Category Archives: Government IT

Australia bars China’s Huawei from competing for broadband project

Posted on 27/03/2012 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

There is an intriguing row Down Under about the Australian Government’s decision to bar the Chinese telecomms company Huawei Technologies from competing for work on its national broadband network (NBN) project.

Australia told Huawei, one of the world’s largest telecomms equipment providers,  that it could not tender for NBN contracts because of security concerns about cyber attacks emanating from China.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said she regarded the NBN as a crucial national infrastructure project.

”You would expect, as a government, we would make all of the prudent decisions to make sure that infrastructure project does what we want it to do, and we’ve taken one of those decisions,” she said, when asked about the Huawei decision at the ongoing nuclear security talks in Seoul.

The Australian Opposition said it regarded the government’s decision to ban Huawei from taking part in tenders as ”clumsy, offensive and unprofessional”.

Huawei’s spokesman Jeremy Mitchell said Australia was still getting used to privately owned Chinese companies, but Huawei would not give up on tendering for NBN projects, which are being managed by the Australian government-owned NBN Co Ltd.

”We’re not used to companies coming from China that are leading in technology and also global – 70 per cent of our work is outside of China,” Mr Mitchell said. “We see this as a setback. We’re obviously disappointed. But through looking at what we’ve done overseas, looking at what we’ve done in the United Kingdom, we can put in place measures that help the Australian government consider us as a partner in the NBN.”

Other Links

Australian Financial Review: China’s Huawei banned from NBN

BBC Business News: China’s Huawei barred from Australia broadband deal

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Posted in Campaign4Change, China, Government IT, IT projects, procurement

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California’s long-running courts’ IT project faces final verdict

Posted on 26/03/2012 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

If there was one place in the world you’d think might be able to get an IT project to improve courts’ systems right, it would be California, the home of Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately not. According to the San Jose Mercury News, there is a risk of the plug being pulled on a proposed system which was intended to link courts to each other and the state’s Department of Justice, and which would replace paper court files with electronic documents, allowing judges ‘with a click of a mouse’ to check everything from criminal histories to child support payments around the state.

But the 10-year project, which has so far cost $560m is running out of money. And now California, which as a state is strapped for cash, and is imposing budget cuts that are closing courthouses, is ready to pull the plug on the project altogether. 

The state’s Judicial Council, which is the court system’s policy arm, will tomorrow weigh up its options and make a decision whether to continue with the Court Case Management System (CCMS) or end the project.

A state audit last year made a catalogue of complaints against the state’s Administrative Office of the Courts for its lack of lack of oversight. It said that the AOC had: 

  • Inadequately planned for the statewide case management project and did not analyse whether the project would be a cost-beneficial solution to the superior courts’ needs.
  • Was unable to provide contemporaneous analysis and documentation supporting key decisions on the project’s scope and direction.
  • Did not structure the development vendor’s contract to adequately control cost and scope—over the course of seven years, the AOC entered into 102 amendments and increased the cost from $33 million to $310 million.
  • Failed to develop accurate cost estimates—in 2004 the cost estimate was $260 million and by 2010 the estimated cost was $1.9 billion.
  • Had not obtained the funding needed for statewide deployment and without full deployment to the 58 superior courts, the value of the project is diminished.
  • Must gain better support from the superior courts for the project—the superior courts of Los Angeles and Sacramento counties asserted that they will not adopt the system unless their concerns are resolved.
  • Did not contract for independent verification and validation (IV&V) of the statewide case management project until 2004 and independent project oversight services until 2007. The level of IV&V oversight was limited in scope and duration.
  • The statewide case management project may be at substantial risk of future quality problems as a result of the AOC’s failure to address certain of the consulting firm’s concerns.

In a telling quote, Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, the Judicial Council’s chairwoman,  is reported to have said it may be time to reconsider the project, comparing it to having “a Ferrari in the garage, but we can’t afford the gas.”

The San Jose Mercury News reported that state lawmakers are now growing increasingly sceptical of paying for CCMS, with one committee last week voting unanimously to put most of the system upgrade on hold.

“Eight presiding judges, including those from trial courts in San Francisco, San Mateo and Los Angeles, last week urged the council to pull the plug,” the San Jose Mercury News said. 

