Category Archives: Campaign4Change

Reasons for councils to avoid large-scale outsourcing? – lessons learnt report

Posted on 24/09/2014 | 6 comments

By Tony Collins

Somerset County Council’s Audit Committee has just published “Update on Lessons Learnt from the Experience of the South West One Contract”. The lessons could be read by some as a warning against any all-encompassing outsourcing deal between a council and a supplier, in this case IBM.

The carefully-worded report is written by Kevin Nacey, the county council’s Director of Finance and Performance. It updates a “lessons learnt” report the council published in February 2014.

The latest report concludes:

“… All parties have been working very hard to keep good relationships and to fix service issues as they arise. The sheer size and complexity of this contract has proven difficult to manage and future commissioning decisions will bear this in mind.”

All local authority large-scale outsourcing deals are complex and difficult to manage. So are councils that sign big outsourcing deals courting trouble? Should councils avoid such contracts whatever the supplier incentives?

Somerset County Council was a top performing council when it created a joint venture owned by IBM in 2007. The aim was to take the council “beyond excellence” in the words of the then Somerset chief executive Alan Jones. His councillors hoped that the new company, Southwest One, would attract much new business and so cut costs for each of the partners.

But even without attracting new business, IBM had difficulties managing the sometimes conflicting expectations and services for each of the initial three clients: the county council, Taunton Deane Borough Council and Avon and Somerset Police.

Former Somerset County Council IT specialist Dave Orr has written a well-informed series of articles on the Southwest One contract.

What’s interesting now is that Somerset County Council, under pressure from Orr and others, has investigated what has gone wrong and why, and is disseminating the lessons, after giving them much thought.

Originally Somerset was proud of its deal with two councils and a police force. Its auditors in 2007 praised the deal’s innovative approach. Now we learn from the latest Somerset report that the contract was “incredibly complicated”. The report says:

“One of the most significant lessons learnt related to the sheer size, breadth and complexity of the contract. Both the provider [IBM] and the Council would agree that the contract is incredibly complicated.

“A contract with over 3,000 pages was drawn up back in 2007 which was considered necessary at the time given the range of services and the partnership and contractual arrangements created.”

[But all big outsourcing contracts run to thousands of pages and are unlikely to be anything but incredibly complicated.]

More from the council’s latest lessons learnt report:

“What has become clear over time is that any such partnership depends upon having similar incentives …”

[Does any big outsourcing deal have similar incentives for supplier and client? Only, perhaps, in the press releases. In reality suppliers exist to make money and, in times of austerity, councils want to spend less.]

“Dissatisfaction can occur”

The county council’s report: “The well-documented financial difficulties faced by the provider [IBM] early into the contract life also affected its ability to meet client expectations. The net effect is that at times the provider and partner aims in service delivery do not always match and discord and dissatisfaction can occur.”

Client function too small

“The Client function monitoring a major contract needs to be adequately resourced. At the outset the size of the client unit was deemed commensurate with the tasks ahead … However, as performance issues became evident and legal and other contractual disputes escalated, the team had to cope with increasing workloads and increasing pressure from service managers and Council Members to address these issues. This is a difficult balancing act.

“You do not want to assemble a large client function that in part duplicates the management of the services being provided nor overstaff to the extent that there is insufficient work if contract performance is such that no issues are created.

“With hindsight, the initial team was too small to manage the contract when SAP and other performance issues were not resolved quickly enough. Sizing the function is tricky but we do now have an extremely knowledgeable and experienced client team.”

3,000-page contract of little use?

“Performance indicators need to be meaningful rather than simply what can be measured. Agreement between the provider and the SCC client of all the appropriate performance measures was a long and difficult exercise at the beginning of the contract.

“Early on in the first year of the contract, there were a large number of meetings held to agree how to record performance and what steps would be necessary should performance slip below targets. Internal audit advice was taken (and has been at least twice since under further reviews) on the quality and value of the performance indicator regime.

“It is regrettable and again with hindsight a learning point that too much attention was paid to these contractual mechanisms rather than ensuring the relationship between provider and SCC was positive. Perhaps the regime was too onerous for both sides to administer.”

[A 3,000 page contract proved of little value in holding the supplier to account on performance. So was there much value in the contract apart from making a lot of money for lawyers? Too tight a contract and it’s “too onerous for both sides to administer”. Too loose and there’s no point in the contract. Another reason for councils to avoid entering a big outsourcing deal?]

“Too ambitious for all parties”

The report says:

“Contract periods need to be different for different services as the pace of change is different. The range of services provided under the initial few years of the contract were quite extensive. On another related point the provider also had to manage different services for different clients. This level of complexity was perhaps too ambitious for all parties.

“Although there were many successful parts to the contract, it is inevitable that most will remember those that did not work so well. The contract period of 10 years is a long time for 9 different services to change at the same pace…”

Drawback of seconding staff

“The secondment model introduced as part of the contract arrangements had been used elsewhere in the country. Nevertheless, it was the first time that 3 separate organisations had seconded staff into one provider.

“In many ways the model worked as staff felt both loyalty to their “home” employer, keeping the public service ethos we all felt to be important, and to Southwest One as they merged staff into a centre of excellence model.

“The disadvantage was that Southwest One was hampered by the terms and conditions staff kept as they tried to find savings for their business model and to provide savings to the Council in recent years given the changing financial conditions we now operate under.”

Different clients on one main contract – a nightmare?

“Another aspect of this contract in terms of complexity is the nature of the partnering arrangement. It is not easy for all partners to have exactly the same view or stance on an issue. Southwest One had to manage competing priorities from its clients and the partners also had varying opinions on the level of performance provided.

“Remedy for such circumstances differed depending upon initial views of the scale of the performance issue and what each client required for its service.”

