Category Archives: Politics

All change for police IT – again?

Posted on 18/07/2012 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

Police IT is supposed to have undergone a transformation over the past 13 years, thanks in part to a Home Office national police IT programme called NSPIS – for which Securicor Information Systems was awarded contracts worth more than £140m.

NSPIS contracts awarded in 1999 included:

– Case preparation: acquisition and delivery of forms, photographs, police reports, statements and other materials required in court for trying cases.

– Custody: booking in, tracking and monitoring of individuals held in police cells.

– Command and control: coordination and management of police operations.

– Crime: analysis of case histories and crime statistics.

With some reluctance, dozens of police forces took NSPIS systems with mixed success. The national transformation did not happen, though large sums were spent. NSPIS [National Strategy for Police Information Systems] was followed by another national IT-led transformation programme ISIS [Information Systems Improvement Strategy].

Now the government plans another police IT-led transformation. It is setting up a new company to improve police IT [as if the last so-called transformation programmes had not existed].

In a joint statement, the Home Office and the Association of Police Authorities say the new company will give strategic ICT advice to forces and procure, implement and manage ICT solutions for forces.

The company will “help police forces to improve their information technology and get better value for money from contracts”.

The police ICT company Ltd is now owned by the Association of Police Authorities and the Home Office but will be handed over to police and crime commissioners following elections in November.

In setting up the company Nick Herbert, the policing minister, says

“While some police IT is good, such as the new Police National Database, much of it is not.  There are 2,000 systems between the 43 forces of England and Wales, and individual forces have not always driven the most effective deals.

“We need a new, more collaborative approach and greater accountability, utilising expertise in IT procurement and freeing police officers to focus on fighting crime.

“By harnessing the purchasing power of police forces, the new company will be able to drive down costs, save taxpayers’ money, and help to improve police and potentially wider criminal justice IT systems in future.”

Chairman of the Association of Police Authorities Councillor Mark Burns-Williamson says that when the new company is handed over to police and crime commissioners “we want it to be fit for purpose and efficient in delivering IT tasks”.

The aim of the new company, says the Home Office and the Association of Police Authorities, is to “free chief officers from in-depth involvement in ICT management and enable greater innovation so officers have access to new technology to save time and ensure better value for the taxpayer”.

Police IT in a poor state?

UKAuthority.com reports that Tom Winsor, the new chief inspector of police, is “staggered” at the ineffectiveness of police IT.

Giving evidence to MPs he said

“I was staggered when I did my field work, in the police pay review, at just how low-tech the technology of the police is in volume crime and so on. It is extraordinary. They have computer screens that resemble those that we saw in the early 1980s. I mentioned the police officers doing their own two-finger typing and so on.

“It is the most extraordinarily archaic system. I think it is part of HMIC‘s role to expose inefficiency – and that surely is massively inefficient.”

Winsor said he had watched police officers standing in a queue for up to four hours at a time to book in a suspect. The private sector would not tolerate such delays, and would quickly change the system, he said.

Comment

With 43 forces buying their own IT it seemed sensible for the Home Office to try and introduce national systems.  As Neil Howell, the then IT Director at Hampshire Police Authority, said in March 2006, there was “political pressure to take up some systems – e.g. NSPIS Case and Custody ” but some national systems did not “match current level of functionality or requirements …”

In the NHS, several national IT-led transformation programmes preceded the NPfIT, but nobody in power wanted to know about the past when NPfIT was launched in 2003.

An extraordinary effort – and money – went into NSPIS  but police forces resented being told what to buy and in general were happy with own IT choices. Many were particularly happy with NSPIS rival systems from Canadian company Niche.

Perhaps the Home Office should accept that, apart from natural national systems such as the  Police National Database, Automated Numberplate Recognition, and the “Impact” intelligence sharing system, police IT is too complicated to be done nationally.

Mandating rarely works

Mandation rarely if ever works in the public sector. The Home Office and its agents cannot tell 43 autonomous police forces what technology to buy and implement.  Public bodies can, and do, circumvent mandation, sometimes by simply ignoring it, as National Audit Office reports point out.

The Department of Health  tried to tell trusts what to buy under the NPfIT and that didn’t work. Like police forces NHS trusts are largely autonomous.

Governments don’t have memories when it comes to failed IT-led transformation programmes. It may be good for civil servants and suppliers to learn new skills and experiment with IT on recycled transformation programmes.

But should suppliers learn at the expense of taxpayers? And should new ministers and civil servants keep launching new and exciting IT-led transformation programmes that fail as miserably as the last – giving excuses for a replacement set of ministers and civil servants to renew the cycle?