When it was first approved more than a decade ago, the project was an ambitious one.  Its goal was to create one unified system for all of California’s trial courts. The upgrade had widespread support, including from the state’s then Governor Gray Davis, and California was flush with cash to pay for the project.

But as the project progressed, its cost increased, and it has since became a ‘lightning rod’ for California judges who have been absorbing more than $600 million in budget cuts over the past three years.

Now, the state wants to cut the judiciary’s losses and find less expensive ways to improve court technology, by, for example, allowing local judges to pick their own IT upgrades.

“Anyone will tell you, if you’re stuck in a hole, stop digging,” said Sacramento Superior Court Judge Maryanne Gilliard, a leader in the Alliance of California Judges, a CCMS critic. “We’ve spent 10 years on this project. It needs to be declared dead.”

However, the end of the project is not necessarily a forgone conclusion, proving the old adage that no failing IT project can easily be killed off. Now a separate audit released last week has suggested three more options:

  • Deploy the full CCMS program in one test county, San Luis Obispo, which would cost more than $20 million; or  
  • Install it in 10 counties, including Alameda, Marin and Santa Cruz, and wait for the end of the recession before taking it state-wide; or  
  • End the project now. 

The audit has however pointed out that with or without CCMS, many trial courts need technology upgrades that will cost some amounts of money. And it has projected that, by 2017, CCMS would save the state about $33 million a year by cutting the cost of everything from collecting fines to transferring court files from one county to another.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, CIO, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, project management, US Government

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New York’s emergency call IT project: just 7 years behind schedule and $1bn overbudget

Posted on 25/03/2012 | 3 comments

By David Bicknell

Everything is always bigger in America: the breakfasts, the buildings – and the IT project overruns. 

According to Government Technology, the call-takers behind New York City’s emergency 911 systems are now using the same technology and are sharing data.

The only problem is that, according to an audit from the City Comptroller John Liu, the expansive  – perhaps that should read  ‘expensive’ – upgrade is $1 billion over budget and seven years behind schedule.

Originally started in 2004, the Emergency Communications Transformation Program (ECTP) is now estimated to cost $2.3 billion, with full completion now expected in 2015.

The project initiated by  the New York City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) set out to establish two public safety call centres in order to improve the resiliency and redundancy of 911 response, which formerly was decentralised within individual city agencies. The New York City Fire and Police departments are now operating in one of the two new call centres while construction work continues on the other building.

According to the audit report, New York employed Gartner as quality assutance consultants when the project began eight years ago, and the consultancy helped implement a series of modifications to the project’s scope and management when problems arose. DoITT contracted with Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2005 to provide services as a system integrator1 for public safety answering centres (PSAC1) and as project manager over other contractors providing services and equipment for PSAC1.

Gartner subsequently made a series of telling comments on project governance, complaining of a lack of timely decision making; a lack of executive sponsorship participation; and no governance/communications centre administration plan.

Liu blamed the cost overruns on inadequate project management within the city’s administration.

“Taxpayers are just tired of hearing about out-of-control projects involving expensive outside consultants,” Liu said. “This is unfortunately yet another example of massive waste and delay due to City management that was at best lackadaisical, and at worst, inept.  New cost constraints put in place by my office will help curb overruns, though they cannot turn back the clock or put already wasted dollars back in taxpayers’ pockets.”

In his report Liu says:

“We found DoITT’s overall project management of the ECTP lacking – due to its initial underestimation of time and technical constraints involved in implementing the multi-agency mission-critical ECTP – which therefore did not allow for project completion on a timely basis.”

It went on: “The original project governance, roles and responsibilities and project controls  were found to be deficient by ECTP’s quality assurance consultant in 2006 covering the 2005-2006 initial time period of system integration work on the ECTP.

“Specifically, the QA consultant noted questionable judgement, poor decisions and deficiencies in the ECTP governance structure.”

It added that: “The effort… to implement a shared Computer Aided Despatch (CAD) system for Police, Fire and the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Division was a major technical misstep. Due to technical obstacles, ECTP departs from one of its original goals of having a shared CAD. The New York Police Department (NYPD), the Fire Department and EMS will need to independently address their respective CAD systems requirements outside of the ECTP.”

The audit also points out a need for ongoing independent, external quality assurance which has been lacking since Gartner’s contract ended in March 2011.