Quick audit work “stifled”

“It has been particularly challenging to achieve effective audit of the contract, both by internal and external auditors. Access for auditors has been a prime issue with clearance of those auditors often being slow as process involved all clients being satisfied that audit scope, coverage and findings were appropriate.

“The contract allowed for transparent audit access and there is no suggestion here that SWO did not welcome audit.

“Indeed, for the first few years of the contract there was a team within business controls in SWO that enabled and carried out their own audit work on behalf of IBM. It again proved to be the controls required by all partners and the complexity of access that stifled quick audit work to be performed.

“Increasingly, there was debate about capacity to support audit work within SWO and therefore, SWAP [South West Audit Partnership] suffered in terms of their ability to conduct audit work in good time. In addition,

“Police levels of security needed to be far higher than SCC and this complicated access for auditors.”

Arguments over confidentiality – FOI requests “incredibly difficult to answer”

“The most recent SWAP [South West Audit Partnership] audit of the contract client function found that there has been effective monitoring of SWO performance.

“The problem is that reporting of that performance has been hampered by arguments over commercial confidentiality and sensitivities about the validity of reporting.

“It is fair to say that the three clients do not always agree on the quality of service provided, which of course gives rise to SWO management challenging SCC’s robust approach if other clients do not agree when in our view service is deficient.

“The transparency surrounding contract performance has been a contentious issue given these difficulties, and especially at times of dispute and with court proceedings pending. Future contracts must make these issues clearer and give the authority the ability to follow the national agenda for transparency more explicitly and without fear of upsetting either partners or the provider.

“The Freedom of Information legislation is there to serve the transparency agenda but such requests have been incredibly difficult to answer because of need to ensure all parties are sighted on information made public.”

Confused data ownership

“A further issue is that of data ownership and responsibility. SCC must make available data if indeed it has that data. On a number of occasions SCC did not and SWO held data that contained references to other authorities.

“The shared service platform and the nature of service delivery occasionally made it costly to segregate data to respond to FoI and other requests. Secondees were also often torn between their allegiance to their ‘home’ employing authority and their commitment to SWO, which did cause some confusion regarding information ownership.

“In all contracts SCC must strive to ensure transparency is foremost in our thoughts and that clearance of data release is not subject to other parties’ views.”

ICT, SAP and splitting a one-vendor database – a host of issues

“Another lesson learnt from this contract relates to the use of ICT systems to be delivered and managed by the provider in any contract… Firstly, the introduction of SAP so early in the contract life and the system issues experienced meant that SWO performance became synonymous with SAP performance.

“There were many other benefits provided by SWO in the first few years of the contract related to other improvements in the network and associated applications but this was overshadowed by the SAP technology issue.

“Over time SAP has worked for SCC albeit there are still outstanding issues with its configuration and its flexibility to adjust to the Council’s changing needs.

“The creation of one vendor database in support of the shared service agenda is now with hindsight going to be a bigger issue for all clients as we approach the end of the contract.

“There is still insufficient knowledge transfer to secondees and this will leave a legacy issue for our authorities. Future contracts must clarify asset ownership, system maintenance and replacement infrastructure issues.”

Comment

Somerset County Council’s Audit Committee deserves recognition for the work it has put into the lessons learnt report.

It has produced the report under the pressure of years of intense outside scrutiny, by Dave Orr, and others.

Without such scrutiny Somerset could have ended up concealing contractual problems even from itself. We’ve seen in other parts of the country, where councils have failing outsourcing contracts, that the most enthusiastic councillors convince themselves that all is well.

They assume that negative local newspaper reports of problems on their major outsourcing contract are prompted by the profoundly disaffected, just as some councillors and officials in parts of the UK wrongly blamed the lifestyles of complainants when they alleged child abuse.

Mutual incentives?

The Somerset report says each side in an outsourcing relationship needs to be motivated by similar incentives. But can that ever happen? Councils exist to provide good public services as cheaply as possible. Suppliers exist to make as much money as possible.

There can only be similar incentives if a council is so inefficient that there’s enough spare cash to cover council savings and the supplier’s profits.

If there isn’t the spare cash, the council, in its enthusiasm to do something different by outsourcing, can simply fictionalise the figures for benefits and potential savings.

This creative (and legal) exercise is perfectly possible given the depth of the conjecture needed to project costs and savings over 6 years or more.

Part-time councillors who are considering a big outsourcing contract have the time only to glance at summary documents or the preferred supplier’s Powerpoint slides. They are unlikely to spot the assumptions that pervade the formalised legal language.

During such a pre-contract exercise, the most sceptical councillors are often excluded from internal scrutiny, and the disinterested ones who are admitted into the inner chamber can find their heads swimming in a supplier-inspired language that either swathes uncertainty in the business jargon of near certainty or obscures reality in opaque legalese.

How are these lay councillors to get at the truth? Do they have the time?

Big outsourcing deals between councils and suppliers are inherently flawed, as this Somerset report indicates. Too many such deals have ended badly for council taxpayers as Dexter Whitfield’s investigations have shown.

But still some councils sign huge outsourcing deals. Their leading officials and councillors say they took lessons from failed contracts around the country into account. But what does that mean? If a deal is inherently flawed, perhaps because of diverging incentives, it is inherently flawed.

The disaster that is Southwest One could be a priceless jewel in the public sector’s display case if it serves to deter councillors and officials signing further large-scale council outsourcing deals.

Thanks to Dave Orr for alerting me to the lessons learnt report.

Somerset report “Update on Lessons Learnt from the Experience of the South West One Contract”.

UK outsourcing expands despite high failure rates.

 

6 Comments

Posted in Campaign4Change, FOI, Freedom of Information, IT-related failures, local government, outsourcing, public sector, SAP, shared services, supplier relationships

Labour asks good questions on Universal Credit programme

Posted on 22/09/2014 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Labour has a “Universal Credit Rescue Committee” whose membership includes a former Rolls Royce CIO Jonathan Mitchell.