The Department of Health has finally learnt that what’s needed before the launch of any major  IT-led initiative is a frank appraisal of what has gone wrong in the past, and what can be learnt.  The DH achieves this in the “Impact Assessment” section of its latest IT strategy.  It’s not beyond the wit of police forces, the Home Office and the Association of Police Authorities to follow the DH’s example.

Unless they do, perhaps David Pitchford’s Major Projects Authority at the Cabinet Office should think twice before allowing large sums to be spent on new police IT.

Joint statement of Home Office and Association of Police Authorities

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Posted in outsourcing, Politics, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, project management, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships, reducing cost strategically

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Poor IT suppliers to face ban from contracts?

Posted on 28/06/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude is due to meet representatives of suppliers today, including  Accenture BT,Capgemini, Capita, HP, IBM, Interserve, Logica, Serco, and Steria.

They will be warned that suppliers with poor performance may find it more difficult to secure new work with the Government. The Cabinet Office says that formal information on a supplier’s performance will be available and will be taken into consideration at the start of and during the procurement process (pre-contract).

Maude will tell them that the Government is strengthening its supplier management by monitoring suppliers’ performance for the Crown as a whole.

“I want Whitehall procurement to become as sharp as the best businesses”, says Maude. “Today I will tell companies that we won’t tolerate poor performance and that to work with us you will have to offer the best value for money.”

The suppliers at today’s meeting represent around £15bn worth of central government contract spend.

The representatives will also be:

– asked their reactions on the government’s approach to business over the past two years

– briefed on the expanded Cabinet Office team of negotiators (Crown Representatives) from the private and public sectors. Maude says these negotiators aim to maximise the Government’s bulk buying power to obtain strategic discounts for taxpayers and end the days of lengthy and inflexible contracts.

Spending controls made permanent

Maude is announcing today that cross-Whitehall spending controls will be a permanent way of life. The Government introduced in 2010 temporary controls on spending in areas such as ICT  and consultancy. It claims £3.75bn of cash savings in 2010/11, and efficiency savings for 2011/12, which it says are being audited.

The Cabinet Office says: “By creating an overall picture of where the money is going, the controls allow government to act strategically in a way it never could before. For example, strict controls on ICT expenditure do not just reduce costs but also reveal the software, hardware and services that departments are buying and whether there is a competitive mix of suppliers and software standards across government.”

Maude said: “Our cross-Whitehall controls on spending have made billions of cash savings for the taxpayer – something that has never been done before. That’s why I’m pleased to confirm that our controls will be a permanent feature, helping to change fundamentally the way government operates.”

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Posted in cost reduction, efficiency savings, Government IT, IT-related failures, operational issues, outsourcing, oversight, Politics, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, project management, public sector, software quality, supplier relationships

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Cabinet Office promises unprecedented openness on risky projects

Posted on 13/06/2012 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

The Cabinet Office has defended its decision not to publish “Gateway” review reports on the progress or otherwise of large and risky IT and construction projects.

Gateway reviews are regular, short and independent audits on the state of medium and high-risk projects. Their publication would allow  MPs and the public to have an early warning of a major project in trouble – rather than know of a project failure only after it has happened.

Campaigners have sought for a decade to have the review reports published; and the  Information Commissioner, in requiring the publishing of ID Card gateway reviews under FOI,  dismissed the generalised arguments put forward by officials for Gateway reviews to remain confidential.

The Conservatives, when in opposition, promised to publish Gateway review reports if they came to power. But departmental heads and senior officials have stopped this happening.

Now the Cabinet Office, in a statement to The Guardian, has suggested that the first annual report of the Major Projects Authority will more than compensate for the non-publication of Gateway review reports.

The statement says that the Authority’s ( delayed)  first annual report will “bring unprecedented scrutiny and transparency to our most expensive and highest risk programmes, changing forever the culture of secrecy that has allowed failure to be swept under the carpet”.

The statement continues:

“Historically, fewer than a third of government major projects have delivered to original estimates of time, cost and quality. Since April 2011 the Major Projects Authority has enforced a tough new assurance regime and begun raising leadership standards within the Civil Service.”

The Guardian asked the Cabinet Office whether the traffic light red/amber/green status of Gateway reviews will be published.  The spokesman replied:

“The annual report will contain details of the status of major projects.“

Comment:

We applaud the Major Projects Authority in scrutinising, and in rare cases helping to stop,  departmental projects that don’t have adequate business cases. The Authority’s work is vital in pre-empting ridiculous schemes such as the NPfIT.

