Category Archives: Campaign4Change

Civil service reforms not dramatic but mean real change says Maude

Posted on 19/06/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude announced the publication this afternoon of the civil service reform plan which he said contains “nothing dramatic but when implemented will represent “real change”.

He told MPs there will be a cross-government management information system put in place by October which enable departments to be held account. He did not say how. He said that management information in central government is “poor”. Some other points in Maude’s speech in the House of Commons:

– A smaller civil service than at any time since World War Two – but he did not says whether outsourced civil servants were included in his figures.

– There would be no more than eight management layers in the civil service and fewer where possible.

– Shared services should be the norm.

– A “key goal” will be to give civil servants the IT they need to do their jobs properly.

– Former accounting officers can be called back to give evidence to the Public Accounts Committee.

– The Cabinet Office will consult the Civil Service Commission on how ministers can be more involved in the appointment of permament secretaries. Maude told MPs that secretaries of state should have the final say on appointments, after the involvement of the Commission.

– Ministers can appoint senior officials for time-limted executive roles.

– More civil servants need more financial knowledge. There are “serious deficiencies in managing change” said Maude.

– There are “serious gaps” in project management capability. Officials will seek to identify what skills are missing.

– Civil servants do not believe their managers are not strong enough in leading and managing change. Policy skills have been rated as more important than operational skills. In future some permanent secretaries will need at least two years experience in a commercial and operational role. There will be an equal balance in future between senior officials with skills in policy advice and those with operational experience.

– Poor performance will be “rigorously addressed”. There will be a civil service appraisal system in which the bottom 10% will have to prove they should stay in their jobs.

– Permanent secretaries wll have their objectives published.

– Information on the performance of major projects will be unprecedented.

Maude said the reform plan is a first stage and part of a policy of continuous improvement.

Edward Leigh, former chairman of the Public Accounts Committee said it was time that permanent secretaries were chosen for their implementation and operational abilities rather than their ability to write a memo in Latin.

Civil service reform plan.

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Civil service reform plan – real change or a tweak?

Posted on 19/06/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The civil service reform plan is to be published this afternoon, at 3.30pm.  The Cabinet Office minister  Francis Maude and Sir Bob Kerslake, the head of the civil service, write about it in today’s Daily Telegraph.

They say that the plan will help deliver a civil service culture that is “pacier, more innovative, less hierarchical and focused on outcomes not process”. They write:

“We also need sharper accountability, in particular from permanent secretaries and those leading major projects, and we need more digital services, better data and management information and for policy and implementation to be linked seamlessly together…”

In the same edition of the Telegraph Andrew Haldenby,  director of the independent think tank Reform, criticises the reform plan which, although not yet published, has been foretold in newspapers including the Financial Times yesterday.

He said the reform plan will “leave the flawed structures of Whitehall in place and do no more than propose some minor variations on a theme”.

We await publication of the paper before we judge it. We hope it will, at least, require the publication of “Gateway” review reports on the progress or otherwise of major IT-enabled projects.

Without timely publication of the Major Projects Authority’s Gateway reports, MPs and the public will continue to learn of failed schemes such as the NPfIT and Firecontrol when it is too late to do much about any rescue; and without contemporaneous publication there will continue to be no accountability for the rigour or otherwise of the reviews, or their outcome.

Civil service reform – meltdown or business as usual? – Institute for Government

Cabinet Office promises unprecedented openness on big, risky projects.

Civil service shake-up – Guardian

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change, change management, Cloud Computing, cost avoidance, cost reduction, culture, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, managing change, openness and transparency, public sector, public services

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Francis Maude talks open govt – and Whitehall does the opposite

Posted on 12/06/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

“If people do not know what you’re doing, they don’t know what you’re doing wrong.” – Sir Arnold Robinson, Cabinet Secretary in a discussion on open government in Yes Minister.

Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, said all the right things at the Intellect World Class Public Services conference 2012.

He said that:

– smaller, innovative and efficient suppliers were finding themselves locked out of the supply of services to Government because of what was described by Parliament as a powerful “oligopoly” of large suppliers

– for the first time in Government “we are using agile, iterative processes, open source technology platforms and world-class in-house development teams alongside the best digital innovation the market can offer”

– “We must eliminate failure waste. At the moment, a large proportion of our service delivery costs are incurred through incomplete or failed digital transactions. And these transactions create cross-channel duplication, which burdens the user and costs Government a huge amount in repeated costs. For HMRC alone, they estimate that 35% of calls to its contact centres are avoidable, which would save £75m.”