Audit Recommendations

To address the audit issues, Liu’s office recommended:

  • DoITT, in conjunction with ECTP executive sponsors, should have its current governance strategy expanded, formulated into a plan, reviewed and formally approved by all stakeholders, and conveyed to all pertinent ECTP team members. The expanded areas should include operational coverage for  PSAC1 upon full completion and occupancy, and line of authority for operations within PSAC1 should be clearly defined and conveyed to stakeholders.
  • DoITT and the OCEC should increase its efforts to fill open positions with appropriately qualified personnel to ensure that the ECTP has sufficient resources required for the ongoing monitoring and management of the ECTP
  • DoITT should improve upon its current strategy to provide Quality Assurance coverage by retaining, on a temporary basis, independent quality assurance experts to monitor the balance of HP’s contractual performance for the duration of its contract.  In addition, DoITT should consider a Quality Assurance arrangement to monitor Grumman’s performance as primary contractor at PSAC2

In a letter responding to the findings, DoITT Commissioner Carole Post said that the 911 upgrade has significantly improved call capacity and that call-takers have moved successfully into the first new call centre.

In January, New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg celebrated the opening of the first public safety answering centre. The centre is able to handle 50,000 calls per hour, 40 times more than the average volume and nine times more than was received on Sept. 11, 2011.

“The changes we have made have eluded many administrations and the project has been a challenge, but we have never shied away from the tough decisions or taking on the difficult projects that will make New Yorkers safer and the city work better, and we never will,” Bloomberg said.

More background

New York Daily News report on the project’s history

City Comptroller John Liu’s Audit Report

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

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Florida’s IT projects consolidation continues at a glacial pace

Posted on 25/03/2012 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

US states’ recent history on IT projects has been a rollercoaster ride with more downs than ups.

The State of Florida’s recent experiences have mirrored those of  others. As this article details, Florida’s modernisation and consolidation of its IT systems has had its fair share of headlines.

“The tenures of the first two chief information officers were controversial. Both resigned; afterward, auditors found problems with how contracts and agency finances had been managed. The third CIO cancelled the questionable contracts, but the missteps left a shadow over the agency, and in 2005 the Legislature eliminated its funding.”

As the article points out, for many years,Florida’s individual departmental agencies made their own IT decisions, leaving the state with nearly two dozen data centres, 30 e-mail systems, 200 different IT groups and 150 websites. Bush believed merging those systems and centralising control of IT operations would make government more efficient and allow the state to take advantage of economies of scale.

But the process has been a slow one. Almost glacial. A new Agency for Enterprise Information Technology (AEIT) was set up to handle the consolidation efforts and create IT policy — but it has been restricted in its work, designed to be “a small agency with a small staff with a large mission in our hands,” according to  its CIO David Taylor.

The department, with a staff of just 16 and a budget of $1.6 million, cannot dictate what systems other agencies should use and purchase. Instead, its role is restricted to advising departments on strategies like bulk buying and working with agencies to standardise specifications for equipment to help facilitate volume purchases. The agencies, however, aren’t required to follow AEIT’s advice. And bigger IT targets — core business systems, accounting systems and licensing systems – remain untouched.

Taylor believes that the state would be better served by “one unified IT agency” with some teeth to do something — and he may eventually get his wish.

In December, the Florida Government Efficiency Task Force, a panel that provides cost-cutting strategies to the Legislature, recommended giving the agency budget and procurement authority for “enterprise” projects and services and giving it greater power to enforce its standards.

Florida’s modernisation of its IT systems may eventually pick up pace. But don’t expect miracles. Just a crawl.

Even Taylor accepts the need for an almost painfully steady-as-you-go approach. “We should demonstrate that we can be successful in our current consolidation efforts before taking on even greater challenges.”

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Posted in CIO, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, US Government

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Should Francis Maude say “no” to so many projects?

Posted on 23/03/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

When Jack Straw was Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, he told MPs on the Constitutional Affairs Committee in 2007 that when he abandoned projects there was a fuss at first and soon nobody noticed the project did not exist.

“There is always the option to abandon things. I did that in the Foreign Office with much complaint that the world might end.