Mitchell is quoted in Government Computing as saying that it would be irresponsible for a Labour government to continue spending large amounts of money on Universal Credit without getting answers to important questions such as:

  • Is there a comprehensive business case – one that clearly outlines the expected benefits, demonstrating that the Universal Credit project is viable?
  • Is the business case agreed by all stakeholders?
  • Is there clarity about what needs to be achieved?
  • Is there a stable specification explaining exactly how the new processes will work and how they will be automated?
  • Is the project being managed and staffed by people and organisations with appropriate levels of experience, track-record and expertise, all of whom are capable of delivering the benefits of the project and ensuring safe roll-out in a timely manner?
  • Is the project fully under control?
  • Can it absorb the changes demanded by a new incoming Government? If not, can the project be brought under control at an acceptable cost with respect to the business case, through a re-planning exercise?
  • Once such a re-planning exercise is completed, are we convinced that it was successful and that the project will now proceed to a satisfactory completion in a controlled fashion?
  • Are there appropriate “control gates” in place to ensure that all aspects of each phase of the plan are fully completed (and that projected costs to completion preserve the business case) before allowing the project to move safely onto each next stage?

Mitchell said, “Universal Credit is one of those applications that might look straightforward when you first look at it, but this is most definitely not the case. I believe there are significant process and technical challenges to overcome.”

Comment

Good questions, most of which the Department for Work and Pensions is unlikely to be able to answer satisfactorily today.

The Treasury still hasn’t approved the full business case, which is odd for a project that started in earnest more than three years ago.

It’s hard to see, given the rate of progress, the amount of work being completed manually, the lack of integration with legacy systems, the complexity of changes of behaviour required, the reliance on other parties such as local authorities, the inflexibility of some supplier contracts, regularly changing project leadership, the variable performance of HMRC’s RTI systems, and the DWP’s poor history of success on big IT-related projects, how the UC programme will be completed before 2020 whoever wins the next election.

Labour committee outlines Universal Credit “rescue” strategy – Government Computing

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Posted in Accenture, BT, Campaign4Change, change management, DWP, excessive secrecy, Government IT, HP, IBM, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, managing change, managing outsourced services, public sector, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

Jailed and bankrupt because of “unfit” Post Office IT? What now?

Posted on 18/09/2014 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

post office logoThe BBC’s “PM” programme returned to the topic last week of subpostmasters who were stripped of their post office contracts and bankrupted because of theft, fraud and false accounting. Some went to jail.

“Is it possible they were innocent and that a computer system was to blame instead?” asked Eddie Mair, the programme’s presenter.

The BBC has seen a leaked copy of an independent report the Post Office commissioned into its “Horizon” branch office accounting system. An interim version of the report by consultancy Second Sight was released last year.

The leaked report says the system was unfit for purpose in some branches, says the BBC. When Post Office investigators checked out shortfalls they did not look for the root cause of the errors – and instead accused the sub-postmasters of theft or false accounting, says the BBC, quoting from the report.

£1bn Horizon system

More than 11,000 post offices use Fujitsu’s £1bn Horizon system for branch accounting and rarely have problems. At the close of each day, the system balances money coming in from customers and money going out, to banks, energy companies, for tax disc sales and for lottery tickets.

If the system showed there was a shortfall, subpostmasters had few options: make up the deficit themselves, sign off the accounts as correct, or refuse to sign off – which might have meant closing the post office (and upsetting customers) while a financial audit took place.

The BBC PM programme last week re-broadcast its interview in June 2012 with a gently-spoken Welshman, Noel Thomas, who worked for the Post Office for 42 years before he had problems with the Horizon branch accounting system at Gaerwen. When he went to balance the accounts the system kept telling him there was a deficit – a shortfall in the daily takings.

Prison

After speaking to the Post Office helpline several times he believed the matter would be sorted out in time. He signed off the accounts – and the Post Office took him to court for false accounting. He pleaded guilty and went to prison; and he went bankrupt.

In his interview with Eddie Mair, Thomas came across as a man of guileless integrity.

“I had a very busy post office,” said Thomas. “I am not ashamed to tell you I had a very good income of between £20,000 and £30,000 a year. I worked very hard for it: I looked after my customers.”

Mair: What was the first sign of trouble?

“I did have trouble over about 12 months actually. The last six months it went worse. You just couldn’t balance. It was going in the end (into deficit) at the rate of £2,000-£3,000 a week.”

Mair: This wasn’t your own personal books – you weren’t filling in a ledger – this was the computer system?

“This was the computer system. In the end I was convicted on the basis that I false accounted for over £50,000.”

Mair: They thought you’d stolen it?

“Yes. But when it came to the court case they dropped the theft [charge] very very quickly and just went for false accounting.”

Mair: You went to jail?

“Yes… I was lucky. I only had eight days. Time went very very quickly.”

Mair: But I am guessing for you that was not really the problem, the passing of time. You’d been branded a criminal?

“Yes. That’s what got me you see.”

Mair: The Post Office still says it is confident about this computer system. It is still happy with it.

“It would say [that], wouldn’t it?”

Mair: As for you, are you confident you didn’t make a lot of mistakes?

“Yes. I can say I didn’t make mistakes. I can say with my hand on my heart I didn’t take the money.”

Mair: What effect has this had on you?

“A big effect, because I was declared bankrupt. The Post Office are paying my pension but they took my private pensions away.”

Mair: What would you like to happen?

“Not for me myself but for (other subpostmasters and mistresses). It has ruined their lives hasn’t it? If you pilfer off the Royal Mail you need to be punished –”

Mair: But Noel if you are correct – and obviously the Post Office has a different view of this – if you are right then you have been made bankrupt, you have lost almost everything –

“Yes.”