– “Transparency is a defining passion for this Government …”

Comment:

How much influence does Maude really have? Can he persuade permanent secretaries to effect major change? The evidence so far is that departmental officials and Maude have different ideas on what reform means.

In “Yes Minister” civil servants were proud of a new hospital that was the best run and most hygienic in the country, with no medical staff, 500 administrators and no patients.

Maude may also recall that Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, the acclaimed writers of Yes Minister, spoke of the Whitehall law of inverse relevance – “the less you intend to do about something, the more you have to keep talking about it”.

Open government? 

Perhaps civil servants are letting Maude get on with talking the talk while they find every way to keep things much as they are. A good example: The Guardian reported yesterday that a key part of the Government’s transparency drive has stalled amid reports of ministry opposition.

The paper’s political editor Patrick Wintour reported that plans to publish regular ‘traffic-light’ progress reports on large, costly and risky IT projects “appear to have been shelved”.

When it comes to IT this could have been the coalition’s most important single reform. It would have given MPs and the public a way of knowing when mega projects such as Universal Credit are failing. Usually we don’t know about a failed IT-related project unless there is a leak to the media, or the National Audit Office finds out and decides, with its limited budget, to do a study.

Sir Bob Kerslake, who is head of the civil service,  had indicated to MP Richard Bacon that “Gateway” review reports on large and risky IT and construction projects may be published in the civil service reform plan which is expected to be released this month.

Gateway reports to go unpublished?

Now it seems that departmental civil servants  have persuaded the Sir Bob not to publish “Gateway” reports. So the secrecy over the progress or otherwise of government mega projects is set to continue.

Yes, civil servants will allow the Cabinet Office to have its way on the publication of data about, say, some government spending. But it’s becoming clear that the civil service will not allow any publication of its reports on the progress or otherwise of major projects. It has been that way since Gateway reviews were introduced in 2001.

Some senior officials – by no means all – say they want a confidential “safe space” to discuss the progress of projects. The reality is that they do not want outsiders – MPs, the media and NAO auditors – meddling in their failing schemes – schemes such as Firecontrol and e-filing at the Ministry of Justice.

Unlike Maude, senior civil servants have what Jay and Lynn call a “flexible approach to open government”. This means in practice that Whitehall will happily release data – but not project reports on which the civil servants themselves can be judged.

Activity is not achievement

Maude’s speeches will give the impression of activity. But activity is the civil service’s substitute for achievement. I quote Jay and Lynn again, in part because their depiction of Whitehall seems to have been taken as serious wisdom by those officials who think Sir Humphrey a character worth living up to.

It’s time Maude and his team got a grip on departments. Until they do, permanent secretaries and their senior officials will regard Maude as trying to get out of situations that don’t need getting out of.

Whitehall to relent on secrecy over mega projects?

The empty hospital – Yes Minister

Government’s transparency drive stalls.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change management, cost avoidance, cost reduction, culture, excessive secrecy, Gateway reviews, Government IT, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, openness and transparency, oversight, Politics, SME

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How London IT director saves millions by buying patient record system.

Posted on 07/06/2012 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

An NHS organisation in London has bought an electronic patient record system for less than a third of the cost of similar technology that is being supplied by BT to other trusts in the capital and the south of England.

The £7.1m purchase by Whittington Health – a trust that incorporates Whittington Hospital near Archway tube station – raises further questions about why the Department of Health is paying BT between £31m and £36m for each installation of the Cerner Millennium electronic patient record [EPR] system under the NPfIT.

Whittington Health is buying the Medway EPR system from System C which is owned by McKesson. The plan is for the EPR to operate across GP, hospital and social care boundaries.

It will include a patient portal. The idea is that patients will use the portal to log on to their Whittington Health accounts, see and save test results and letters, and manage outpatient appointments on-line.

In a board paper, Whittington Health’s IT Director Glenn Winteringham puts the case for spending £7.1m on a single integrated EPR.  Winteringham puts the average cost of  System C’s Medway at £8m. This cost, he says, represents “significant value for money” against the average deployment costs for the NHS Connecting for Health solution (Cerner Millennium) for London of £31m. In the south of England the average cost of Cerner Millennium is £36m, says Winteringham in his paper.

He also points out that the new EPR will avoid costs for using “Rio” community systems. The NPfIT contract with BT for Rio runs out mid 2015. “From this date onwards the Trust will incur an annual maintenance and support cost. Implementing the EPR will enable cost avoidance to the [organisation] of £4m per year to use RIO (indicative quotes from BT are £2m instance of RIO and the [organisation] has 2 – Islington and Haringey).