But project  disasters that rely on  IT continue, at the Ministry of Justice for example.  Like the National Audit Office, the  Major Projects Authority has limited resources and cannot scrutinise everything. Even if it could, the system of government is not set up in such a way as to allow the Authority to have final say over whether a project is stopped, curbed or re-negotiated.

Preventing failure

Gateway review reports are a critical component in preventing IT-related project failures. If officials know the whistle is going to be authoritatively blown on their failing schemes they are likely to do all they can to avoid failure in the first place. If they know that nobody will be aware of doomed schemes until those involved have left or moved, they will have less incentive to make projects a success.

An annual report is no substitute for the contemporaneous publishing of Gateway review reports. Each Gateway review is several pages and puts into context the traffic light red/amber/green status of the project. An annual report will not contain every Gateway review report. If just the traffic light status is published that will be a start, but without the context of the report what will it mean?

[And it’s worth bearing in mind that the first annual report of the Major Projects Authority is already six months late.]

The non-publication of Gateway review reports is  a victory by senior officials over ministerial promises.  How can we believe that the coalition is committed to unprecedented openness when the final say remains with Sir Humphrey?

Cabinet Office promises to challenge culture of secrecy on IT projects.

Whitehall to relent on secrecy over mega projects?

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Posted in change, change management, cost avoidance, cost reduction, excessive secrecy, Freedom of Information, Gateway reviews, government, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, openness and transparency, operational issues, Politics, reducing cost strategically

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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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HMRC loses an important voice on its board

Posted on 11/06/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Steve Lamey, who is leaving HM Revenue and Customs as Director General, Benefits and Credits, has worked tirelessly to improve the organisation’s systems and administration; and he has gained a reputation for listening to IT suppliers.

In 2007 he  won a British Software Satisfaction award for his work in promoting collaboration within the business software industry. He joined HMRC in October 2004 as CIO.

He is perceived to be leaving at a time when there are a number of vacancies at the top of HMRC. Accountancylive reported last month there was an “exodus”of senior officials from HMRC, and morale is said to be low.  But a man as influential as Lamey can do only so much.  Anyone who wants to effect major change at  HMRC must move an iceberg with a rowing boat. That said there have been some HMRC IT-related successes.

Was Lamey an unexploded force at HMRC?

But it’s conceivable that Lamey could have achieved more if he had carried on the way he started: by highlighting the need for change.

He unwittingly made a name for himself in 2005 after a speech he gave to a Government IT conference in which he revealed some of the corporate weaknesses of HMRC, an the organisation he had  joined not long before.

He  probably had not expected  his comments to be reported first in Computer Weekly and then on the front page of the Daily Telegraph.

At that time Lamey was HMRC’s new CIO. He told delegates of some of his discoveries, namely that:

– At least 31 million wrongly addressed letters were being sent out.

– Nearly half of self-assessment tax forms were being incorrectly processed and had to be done again.

–  he had been struck by the out-of-date computer systems. He told the conference: “If I were an information technology historian I would love it. We need to move on from there.”

– his  “biggest, biggest, biggest challenge” was correcting “poor quality data”.

Later a Daily Telegraph article, quoted me as saying “Mr Lamey’s frank assessment of the state of the tax department’s processes and systems is a rare and fresh approach for a senior government official.”

But was Lamey muzzled?

After that article it seems that Lamey was effectively muzzled, at least from making disclosures in public about HMRC’s flaws. Board papers at the time indicated that senior civil servants at HMRC would, in future, have to clear their public speeches in advance. Lamey did not make a similar speech in public again, not to my knowledge at least.

Richard Bacon MP, a member of the Public Accounts Committee, spoke at the time of the apparent attempts by HMRC to silence Lamey.

“It was refreshing to have a senior IT specialist, who is familiar with the business issues, and who is prepared to identify clearly what the scale of the problems is. Unless you’ve got that degree of frankness and candour, I don’t think you’re really going to solve the underlying problems. The alternative is to be in denial, to suggest that the problems don’t exist. It is plain that they do.”

The then Shadow Treasury minister Baroness Noakes, who was formerly a partner at KPMG, said she was concerned that it was already hard for parliament to discover how well HMRC was managing its business.

She said HMRC was “apparently silencing people from telling the truth”. She added “Speaking the truth [in the public sector] in the way you do in the private sector may well not be as acceptable.”

Would Lamey have been even more influential if he had continued – in public – to point to the weaknesses HMRC needed to tackle?

So defensive is HMRC that it considered a positive PR campaign to highlight its strengths after the loss of two CDs which contained the details of 25 million people.