You have been to jail –

“Yes.”

Over a computer mistake –

“Yes.”

Mair: What do you want from them?

“That we can get justice for everybody.”

Criminals or faulty systems?

Thomas had given up trying to prove his innocence when he received a phone call from retired senior probation officer Roch Garrard who said the same thing had happened to his local postmistress in Hampshire.

In time Thomas found that dozens of middle-aged, middle-class subpostmasters and mistresses who had never put a foot wrong were being branded criminals.

“It didn’t make sense to me so I started to contact some of them and said to them ‘this is what happened to our postmistress, what happened to you’ and the stories were all so similar that I thought there must be something wrong,” he said.

Now, more than 150 sub-postmasters say they were wrongly prosecuted, or made to repay money, because of the system. The Post Office remains defensive. Its public statements express little sympathy. It is, though, in secret talks with the subpostmasters over possible compensation. But can money ever put right injustices that have ruined lives?

New Second Sight report

BBC reporter Dan Johnson said the latest report explains exactly was going on with the Post Office computer system. “The thrust of this report is that it was faults in that computer system as well as communication problems, and issues around training that led to these mistakes. It wasn’t dishonesty,” said Johnson.

The report said training was not good enough for those without IT skills and power failures and communication issues made things worse. Helpline staff gave conflicting advice or said problems would sort themselves out.

Second Sight found in its research on Horizon that bugs were  not unknown. It said in its interim report that “some combinations of events can trigger situations where problems occur”.

A tearful Sarah Burgess Boyd, from Newcastle-upon-Tyne told the BBC she lost her life savings in repaying an incorrect shortfall. She said of the Post Office, “I just don’t know of another business that would conduct themselves in such a callous and inhumane manner.”

The Post Office said the leaking of the report was “unhelpful”. In a statement, the Post Office told the BBC:

“Although we will not comment on the contents of any confidential documents, after two years of investigation it remains the case that there is absolutely no evidence of any systemic issues with the computer system which is used by over 78,000 people across our 11,500 branches and which successfully processes over six million transactions every day.”

The Post Office is in mediation with some of the affected subpostmasters, in part because of campaigning for justice by MPs, particularly North East Hampshire MP James Arbuthnot.

Also leading the campaign is the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, which was set up to “raise awareness of the problems around the Post Office Horizon system which for many years Post Office Limited has denied exist”.

Despite the mediation, the relationship between the accused subpostmasters and the Post Office remains strained. Alan Bates, a former subpostmaster in Wales who founded the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, continues to submit FOI requests to the Post Office, the latest being August 2014. The Post Office tends to refuse his requests or gives him unsympathetic replies.

In one of his FOI appeals, Bates tells the Post Office that the concern is not about the millions of successful weekly and monthly financial reconciliations that take place but the “numerous unsuccessful reconciliations that take place that Post Office refuses to even consider may occur”. Post Office management “seems blind to such possibilities”.

He told BBC Wales in 2012:

“One of the big problems with Horizon is the inability to fully examine all the data you have put in the system. You were not allowed to interrogate it. They restricted the access. I refused to be held liable for a system that I and my staff were unable to access to check.”

Under the FOI Act, Bates asked the Post Office last month for the total amount in value and number of all “transaction correction” invoices and credit notes issued to post offices in the latest accounts period; and he asked in April 2014

“Has Post Office ever been made aware of faults within the software of their Horizon System that would have impacted in any way on the accuracy of the accounts of any post office?”

The Post Office did not say. Its reply was that the question was not specific enough.

Ministers have been unsympathetic to the accused subpostmasters –  although the campaign to clear the names of the accused has come mostly from Conservative MPs. Minister Jo Swinson told the House of Commons last year that the number of subpostmasters who’d complained about the Horizon system was “tiny, tiny”.

The National Federation of SubPostmasters has also been unsympathetic and has backed the Post Office. The Federation said: “We continue to have complete confidence in the Horizon system, which carries out hundreds of millions of transactions every week at 11,500 Post Office outlets across the country.

“The NFSP has seen no evidence to suggest that Horizon has been at fault and we believe it to be robust.”

Contract Law

Bhavisha Parekh, a case handler at Contact Law, was approached in 2009 by a sub-postmaster whose accounts had been audited that morning – and they’d found a loss of £7,000.

Parekh writes on the Contract Law website:

“The client had found this loss when doing her daily accounts a week earlier and asked the Post Office auditors to assist her and investigate the matter to locate the loss and rectify the accounts.

“Post Office accounts consist of cash, stamps, and postal orders as well as anything else they trade in; everything is given a financial value. The client’s loss was not of cash and all her transactions were showing to be completed correctly.

“However, upon the auditor’s confirmation of the loss she was charged with theft from the Post Office and given notice of being given a statutory demand for the £7,000.

“The client was in tears over the phone as she felt she had been wrongly charged; the client had run the Post Office for many years without fault and had become a pillar of the community.

“She felt victimised, as when trying to resolve this problem with the Post Office she had asked them to audit her branch and now she was being charged with theft.

“That day I gave the client details of a firm local to her (solicitors) to assist her with this matter. A few weeks later when calling the client to get feedback on the outcome of her case, she explained that she had had been investigated by the Post Office but they had not found anything to show she had taken the money.

“When auditing her branch the final accounts showed a loss; however, the auditors were unable to trace where this loss occurred. After further investigation and having a forensic accountant look into the matter, there were still no answers as to where this loss had occurred.

“This seemed pretty strange; the client in the meantime was told she could not work in the Post Office or even enter the building so she was left without an income and fear of being criminally prosecuted.