BT’s quote to Whittington for Rio is several times higher than the cost of Rio when supplied directly by its supplier CSE Healthcare Systems. A CSE competitor Maracis has said that, during a debrief, it was told that its prices were similar to those offered by CSE Healthcare for a Rio deployment – then less than £600,000 for installation and five years of support.

In comparison BT’s quote to Whittington for Rio, as supplied under the NPfIT, puts the cost of the system at more than fifteen times the cost of buying Rio directly.

In short Whittington and Winteringham will save taxpayers many millions by buying Medway rather than acquiring Cerner and Rio from BT.

Why such a price difference?

The difference between the £31m and £36m paid to BT for Cerner Millennium and the £8m on average paid to System C could be partly explained by the fact that Whittington (and University Hospitals Bristol) bought directly from the supplier, not through an NPfIT local service provider contract between the Department of Health and BT. Under the NPfIT contract BT is, in essence, an intermediary.

But why should an EPR system cost several times more under the NHS IT scheme than bought outside it?

Comment:

Did officials who agreed to payments to BT for Cerner and Rio mistakenly add some digits?

Whittington’s purchase of System C’s Medway again raises the question – which has gone unanswered despite the best efforts of dogged MP Richard Bacon – of why the Department of Health has intervened in the NHS to pay prices for Rio and Cerner that caricature profligacy.

Perhaps the DH should give BT £8m for each installation of Cerner Millennium and donate the remaining £21m to a charity of BT’s choice. The voluntary sector would gain hundreds of millions of pounds and the DH could at last be praised for spending its IT money wisely.

Whittington buys Medway and scraps Rio – E-Health Insider

NHS IT supplier “corrects” Health CIO’s statements

MP seeks inquiry into BT’s £546m NHS deal

NPfIT go-live at Bristol – trust issues apology

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Posted in Campaign4Change, cost avoidance, Government IT, health, health records, IT and the Business, IT projects, managing outsourced services, NHS, npfit, reducing cost strategically, supplier relationships

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The US approach to increasing innovation in government

Posted on 06/06/2012 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

I liked a recent blog written in the US by a ‘federal coach’ – I guess they could only get away with that title in the US!- about US government efforts to increase innovation in departments.

The piece makes the point that the White House recently launched an innovation scheme grandly titled the Presidential Innovation Fellows program that will bring in 15 ‘innovators’ from outside government to provide expertise on five technology projects.  

According to the article, within 24 hours of the announcement, more than 600 people had applied to go to Washington for at least six months to work with federal employees on projects aimed at making government more effective and more accountable.

The projects, which will be led by Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and Government Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel, include creating an electronic payment system for government transactions involving foreign aid and U.S. operations overseas; and streamlining an online system for citizens in need of federal services.

It sounds impressive. The “Presidential Innovation Fellows program is based in part on the Entrepreneurs-in-Residence  programme that allows agencies to recruit world-class, private-sector innovators for limited periods of time and pair them with public-sector innovators to solve big problems.”

For the US, its scheme of government and the strength of its technology sector, it will probably work. Could such a programme work here? What would be the equivalent of a Presidential Innovation Fellows programme? And how many offers of help would it achieve within 24 hours of its launch?

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change management, government, Government IT, innovation

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Queensland audit brings in new broom to sweep away problem IT projects

Posted on 28/05/2012 | Leave a comment
There is nothing like an IT project disaster to spur the arrival of a new broom designed to ensure that it will never happen again.
 
Until next time.
 
According to the Queensland Courier-Mail in Australia, every computer system used across Queensland’s public service will be probed for flaws and inefficiencies under a A$5.2m audit set up to head off another costly IT project.
 
It follows the emergence of problems with a Queensland Health health payroll project which is now being audited after it was revealed that the costs required to put the project right would increase to over $400 million.
 
Newly appointed Queensland IT Minister Ros Bates ordered the audit to uncover how IT is being used across the government’s 19 departments and find where savings can be made.
 
The audit team, which comprises a seconded army of 32 public servants, will present its findings by the end of October.
 
In addition to the audit, as part of a push to achieve government IT efficiencies, departmental chief information officers have been stripped of their autonomy and will now report to the Queensland Government CIO.
 
Meanwhile, despite its payroll project problems, Queensland Health has won an excellence in eGovernment award for a project dubbed ‘The Viewer’ that has streamlined how clinicians access patient information about their patients.
 
The Viewer is a read-only web-based application that sources key patient information from existing Queensland Health systems, providing consolidated information in one place.
 
Before the project’s  implementation, patient data was stored in a range of paper and electronic record systems in over 260 different facilities.
 

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Posted in Australia, Campaign4Change, e-health, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, project management

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Healthspace was failing in 2010 – why is it being kept alive?