“What happened was that we saved a lot of money and no one ever noticed the fact that that scheme did not exist…it is very frustrating that so many people, including the private sector, are taken in by snake oil salesmen from IT contractor who are not necessarily very competent and make a lot of money out of these things. I am pretty intolerant of this.”

Andrew Tyrie (Conservative): Do you suggest that the public sector has been taken in by snake oil salesmen?

Straw: I am saying that we are all taken in. There are plenty of disastrous IT examples in the private sector, BP and Sainsbury being two of them.

Tyrie: I was looking at the public sector.

Straw:

“I was looking at both. I think we all face problems whereby unless we are total IT experts there is a danger of being taken in by snake oil salesmen… It is a real problem and it is one that is inherent in IT; it is not just a problem for the public sector.

“The difficulty is that in the case of the public sector it is taxpayers’ money, not shareholders’ or customers’ money, and the mistakes are much more visible, but plenty of companies in the private sector have similar problems.”

Comment:

Should the Cabinet Office Francis Maude say “no” to so many projects? Clearly he’s doing the right thing if Straw’s remarks are anything go by. Would a  private sector board that has to watch every penny launch costly IT-related projects that weren’t really needed?

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Posted in Campaign4Change, cost avoidance, efficiency savings, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, private sector lessons for the public sector, project management, public sector, reducing cost strategically, supplier relationships

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Francis Maude reforms by saying “no” – a “massive” number of times

Posted on 23/03/2012 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has intervened to reject departmental projects a “massive” number of times says Ian Watmore, Cabinet Office permanent secretary and former Government CIO.

Evidence Ian Watmore gave to the Public Administration Committee last week suggests that the Cabinet Office’s saying “no” repeatedly to departmental projects has changed behaviours within the civil service.

Watmore, the Cabinet Office’s permanent secretary, told Tory MP Charlie Elphicke, that Francis Maude and his officials now have the power to challenge departments’ civil servants who try and ignore Cabinet Office recommendations.

“In the past, those controls did not exist so they [officials in departments and agencies] could ignore us if they wanted to and carry on as before,” said Watmore. “Under the new regime, they cannot do that because in the end, if they ignore the recommendations that we come to, then they have to seek approval for the expenditure they were going to make on their projects and Francis Maude would, in his own words, happily say ‘no’ in such situations, and say ‘no’ again until people actually came to the table and changed what they were doing.”

Elphicke: Has he done so to date?

Watmore: Yes, an absolutely massive number of times.

Changing behaviour

Since departments have found it harder to get the Cabinet Office to endorse their projects, departmental officials are now “bringing their plans to us much earlier in the timeframe because they do not want us saying ‘no’ when it is well advanced”,  said Watmore.

“So we are getting into a dialogue with them early on about what the best way of doing something is. When we have agreed on the best way of doing something, when it comes back for approval, it gets nodded through and that is working much more effectively.”

Watmore added that the Cabinet Office’s controls will become redundant over time “because people will behave the right way”. He said: “Like the Carlsberg complaints department was the analogy I had in my head; it exists but it is never used.. At the moment we use it a lot because, left to their own devices, people would do things that were suboptimal when you look at it from across Government.

“Francis Maude is in a position to say, ‘No, you are not doing that. You are going to do it this way and reuse somebody else’s system or somebody else’s way of doing things’. He is very hands-on and vigorous at doing that.

Comment:

Watmore’s evidence confirms that Maude remains the mainspring of change in the way government works. Without Maude the unreasonably costly status quo would prevail.  He may be in danger of spinning. But how many ministers like to say “no”? He is invaluable for that reason alone.

What will happen when Maude is promoted, stands aside or retires?  The minister who likes to say “yes”  will earn the respect of some of his civil servants. The refreshing thing about Maude is that he is happy to take his plaudits from taxpayers, not officialdom.

Watmore’s evidence to the Public Administration Committee, 13 March 2012.

Institute for Government open letter on civil service reforms – the problems and opportunities.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, CIO, compliance with spending review, efficiency savings, Government IT, IT projects, managing change, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, project management, reducing cost strategically

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Is Francis Maude starting to spin – without realising it?

Posted on 16/03/2012 | 6 comments

By Tony Collins

Francis Maude is, perhaps, the most effective Cabinet Office minister in decades.

If the business world divides into two main types of character, black and white, and grey – neither being better or worse than the other –  Maude is black and white.