“However, after a month or so the Post Office wrote to her to state they had dropped the charges. She would however not be able to commence work as a sub-postmaster, and no explanation of the matter was given.

“Since speaking to this client I was approached by two more former sub-postmasters with the same case. However, they have not been as ‘lucky’ as my initial client – one was dismissed as a sub-postmaster and asked to repay this ‘lost’ amount, and the other was charged with theft and imprisoned for 18 months as well as ordered to pay a sum of £75,000.

“In all three cases the Post Office and their trained auditors have been unable to locate what this loss is; further they have not been able to trace any money into the postmasters’ accounts. Apart from there actually being a loss, there has been no evidence of any theft ever taking place.

“I have only spoken to three sub-postmasters; however this is happening at an increasing scale all over England. Computer experts are now stating that the ‘Horizon’ software the Postmasters use is flawed and so showing these losses.

“Potentially, due to this computer error, many sub-postmasters have lost their jobs, been imprisoned, and left traumatised by the Post Office’s actions.”

Comment

The Post Office deserves credit for investigating some of the complaints (after years of pressure from MPs) and it is said to have settled some of the less serious cases. But five years since the accumulation of problems came to light the convictions against subpostmasters remain. Computer Weekly highlighted the plight of subpostmasters in 2009.

Second Sight’s latest report will add to concern that lives were ruined because unexplained deficits on the Post Office’s Horizon system were not thoroughly investigated – and the root cause established – before the Post Office ticked the legal box to prosecute.

There is scope for systems to go wrong when there are multiple interfaces, occasional power failures and faults in networks and communications equipment. The Post Office’s Horizon system has multiple interfaces; and in any case no IT system is perfect. That Horizon works well for tens of thousands of subpostmasters is no guarantee it will work well for all.

Telling the family of someone struck by lightning that millions of people are not struck by lightning every year is extraordinarily insensitive. What’s the point of the Post Office’s continuing to insist that most subpostmasters have no problem with Horizon? Clearly there are no system-wide issues but nobody is saying there are – and why would those sent to prison, made bankrupt or deprived of their livelihoods care if IT issues were systemic or not? They say it happened to them.

Nobody in the general population would believe that 150 or more subpostmasters were dishonest.

Who would put the integrity of a computer system above the integrity of 150 subpostmasters?

The Post Office, as the prosecuting authority, could argue it is only doing its job in protecting its money and the investments of taxpayers. But in doing their jobs Post Office managers seem to be behaving more like machines than humans. They prosecuted for false accounting because they could.

They could, because sub-postmasters, when confronted by a deficit they didn’t understand, signed off accounts after being told by the IT helpdesk that the problems would probably clear in time. Strictly speaking, signing off accounts as correct when they are  known to be incorrect is false accounting. But was it something the Post Office should have prosecuted, given the mounting complaints about the accuracy of the system’s deficit figures?

Still the Post Office is refusing to answer subpostmaster’s questions. Its managers know they have the legal and contractual upper hand; and as owners of the system they possess the facts. What they do not have is the moral upper ground: they lost any claim to neutrality when they took subpostmasters to be dishonest before properly investigating the potential for shortcomings of the system.

It will be damaging to justice and the reputations of the subpostmasters if the Post Office continues to conform to the stereotype of a large organisation that, once it has denied liability for anything, refuses repeatedly to alter its position, whatever the facts.

As individuals, Post Office managers are probably understanding. As an institution the Post Office appears hostile to those whose lives have been ruined. It seems content to allow the cry for justice to stretch out for years, while it remains defensive and unsympathetic.

Shadow business minister Ian Murray asked in the House of Commons last year:

What processes will be put in place to compensate sub-postmasters and former sub-postmasters who have been disadvantaged, fined, lost their businesses, homes or even jailed, as a result of the problems with the Horizon system?

Wronged subpostmasters deserve far more in compensation than the sums originally in dispute. Is the Post Office institutionally capable of righting egregious wrongs?

Are disaffected subpostmasters having to sign gagging orders?

Second Sight interim report

Subpostmasters tell their story

Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance

 

2 Comments

Posted in Campaign4Change, FOI, Freedom of Information, Fujitsu, openness and transparency, operational issues, Post Office IT

DWP appoints 180k DG Technology

Posted on 04/09/2014 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Mayank Prakash is the new Director General for Technology at the Department for Work and Pensions. He’ll be responsible for the DWP’s IT services and ensuring that its technology supports current and new digital services. He is the permanent replacement for DWP Chief Information Officer Andy Nelson who was in the role less than a year.

Prakash was previously Managing Director of Wealth and Asset Management Technology delivery centres at Morgan Stanley. Before that he led IT, security and digital business transformation at Sage UK.

He said: “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to simplify welfare by transforming one of the UK’s largest IT estates to deliver easy to use digital services. It is a professional privilege to improve how the government delivers services to 22 million citizens.”

He’ll start in November.

His early career was in leading technology and eBusiness teams for Lucent and then Avaya where he was the International IT Director. He has an MBA from Manchester Business School.

He will be partly responsible for Universal Credit.

DWP’s advert for a £180k IT head – what it doesn’t say

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Posted in Campaign4Change, CIO, DWP, Government IT, Universal Credit

Tagged

Whitehall has taken on 100 technology experts over past year

Posted on 29/08/2014 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Cabinet Office says that government departments have taken on more than  100 IT experts over the past year.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) led the recruitment as part of a plan to raise technology-related skills in the civil service.

One appointment is of former Credit Suisse CIO Magnus Falk as the Government’s new Deputy Chief Technology Officer, reporting to Government CTO Liam Maxwell. Other recent technology recruits include:

  • MOJ Chief Technology Officer Ian Sayer, who was Global Chief Information Officer at Electrolux; and
  • Government Chief Technical Architect Kevin Humphries, former Chief Technical Architect at Qatarlyst.