Posted on 25/05/2012 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

“Too many failing projects are continued for too long” – Ian Watmore, House of Commons, 2009.

HealthSpace, a centrally-run system that has, for years, provided unneeded work for consultants based at Connecting for Health, software developers, civil servants, and IT suppliers,  at a cost of tens of millions of pounds, is to close “from” March 2013.

A report commissioned by the Department of Health and NHS Connecting for Health in 2010 found that the system had never worked satisfactorily. But the Department and CfH has kept the project going, paying consultants and IT suppliers, although it was clear from an early stage that the scheme was doomed.

Will the Department of Health continue paying consultants and IT suppliers for a system that is to be cancelled?

HealthSpace was designed to be a personal health organiser. It was based on a good idea – that some patients could benefit from access to their health records – but the technology was too complicated and never fit for the public to use. It is said that those involved in the project spoke in a technological, managerial and procurement language – and rarely mentioned patients.

The Guardian this week reports Charles Gutteridge, national clinical director for informatics at the Department of Health, as saying that Healthspace is “too difficult to make an account; it is too difficult to log on; it is just too difficult.”

The Department of Health later told The Guardian that Healthspace would be closed down “from” March 2013.

In 2010 a report by Trisha Greenhalgh and her team, The devil’s in the detail, which was commissioned by CfH, found that HealthSpace had involved professional advisers, software developers, security testing contractors, business managers who wrote the benefits realisation cases, lawyers who advised on privacy and regulatory matters and many others.

Yet the system was doomed from the start. Greenhalgh’s report in May 2010 revealed that:

“Project leads from participating NHS organisations repeatedly raised concerns with Connecting for Health in monthly management meetings about the low uptake of advanced HealthSpace accounts, since the benefits predicted, such as lower NHS costs and patient driven improvements to data quality, could not possibly be achieved unless the technology was used.”

Comment:

It’s not known how many millions has been wasted – and continues to be wasted – on Healthspace; and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the continuance of the scheme benefits nobody except those who are paid to work on it, which includes contractors and IT suppliers.

Why is the scheme to be cancelled “from” 2013, when it should have been cancelled when Trisha Greenhalgh and her team produced their report in May 2010?

Shouldn’t ministers have some control – especially given that we are supposed to be in an age of public sector austerity? Ian Watmore, Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office and former Government CIO, has said that failing projects are continued for too long. He said that in 2009. So isn’t it time ministers and particularly civil servants applied the principle of ‘fail early, fail cheaply‘?

Link:

In 2010 ComputerworldUK had an account of how Healthspace was being kept alive unnecessarily.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, e-health, excessive secrecy, Government IT, health, health records, IT projects, IT-related failures, NHS, npfit, supplier relationships

Fire ‘superstations’ without software cost £1m a month – The Times

Posted on 24/05/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Times reports today that taxpayers are paying more than £1m a month on the rent and upkeep of fire control rooms across England that have never been used. The purpose-built control centres look ready for immediate use, with open-plan desks fitted with desktop monitors and keyboards, and huge screens on a wall at the front of the control rooms which are supposed to help fire and rescue crews mobilise appliances and manage incidents.

Only there’s no working software.  The Department for Communities and Local Government negotiated the end of a contract with the main contractor EADS for software to run the regional control centres in December 2010. Officials concluded that the software could not be delivered within an acceptable timeframe. The regional control centres were completed before the IT project was cancelled.

The cost of the centres has been uncovered after a request under the FOI Act. The Times devotes much of its page three to a story under the headline:

Revealed: scandal of the £1m-a-month fire service ‘superstations’ lying empty.

Only one of nine regional centres is in use. The other eight incur rent, electricity, water and repair costs at £1,134,566 a month. Costs will be incurred for years because there are no break clauses in the agreements to lease the buildings. Two leases come to an end in 2027, one in 2028, two in 2032, three in 2033 and one in 2035.

A spokesman for the Department said that agreement has been reached for a further two of the buildings to be used by local fire authorities. Officials are searching for public or private sector tenants to occupy the other regional centres.

Lord Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister, who authorised the start of the technology project in 2004,  said he had been kept in the dark by civil servants on the rising costs of the scheme. He said it had been on budget when he left the department in 2007.

Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, said the failure of Firecontrol was an “expensive reminder of why you can’t trust Labour to run anything”. But the Coalition’s coming to power has not stopped central government IT-related failures.

Why Firecontrol failed

Firecontrol  followed the same tracks to a cliff edge that have caught out civil servants, ministers and suppliers on other government  computer-related projects.