Can an organisation that intuitively discounts and suppresses the negatives while trumpeting the positives ever properly reform itself? Probably not. If you cannot accept you have problems you cannot resolve them. We wonder how HMRC is getting on with its part of the Universal Credit project … its officials say all is well.

Attempts to constrain HMRC directors.

Front page Telegraph article with references to Steve Lamey’s speech

HMRC honcho poached.

Time for truth on Universal Credit

Hungry re-seller bags Steve Lamey.

Whistleblower punished?

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Posted in excessive secrecy, Government IT, HMRC, managing change, openness and transparency, Politics, private sector lessons for the public sector, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Whitehall to relent on secrecy over mega projects – after 10-year campaign?

Posted on 29/05/2012 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

The Cabinet Office may be about to change its decade-old policy of not publishing reports on  the progress or otherwise of its large, costly and risky IT-based projects.

A change of policy from secrecy to openness would give MPs and the public warning of when a major project is in trouble and needs rescuing or cancelling.

Parliament last to know

For more than a decade campaigners have sought to persuade successive governments to publish “Gateway” reviews, which are short independent audits on the state of big projects.  The secrecy has meant that Parliament is usually the last to know when new national schemes go wrong. IT-related failures have hit many public services including those related to tax, benefits, immigration, passports, the fire service, prisons, schools examinations, student loans, the police and health services.

Now Sir Bob Kerslake, head of the civil service, has hinted to campaigning Conservative MP Richard Bacon that the Cabinet Office may change its policy and publish the “red, amber, green” status of large projects as they are routinely assessed.

Kerslake was replying to Bacon at a hearing of the Public Accounts Committee meeting on transparency. Bacon pointed out at the hearing that the Public Accounts Committee had, years ago, called for Gateway reviews to be published.

Not learning from mistakes

“Something I have always been puzzled by is why government does not learn from its mistakes particularly but not only in the area of IT where things go wrong again and again, again and again,” said Bacon. “I have come to the conclusion government does not learn from its mistakes because it does not have a learning curve. If you don’t have a learning curve you are not going to learn.”

He cited the example of how Ian Watmore, Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office, had, at Bacon’s request, arranged for an “Opening Gate” report on Universal Credit to be published in the House of Commons library.

But, said Bacon, when an IT journalist applied to the Department for Work and Pensions, under the FOI Act, for the release of all Gateway reports on Universal Credit, the DWP would not publish any of them  – and even refused an FOI request to release the report Watmore had arranged to be placed in the House of Commons library, which Bacon obtained.  “So there is still a culture of intuitive, instinctive secrecy,”  Bacon said. Kerslake replied:

“Yes, actually we are looking at this specific issue as part of the Civil Service Reform Plan….I cannot say exactly what will be in the plan because we have not finalised it yet, but it is due in June and my expectation is that I am very sympathetic to publication of the RAG [red, amber, green] ratings.”

Bacon pointed out that the Cabinet Office Structural Reform Plan Monthly Implementation Updates had said Gateway reviews would be published.  But the commitment was removed for no apparent reason. When the Cabinet Office was asked why,  it said the Structural Reform Plans were only ever “drafts”.

Bacon asked Kerslake if the Government now plans to publish the Gateway reports.  “The Cabinet Office Structural Reform Plan Monthly Implementation Updates originally said Gateway reviews would be published  and then it somehow got downgraded into a draft; and from what’s publicly available at the moment the position of the government is not to publish Gateway reviews.  You sound as if you’re saying that’s going to change. Is that right?” asked Bacon.

“Watch this space,” replied Kerslake. “I am sympathetic. I generally broadly welcome, in principle, the idea of publishing information but there are lots of risks …”

Peter Gershon introduced Gateway reviews when he was Chief Executive of the Office of Government Commerce, which is now part of the Cabinet Office’s Efficiency and Reform Group. The reviews are carried out at key decision times in a project and are sometimes repeated:

  • Gateway Review 0 – Strategic assessment
  • Gateway Review 1 – Business justification
  • Gateway Review 2 – Procurement strategy
  • Gateway Review 3 – Investment decision
  • Gateway Review 4 – Readiness for service
  • Gateway Review 5 – Benefits realisation

Are Gateway reviews a success?

Gateway reviews are now supplemented by regular assurance audits carried out for the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority. None of the reports is published.

Gateway reviews have not stopped costly failures such as Firecontrol or the NPfIT.  One permanent secretary told an MP that the reviews in his department were considered unimportant by senior responsible owners, for whom the reports are written. This may be because SROs often have charge of many projects; and even their SRO responsibilities are often in addition to their main jobs.