Chief Digital Officer appointments include:

  • HMRC Chief Digital and Information Officer Mark Dearnley, formerly CIO of Vodafone;
  • MOJ CDO Paul Shelter, who previously co-founded two start-ups and was CTO for banking at Oracle;
  • ONS’s Laura Dewis, Deputy Director Digital Publishing, who was Head of Online Commissioning at The Open University;
  • Jacqueline Steed, former Managing Director and CIO for BT Wholesale, who starts as CDO at the Student Loan Company next week; and
  • DWP CDO Kevin Cunnington, who was previously Global Head of Online at Vodafone.

Comment

It’s encouraging that the Cabinet Office, through the GDS, is overseeing the recruitment of IT leaders in government departments. It means the recruits will see their roles as cross-governmental. In the past the civil service culture has required that CIOs show an almost filial respect for their departmental seniors.

It’s a good idea that GDS tries to change age-old behaviours from within by recruiting technology experts with a wide range of experience from the private sector. But how long will they last?

Their challenge will be converting the words “transformation”, “innovation” and “fundamental change” from board papers, press releases, strategy documents, and conference speeches, into actions.

New deputy CTO role in central government – Government Computing

 

 

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Posted in BT, Campaign4Change, CIO, DWP, Government IT, HMRC, Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Oracle

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Cover-up of Universal Credit problems?

Posted on 20/08/2014 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

MPs on the Public Accounts Committee say the decision to award a ‘reset’ rating to the Universal Credit project is “an attempt to keep information secret and prevent scrutiny”.

Says the Committee in a report published this week:

 “Despite welcome progress in extending the range of information published, the data [in the Major Projects Authority’ 2nd annual report]  is infrequent and out-of-date, and too much is still withheld. The MPA’s second annual report was a significant improvement on the first, with 30% less data withheld and more analysis provided.

“However, too much data is still missing. We are particularly concerned that the decision to award a ‘reset’ rating to the Universal Credit project was an attempt to keep information secret and prevent scrutiny.

“The Government’s transparency policy is too restrictive as it prevents useful data sets, such as the amount spent so far, from being published and stipulates that major project data can only be published once a year.

“This is too infrequent and means that the data available on high-profile, high-cost projects can be significantly out-of-date.”

The Major Projects Authority, at the request of “ministers” – which is taken to mean Iain Duncan Smith –  gave UC programme a “reset” designation instead of a red/amber/green traffic light.

All credit to the all-party committee for seeing the reset for what it is. The DWP tried to argue the UC programme was reset because the implementation had changed.

Before UC the Major Projects Authority had never given any project a “reset” designation  Even new projects considered risky are usually given a traffic light status.

Without a reset designation the MPA might have given the UC programme a red, or red/amber rating, which would have generated more bad publicity.

Comment

It’s extraordinary in an era of so-called open government that Major Project Authority reports on the progress or otherwise of big and risky government projects such as UC are not published.

It’s also extraordinary that the Cabinet Office minister and civil service reformer Francis Maude has been unable to get the reports published. He has agreed to keep them confidential in return for departmental ministers and permanent secretaries accepting publication of the MPA annual reports which have summaries of projects’ progress.

Even then Maude had little choice but to allow the summaries to be written by the department’s civil servants (not quoting the MPA reports). He has also accepted that the traffic light status’ will be at least six months old when published – in other words out-of-date.

Governments for more than a decade have been unable to publish progress reports on big IT-based projects. Civil servants will not let them be published.  Indeed the DWP is going through a series of appeals to stop UC reports from 2011 and 2012 being published – and these reports have nothing to do with the MPA.

If nothing else the MPA’s obsolescent second annual report – and the continued non-publication of progress reports on major projects – will contribute to the widely-held belief that it is the permanent civil service that is really in charge, not ephemeral ministers.

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DWP’s advert for a £180k IT head – what it doesn’t say

Posted on 06/08/2014 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Soon the Department for Work and Pensions will choose a Director General, Technology.  Interviewing has finished and an offer is due to go out to the chosen candidate any day now.

The appointee will not replace Howard Shiplee who runs Universal Credit but has been ill for some months. The DWP is looking for Shiplee’s successor as a separate exercise to the recruitment of the DG Technology.

In its job advert for a DG Technology the DWP seeks a “commercial CIO/CTO to become one of the most senior change agents in the UK government”.

The size of the salary – around £180k plus “attractive pension” – suggests that the DWP is looking for a powerful, inspiring and reforming figure. The DWP’s IT makes 730 million payments to a value of 166bn a year.

In practice it is not clear how much power and influence the DG will have, given that there will be a separate head of Universal Credit (Shiplee’s successor) and there is already in place a Director General for Digital Transformation Kevin Cunnington.

What’s a DG Technology to do then?

The job advert suggests the job is about bringing about “unprecedented” change.  It says:

“The department is undergoing major business change, which has at its heart a technology and digital transformation of the services it provides, which will radically improve how it interacts with citizens.”

The role, says the advert, involves:

  • “Designing, developing and delivering the technology strategy that will enable unprecedented business change.”
  • “… Reducing the time to taken to develop new services and cutting the cost of delivery.”

The chosen person needs “a clear record of success in enabling the delivery of service driven, user focused, digital business transformation,” says the advert.