The National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee found that  the Firecontrol project was rushed, had little support from those who would use it, costs and complexity were underestimated, there was an over-reliance on consultants and a lack of accountability for decisions made  – or not made.

The idea was to replace 46 local control rooms with nine, linked regional centres, which would be equipped with new standardised computer systems to handle calls, mobilise equipment and manage incidents.

But the project was cancelled in December 2010 with ministers unsure the technology would ever work. The NAO estimates that £469m will be wasted on the project.

The NAO found that the scheme was “flawed from the outset”, largely because local fire and rescue officers did not want regional centres or major changes in the way they worked.  Introducing any large new system is difficult but with enthusiastic support serious problems can sometimes be overcome; but introducing a complex new system without support from those who would use it means staff will have little incentive to find ways around problems.

The NPfIT [National Programme for IT in the NHS] failed in part because it lacked support among GPs and NHS staff; and the complexity of introducing standardised technology in semi-autonomous hospitals – each one with different ways of working – was underestimated. It was the same with Firecontrol.

The complexity of introducing standardised systems in regional centres with no goodwill among staff – was underestimated.  From the start many local fire and rescue officers criticised the lack of clarity on how a regional approach would increase efficiency. “Early on, the Department’s inconsistent messages about the regionalisation of the Fire and Rescue Service led to mistrust and some antagonism,” said the NAO.

The technology project was rushed while local fire crews were excluded from project discussions. “The project progressed too fast without essential checks being completed. For example Departmental and Treasury approval was given without proper scrutiny of the project’s feasibility or validation of the estimated costs and savings,” said the Public Accounts Committee. The project went ahead before the full business case was written.

A review of the project as early as April 2004 found that the scheme was already in poor condition overall and at significant risk of failing to deliver. But the “Gateway” review report was kept secret for seven years.

Is the stage set for IT disasters in government to continue? So far the Coalition has decided, like Labour, to keep secret all internal reports on the progress or otherwise of its mega projects, including Universal Credit, though the policy on secrecy may be about to change, which Campaign4Change will report on separately.

Firecontrol – same mistakes repeated on other projects.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change management, consultants, culture, excessive secrecy, Freedom of Information, Gateway reviews, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, local government, managing change, npfit, openness and transparency, Politics, project management, public sector, public services

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Watmore’s successor – the biggest challenge?

Posted on 23/05/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Ian Watmore, Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office, leaves at the end of June. What will be the biggest challenge for his successor?  I am told it will be to join up all the efficiency and reform measures:  ICT, digital, procurement, supplier management, project management, new business models, property and rationalisation  so that they are coherent from the point of view of departments, and don’t just look like a random set of instructions from the centre.

Farewell to Ian Watmore – the antithesis of Sir Humphrey

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change, change management, CIO, cost reduction, efficiency savings, procurement, reducing cost strategically

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IT: bringing both growth and headaches for developing nations

Posted on 17/05/2012 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

A number of developing nations are turning to IT to drive economic growth and create new employment opportunities.

Rwanda in Africa recently attracted the interest of the US Carnegie-Mellon University to invest in the country. French writer Francis Pisani is also visiting Rwanda on his global innovation tour.

But investing in IT can create headaches for developing countries too. For example,  a lack of money is threatening to halt the implementation of a Government IT project planned to increase Vietnam’s e-Government capability.  

The project, originally approved by Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung in September 2010, has largely failed to get off the ground.

Part of the project’s plan was to apply e-Government at all State-owned agencies from communal to central levels.

But according to the country’s Ministry of Information and Communications, Vietnam News reported, to date, 31 out of 63 provinces and cities across the country have not developed plans to implement the project. Most local authorities say they don’t know where or how to start.

Cao Dang Phuong, head of the ministry’s representative office in Da Nang City, said only seven out of 16 provinces and cities in the central region had plans to carry out the project.

Ho Quang Thanh, director of the Department of Information and Communications in central Nghe An Province, said that the biggest problem for most localities was the lack of funds for implementation.

To Thi Thu Huong, deputy director of the ministry’s IT Department, said: “This is a big project and to bring it into practice is a challenge as there is no financial source for it.”

The ministry has registered to carry out part of the project in 2012 at a cost of VND55.4 billion (US$2.6 million), but the lack of funding has hindered its implementation.

Nguyen Van Hai from the ministry’s IT Application Promotion Department told Thoi bao Ngan Hang (Banking Times) newspaper that VND100 billion (US$4.8 million) had been approved to execute plans at different ministries and localities this year, but it seems that is much too small to drive the successful IT development Vietnam needs.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Developing countries, government, Government IT

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