He wants clarity. He shuns subtlety and complexity. He has no time for civil service sophistry and equivocation, or the coded language of some supplier representatives. He wants cuts in the cost of contracts and doesn’t want to hear long arguments on why things are not that simple. He had deep reservations over doing a new deal with CSC over the NPfIT.

A strength of Maude and his colleagues at the Cabinet Office has been the absence, or at least scarcity, of exaggerated and unsubstantiated statements of efficiency savings, of the sort made repeatedly during Labour’s tenure.

Is that beginning to change?

In the past fortnight Maude has made two major claims that are not based on published evidence.

• Maude said spending on SMEs has risen from 6.5% to 13.7%.  It’s not clear how that figure is calculated. There’s a good analysis of the tenuousness of the claim by Peter Smith of Spend Matters. How much of the increase in SME work is down to unaudited claims by large companies that they are giving their SMEs more work?

• He said that £200m has been cut from Capgemini’s Aspire contract with HMRC. [Aspire also involves Fujitsu and Accenture.] He has received much good publicity for the claim. Said the Telegraph yesterday:

“He [Maude]  announced that ministers had successfully renegotiated one deal on computers and tax systems for HM Revenue and Customs.

He said the new contract, with Capgemini, would save £200 million on the deal previously agreed.”

Last year Mark Hall, deputy CIO at HMRC was reported as saying that the Aspire contract was on course to save more than £1bn. Is the £200m quoted by Maude in many news articles this week new?

And none of the articles mention the total cost of the Aspire contract – so from what is £200m being cut?

At one point, according to Mark Hall, the estimated cost of Aspire rose to £10bn from its original estimate of £2.83bn over 10 years. This means that cost increases on the Aspire contract are measured in billions – which puts the £200m savings figure mentioned by Maude into context.

And have Maude and his team offered Capgemini anything in return for a price cut, such as an improved profit margin? [The contract is on an open-book accounting basis]. This week’s Cabinet Office statement on the £200m cut gives no help here. An HMRC FOI response in 2010 and an NAO report in 2006 show that costs of Aspire are fluid. They change according to internal demand; and pricing arrangements are complex. HMRC has refused FOI requests to publish the contract so how can anyone put the claimed £200m savings into a contractual content?

In 2007 negotiations between HMRC and Capgemini extended the 10-year contract by three years, to June 2017; and there’s an option to extend Aspire  for a further five years to 2022. In return for the contract extension Capgemini has already guaranteed savings of £70m a year and a further £110m a year from 2012. Are these savings in addition to the £200m a year Maude has announced? Or the £1bn savings mentioned by Mark Hall?

The good news is that HMRC’s CIO is Phil Pavitt who is a natural sceptic of big outsourcing deals. If anyone is going to achieve genuine savings on Aspire it is Pavitt. Indeed he has given some details of his negotiations. But the contractual context remains abstruse.

Comment

Doubtless Maude believes the figures he has announced on SMEs and Aspire are correct but without substantiation they will mean little to anyone except the media. Maude, perhaps, needs to trust his own cautious instincts than listen too much to his advisers. Otherwise he’ll begin to sound more like Labour ministers who repeatedly made claims the NAO found difficult to substantiate.

The important and impressive work Maude is doing to cut the costs of running government should not be trivialised and debased by spin. Announcements on what he is doing to cut costs and make government more open are usually helpful. But Maude should the first to differentiate the real – in other words the factually corroborated – from aggrandising and flimsy political claims.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, compliance with spending review, cost avoidance, efficiency savings, Freedom of Information, Government IT, managing change, managing outsourced services, outsourcing, Politics, procurement, public sector, public services, reducing cost strategically, supplier relationships

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Lessons from “stupid” NHS IT scheme – Logica boss

Posted on 13/03/2012 | 1 comment

Some wise words from Andy Green, CE of Logica, on lessons from the NPfIT and other failures

By Tony Collins

Andy Green, CE, Logica

Andy Green, chief executive of Logica, speaking to the BBC’s Evan Davis about the NHS National Programme for IT, NPfIT, said:

“It is a stupid thing for the supply chain to have answered, and it’s a stupid thing for the customer to have asked for.”