What the DWP doesn’t say

If DWP officials took a truth pill when interviewing candidates they might have said:

  • “No department talks more about change than we do. We regularly commission reports on the need for transformation and how to achieve it. We issue press releases and give briefings on our plans for change.  We write  ministerial speeches on it. We employ talented people to whom innovation and productive change comes naturally. The only thing we don’t do is actually change. It remains an aspiration.
  • “We remain one of the biggest VME sites in the world (VME being a Fujitsu – formerly ICL – operating system that dates back to the 1970s). VME skills are in ever shorter supply and it’s increasingly costly to employ VME specialists but changing our core software is too risky; and there is no commercial imperative to change: it’s not private money we’re spending.  We’ve a £1bn a year IT budget – one of the biggest of any government department in the world.
  • DWP core VME systems run an old supplier-specific form of COBOL used on VME, not an industry standard form.
  • We’ve identified ways of moving away from VME: we have shown that VME-based IDMSX databases can be transitioned to commodity database systems, and that the COBOL code can be converted to Java and then run on open source application servers. Still we can’t move away from VME, not within the foreseeable future. Too risky.
  • We’d love the new DG Technology to work on change, transformation and innovation but he/she will be required for fire-fighting.
  • It’s a particularly difficult time for the DWP. We are alleged to have given what the Public Accounts Committee calls an unacceptable service to the disabled, the terminally ill and many others who have submitted claims for personal independence payments. We are also struggling to cope with Employment and Support Allowance claims. One claimant has told the BBC the DWP is “not fit for purpose”.
  •  The National Audit Office will publish an unhelpful report on Universal Credit this Autumn. We’ll regard the report as out-of-date, as we do all negative NAO reports. We will say publicly that we have already implemented its recommendations and we’ll pick out the one or two positive sentences in the report to summarise it. But nobody will believe our story, least of all us.
  • If we could, we’d appoint a representative of our major suppliers to be the head of IT.  HP, Fujitsu, Accenture, IBM and BT have a knowledge of how to run the DWP’s systems that goes back decades. The suppliers are happily entrenched, indispensable. That they know more about our IT than we do puts into context talk of SMEs taking over from the big players.
  • One reason we avoid major change is that we are not good at it: Universal Credit (known internally as Universal Challenge), the £2.6bn Operational Strategy benefit scheme that Parliament was told would cost no more than £713m, the £141m  (aborted) Benefit Processing Replacement Programme, Camelot which was the (aborted) Computerisation and Mechanisation of Local Office Tasks,  and the (aborted)) Debt Accounting and Management System. Not to mention the (aborted) £25m Analytical Services Statistical Information System.
  • They’re the failures we know about. We don’t have to account to Parliament on the progress or otherwise of our big projects, and we’re particularly secretive internally, so there may be project failures not even senior management know about.
  • We require cultural alignment of all the DWP’s most senior civil servants. This means the chosen candidate must – and without exception – defend the department against all poorly-informed critics who may include our own ministers.
  • The Cabinet Office has some well-meaning reformers we want nothing to do with. That said, our policy is to agree to change and then absorb the required actions, like the acoustic baffles on the walls of a soundproofed studio.

 

 

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Posted in Accenture, BT, Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, Fujitsu, Government IT, HP, IT projects, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, managing change, National Audit Office, outsourcing, procurement, project management, public sector, public services, SME, supplier relationships, Universal Credit

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Secrecy is one reason gov’t IT-based projects fail says MP

Posted on 25/07/2014 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The BBC, in an article on its website about Fujitsu’s legal dispute with the Department of Health, quotes Richard Bacon MP who, as a member of the Public Accounts Committee, has asked countless civil servants about why their department’s IT-based change projects have not met expectations.

Bacon is co-author of a book on government failures, Conundrum, which has a chapter on the National Programme for IT [NPfIT] in the NHS.

In the BBC article Bacon is quoted as saying that the culture of secrecy surrounding IT-based projects is one of the main reasons they keep going so badly – and expensively – wrong.

He says it has been obvious to experts from an early stage that the NPfIT, which was launched by Tony Blair’s government, would be a “train wreck” because the contracts were signed “in an enormous hurry” and contained confidentiality clauses preventing contractors from speaking to the press.

He says the urge to cover things up means that “we never learn from our mistakes because there is learning curve, but when things go wrong with IT the response is to keep it quiet”.

Citing the example of air accident investigations, which are normally conducted in a spirit of openness so lessons can be learned, he says “It is the complete opposite in IT projects, where everyone keeps their heads down and goes hugger-mugger.”

Fujitsu versus Department of Health

Fujitsu sued the Department of Health for £700m after the company was ejected six years early [2008] from a 10-year £896m NPfIT contract signed in January 2004.  The case went to arbitration – and is still in arbitration, largely over the amount the government may be ordered to pay Fujitsu.  Bacon says the amount of the settlement will have to be disclosed.

“I don’t know how the government can honestly keep this number quiet. It simply cannot do it. It is not possible or sensible to keep it quiet when you are spending this much money,” says Bacon.

The BBC article quotes excerpts from a Campaign4Change blog

Government ‘loses £700m NHS IT dispute with Fujitsu’ – BBC News

 

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change management, Department of Health, e-health, excessive secrecy, Fujitsu, Government IT, health, health records, IT-related failures, NHS, npfit, public sector, public services, supplier relationships

Capgemini and Fujitsu pocket “incredible” £1.2bn profits from HMRC

Posted on 22/07/2014 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

In an outsourcing deal of then unprecedented size Inland Revenue contracted out about 2000 IT staff and services to EDS – now HP – in 1994.

The deal was worth about £1bn over 10 years. Later Inland Revenue joined with Customs & Excise and became HM Revenue and Customs. As part of the merger HP took over Customs’ IT which was largely run by Fujitsu. The £1bn outsourcing contract with HP turned into a £2bn deal.

In 2004 the merged contracts were called “Aspire” and Capgemini took over staff and IT services from HP in a 10-year deal expected to be worth between £3bn and £5bn.  The contract was later extended by 3 years to 2017.

Today a National Audit Office report Managing and replacing the Aspire contract says the deal is worth £10.4bn to Capgemini and Fujitsu.