Green was speaking on Radio 4’s The Bottom Line about corporate “cock-ups and conspiracies”. Other guests were Phil Smith, chief executive of Cisco UK and Ireland, and entrepreneur Luke Johnson.

Green, who joined Logica as CEO in January 2008, said he was in one of the bidders for the NPfIT when he was at BT.

The plan, he said, had been to put the same system into every hospital but later foundation hospitals were able to opt out of the NPfIT.

“Half way through [the NHS IT programme] foundation hospitals were invented,  and suddenly foundation hospitals did not have to go with what the NHS said at all”.

He added: “There were fundamental errors in the whole procurement process, and then real difficulty in delivering what had been promised.”

Evan Davis said the NHS IT scheme had cost billions, achieved little and had been running for years. He asked Green: “What’s the story?”

Green said some things went well including the supply of a network that connects pharmacies and doctors. But …

“What  had been promised by the supply chain was fantastic software that had not been designed yet that was going to completely revolutionise hospitals and delivering that proved to be horrendous… in the end it is foolish to set out on a programme that is going to take seven years with a fixed procurement up front, which says we all know everything about it …”

Lessons

Green spoke of the need for the supplier to understand exactly what the customer wants and whether it is deliverable before the parties agree to draw up a project specification.

“I think the world is beginning to learn about incrementalism. Let’s do something that we can all see and understand.

“Some of our clients we now work with in common teams – we call it co-management – and only when we have worked out exactly what is going to work in the client, and we can deliver, do we specify it as a project.

“Those things tend to go a lot better. We have got used to the fact that we don’t know everything.”

Luke Johnson

Luke Johnson, who is a former chairman of Channel 4, criticised IT suppliers for not getting it right often enough.  “I have bought quite a lot of projects and been involved as a customer many times… As a customer it is a very scary thing because clearly you are not an expert. Your providers are experts and yet they do not seem to be able to get it right often enough it seems to me, given how much they charge.”

Green said there is a high failure rate in the IT industry. “The client sets out one view at the beginning and then they have to change. The sensible defence to this is the partitioning into smaller items and relationships.

“We bluntly always think of our clients over the long run. You need to know people so that you can sit down and have a decent conversation. Too often when these things start to go wrong everybody runs for the contract. Experienced buyers and sellers do not do that: they run for each other and they talk it through, and they work it out, and they put it back on track.

“It’s value that matters. It’s doing something that really changes Patisserie Valerie’s business. [Luke Johnson is chairman of Patisserie Valerie.] What can you do that would transform that. If you can get that done, then if it over-runs by 20% it probably does not matter.”

Luke Johnson: “It depends how much money you’ve got.”

Lowest-price bids

Phil Smith, Cisco

Phil Smith of Cisco said government often has the biggest problems because “they squeeze so much in procurement there is little good value and goodwill left”.He said that on good projects problems are tackled by cooperation but “if every piece of value has been squeezed out before you procure it, your only option is to get something back from it”.

Beware procurement experts

Johnson said if procurement experts take control, and their mantra is to save money, it can often lead to trouble. “I fear that in many aspects of business, it gets down exclusively to price rather than value.

“Quality is out the window. They [procurement experts] can show a saving so they have justified their bonus but the supplier may be rubbish.”

Green said government is in a difficult position when a project starts to go wrong. “You are stuck in a procurement and the poor individual responsible is almost certainly facing a union or a consumer group or a doctor who doesn’t want the thing to happen anyway.”

Evan Davis made the valid point that the costs of projects in the public sector have to be underestimated to get approved. Realistic estimates would be rejected as too costly.

“… The person who is championing this project has to demonstrate to superiors that it is not too expensive. It is only by taking the cheapest bid and starting the thing off that you can sell the project higher up and of course down the line it costs a heck of a lot more.”

Luke Johnson: “We all know in many sectors there are providers that will take things at cost or even less with a view that they will somehow bulk it out and make a margin on the way. They know the client will need variations.

Innovation means taking risks

Luke Johnson: “If you want an innovative society, if you want one that is willing to take risks, to generate new technologies, new jobs, new businesses, then it involves failures and cock-ups.

“I think the British have got vastly better in recent years in accepting that as part of the journey and that is incredibly healthy.”

BBC R4’s The Bottom Line – Cock-ups and conspiracies.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change management, Government IT, health records, IT projects, IT-related failures, managing change, managing outsourced services, NHS, npfit, operational issues, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, project management, supplier relationships

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US Government opens its books on IT projects

Posted on 12/03/2012 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

The Office of Management and Budget in the US has gone some way to opening up the books on IT investments to public scrutiny with the updating of the Agency’s IT Dashboard.

The move,  announced by Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel, makes publicly available detailed IT investment information in support of the President Obama’s FY 2013 Budget.

The Obama Administration launched the IT Dashboard in 2009 to create  more transparent and open government.

As VanRoekel says in his blog,  “By publicly posting data on more than 700 IT investments across the Federal government, we armed agencies with the tools needed to reduce duplication in IT spending, strengthen the accountability of agency CIOs, and provide more accurate and detailed information on projects and activities. We also gave Americans an unprecedented window into how their tax dollars were being spent.”

VanRoekel says the latest dashboard will provide greater transparency of IT investment performance and empower CIOs to intervene in troubled projects sooner. Changes include:

Making the Dashboard more accessible: the Dashboard will now provide access to individual projects and activities associated with an investment, link investments to funding sources, and include visualisations to track investment performance from year-to-year.

Identifying duplication: New data on what kind of services each investment provides will help US agencies identify and address duplication in their IT portfolios.

Improving data quality: Improved validations and warnings will prevent erroneous data from coming into the system,  while new data quality reports will help agencies identify improvements they can make to their existing data

More data and tools: More datasets are now being made available, as well as additional tools to enable the public to participate by downloading and building their own applications.

According to VanRoekel, the  transparency enhancements will improve the way US taxpayers’ dollars are spent. He argues that by using the IT Dashboard and Techstat accountability developments to focus on the most challenged critical projects, agencies and the Office of Management and Budget have driven reforms that have saved taxpayers upwards of $4 billion since the initial launch.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Gateway reviews, government, Government IT, IT projects, oversight, US Government

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Lean Procurement – an early bird analysis

Posted on 08/03/2012 | Leave a comment

 In this guest blog, John Pendlebury-Green and John Jones from strategic sales architects Landseer Partners discuss the Government’s plans to introduce lean procurements, an approach which should shorten procurement times, reduce bidders’ costs and encourage greater SME participation

Lean procurement is being piloted by the Government with six pilots underway across various departments. We at Landseer Partners have been extensively involved with one of these pilots. Also, we have discussed the emerging characteristics with service providers participating in other lean procurements.

Although it is early days, there are some emerging trends that the Government and bidders would do well to take on board for lean procurements to become successful and ubiquitous across government.

So, what are these emerging trends? Our “early bird” experience of being on a lean procurement pilot suggests that:

·         Lean procurements, by their very nature in attempting to reduce the overall procurement timeline significantly, have the potential benefit of reducing bidders’ costs. They also have the potential to reduce the opportunity to discuss in sufficient detail important commercials such as contract schedules and contractual terms and conditions.

·         Both the client and potential suppliers need to plan and resource better a lean, competitive dialogue. That means supplier submissions need to be submitted much sooner than in previous procurements. It also means that client bid reviews and quality assurance need to be undertaken much quicker and more efficiently.

·         There is an even greater need for strong leadership and decision-making on both the client and supplier side i.e. the need for empowered individuals is greater in lean procurements than in a traditional competitive dialogue. Decisions need to be taken swiftly in order to maintain pace in the procurement.

·         Stress levels for all parties can be high. All parties will be “doing more” in “less time” – so outcomes need to be kept in perspective with a view to the quality of deliverables/schedules not being compromised and

·         Bid teams need to be better resourced at the outset, especially in terms of having the right subject matter experts being available at the appropriate time. This seems to be especially so in the case of lean dialogue.

Finally, our experience, short though it is, suggests that incumbent suppliers, by virtue of their incumbent status, have a slight advantage over other short-listed competitors. They have greater knowledge of the existing services supplied. They need less time in the “data room” and are often able to provide a greater level of detail in their dialogue responses, simply by virtue of knowing the service in greater detail.

In summary, it is still very early days in the lean procurement world.  The obvious benefits of shorter procurement times (and hence reduced costs on all sides) though welcome, might actually mask additional costs that could subsequently emerge.  

Landseer Partners     http://www.landseerpartners.com/

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