Margaret Hodge, chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts, says of the NAO report on the Aspire contract:

“HMRC’s management of Aspire, its most important contract which provides 650 IT systems to help HMRC to collect tax, has been unacceptably poor.

“While it may have secured a good level of IT service in the end, by the time the contract ends in 2017 HMRC will have spent £10.4 billion – more than double what it initially expected to spend.

“What’s worse, it has spent £5 billion of this total without first checking whether other providers could deliver a better deal, even though it had evidence that it was paying above market prices.

“It is deeply depressing that once again a government contract has proved better value for the private companies involved than for the taxpayer, with Capgemini and Fujitsu pocketing an incredible £1.2 billion in combined profits – more than twice the profit HMRC expected.

“Its own lack of capability meant HMRC was over-reliant on providers’ technical expertise, undermining its ability to act as an intelligent customer on behalf of the taxpayer.

“HMRC is planning to replace the Aspire contract in 2017, but its new project is still half-baked, with no business case and no idea of the skills or resources needed to make it work. All of this gives me little confidence that HMRC’s senior team has the capability to manage large and complex contracts.”

“More changes than normal”

The NAO found that in more than 80% of projects, HMRC and Capgemini changed the agreed scope, time or budget. Says the NAO report:

“One feature of the cooperative approach between HMRC and Capgemini has been a willingness on both sides to make changes once the extensive planning is complete and budget, scope and timing has been agreed commercially.

“These changes are made through formal governance processes and usually help to educe risk. Some change is to be expected as part of good project management.

“However, we consider that HMRC and Capgemini made more changes than normal on projects after the point at which budgets, scope and timing had been commercially agreed. The degree of change makes it very difficult to hold the Aspire suppliers to account for their performance across the portfolio of projects.”

Managing and replacing the Aspire contract – NAO report

Good summary of NAO report at Computerworlduk

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Capgemini, Fujitsu, Government IT, HMRC, outsourcing

After two IT disasters, immigration officials launch £208m agile project

Posted on 22/07/2014 | 7 comments

By Tony Collins

In 2001 immigration officials cancelled a £77m system with Siemens for a Casework Application system.

The objective had been to create a “paperless office”, help reduce a backlog of 66,000 asylum cases and provide a “single view” of individuals. But the scope was overambitious and the supplier underestimated the complexities. It proved difficult to automate paper-based processes.

In 2010 immigration officials came up with a similar scheme that also failed to meet expectations.  They developed a business case for a flagship IT programme called Immigration Case Work (ICW).

It was designed to draw together all casework interactions between the business and a person, enabling caseworkers to gain a single accurate view of the person applying. It was expected to replace both the legacy Casework Information Database (CID) and 20 different IT and some paper-based systems by March 2014.

A National Audit Office published today says the ICW programme was closed in
August 2013, having delivered “significantly less than planned for £347m.”

So in the end, while the taxpayer has paid hundreds of millions for caseworking systems for immigration staff, many of the workers are still, says the NAO, relying on paper.  Today’s NAO report says:

“Both directorates [UK Visas and Immigration and Immigration Enforcement, which were formerly the UK Border Agency] rely heavily on paper-based working.

“The Permanent Migration team is 100 per cent paper-based and acknowledge this as a barrier to efficiency.”

Immigration officials use some technology to record personal details of people who pass through the immigration system. But:

• A lack of controls mean staff can leave data fields blank or enter incorrect
information. The NAO found many errors in the database.
• There is a history of systems freezing and being unusable.
• A lack of interfaces with other systems results in manual data transfer or
cross‑referencing.

Agile success?

Now, says the NAO, the Home Office has begun a new agile-based programme, Immigration Platform Technologies  (IPT). It is due to cost £208.7 million by 2016-17.

A tool for online applications for some types of visa has already been rolled-out and is being updated using applicant feedback,” says the NAO.

But support contracts for the existing technology [the legacy Casework Information Database] expire in January 2016, before the scheduled completion of IPT in 2017.

The Home Office is “reviewing options for support contracts to cover this gap”.

Margaret Hodge, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, says of the agile project: “Given its poor track record, I have little confidence that the further £209 million it is spending on another IT system will be money well spent.”

Comment

Is it possible for a genuinely agile project to cost £208m? The point about agile is that it is supposed to be incremental, quick and cheap.  It looks as if the Home Office is running a hybrid conventional/agile programme, as the DWP did with Universal Credit. Either a project is agile or its not. Hybrids, it seems, are not usually successful.

There again is the Home Office congenitally capable of running an agile project?  The Agile Manifesto is based on twelve principles, most of which could be said to be alien to the Home Office’s culture:

1.Customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of useful software
2.Welcome changing requirements, even late in development
3.Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
4.Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
5.Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
6.Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
7.Working software is the principal measure of progress
8.Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
9.Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
10.Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential
11.Self-organizing teams
12.Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

So what’s needed?

Big government IT-based change programmes tend to be introspective and secretive. Those working on them don’t always feel able to challenge, to criticise, to propose doing things differently.

What would be innovative would be openness and independent challenge, and tough and well-informed Parliamentary scrutiny. It rarely happens. Ask the Home Office for any of its progress reports on its IT-base change programmes and it’ll tell you exactly what the DWP says when asked a similar question: “That’s not something we generally release.”

The NAO report points to a culture problem. “… Having a transparent culture was rated as red on the UK Visas and Immigration risk trends in April 2014.”

Will the new agile project be any more successful than the other 2 major immigration IT projects? The Home Office will doubtless claim success as it usually does. Even when the patient dies it tells Parliament the operation was a success.  For you can say publicly whatever you like when you keep the facts confidential – as IDS at the DWP knows.

Reforming the UK border and immigration system – National Audit Office report

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, change management, excessive secrecy, Government IT, Home Office, IT projects, IT-related failures, private sector lessons for the public sector