But Gershon had high hopes of Gateway reviews when they were introduced in February 2001. This is evident from the number of times he referred to Gateway reviews at one hearing of the Public Accounts Committee in December 2001.

 “… as the Gateway review process cuts in, which I have referred to on a number of occasions when I have appeared at this Committee …”

“… Through things like the Gateway process we are helping to sharpen the focus on the whole life aspects of these and other forms of complex projects in public sector procurement…”

“ …First, we have the introduction of the Gateway review process…”

“ … The Gateway process is a demonstrable example of how we have introduced a technique to support that whole life approach…”

“… If you look at the guidelines around the Gateway review process that is one of the things that is tested by these independent reviews …”

“… we recognised that that was a problem some time ago, which is why in the Gateway review one of the things that is explicitly tested is things like the skills and capabilities of the team at the design and build stage and that the skills and capabilities of the team at the procurement stage …”

“… in this area with the Gateway review process, from when we first launched it last February, we have been helping the department take a whole life approach to these forms of complex projects …”

“… Part of the Gateway Review process is to get a much sharper insight on to where we see good things happening where we can encourage other clients to replicate them…”

“… Now, with the Gateway Review process, my experience has been because of where we have deliberately focused the attention on the early life of projects where there is the greater scope for management to take corrective action, the accounting officers are paying a lot of attention to the recommendations that are emerging because, much to my surprise, most of them do not seem to like coming here defending what has gone wrong in the past. They seem to welcome the recommendations that we are providing to them to help try to get projects on to much stronger foundations in the future…”

“… With the Gateway Review, my experience has been that the Accounting Officers respond to the recommendations very positively…”

“…Gateway Reviews explicitly test how the department is planning in the pre-contract phase to secure ongoing value for money in the post-contract phase…”

“… Take, firstly, the Gateway Review process. That is testing various points in the life cycle of the project, from the very earliest stage…”

“… I would certainly expect in Gateway Reviews that the review team would be testing what methods were in place to facilitate the ongoing management of the contract…”

“… I think it is encouraging that Sir Ian Byatt thought the Gateway Review process had sufficient value to recommend it in his own review…”

And so forth.

Comment:

We applaud Richard Bacon MP for his persistent call for Gateway reports to be published.

Gateway reviews have defeated expectations that they would stop failures; and the National Audit Office tells us that central departments don’t even request Gateway reviews on some big and risky projects although they are supposed to be mandatory.

But Gateway and other project assurance reports could prove invaluable if they are published. In the public domain the reports would enable Parliament and Francis Maude’s “armchair auditors” to hold officials and SROs to account for projects that are in danger of failing. That would be an incentive for officialdom to fail early and fail cheaply; and Gateway reviewers may take greater care to be neutral in their findings – not too lenient, or too harsh – on the basis that the reports would be open to public scrutiny. SROs would also have to take the review reports seriously – not just put them in a draw because nobody knows about them anyway.

We welcome Kerslake’s comments but hope that he and his colleagues plan to publish more than the RAG (Red/Amber/Green) status of projects. Otherwise they will be missing an opportunity.  Gateway reports and other assurance reviews are expensive. Reviewers can earn up to £1,000 a day. This money  could be well spent if the reviews are to be published; but it will add to public waste if the reports are kept secret and continue to be deemed pointless or unimportant by departments.

It is ironic, incidentally, that the Ministry of Justice, which introduced the FOI Act, gives advice to departments to keep the RAG status of Gateway reviews confidential. In its advice on Gateway reviews and the FOI, the MoJ tells departments that the “working assumption” is that the substance of the Gateway reports should be kept confidential until at least two years have elapsed.

It’s time for a culture change. Maybe the Civil Service Reform Plan next month will be worth reading.

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Posted in change management, cost reduction, culture, excessive secrecy, Freedom of Information, Gateway reviews, Government IT, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, managing change, NHS, npfit, openness and transparency, oversight, Politics, project management, public sector, public services, Universal Credit

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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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The real reason NHS Risk Register is a State secret?

Posted on 16/05/2012 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Yesterday  (15 May 2012) the Information Commissioner Christopher Graham issued a finely-crafted report to Parliament on his concerns about the Government’s use of a ministerial veto to stop publication of the Transition Risk Register relating to health service reforms.

Graham’s concern is that the veto represents a new and worrying approach to Freedom of Information.

Graham cannot do anything about the veto but he can warn MPs when he feels the Government has gone too far. This he has done in his report which says that the previous three occasions on which the ministerial veto has been exercised related to the disclosure of Cabinet material under FOIA. Now the Government has applied the veto to information held by the Department of Health.

Says yesterday’s report: “ The Commissioner would wish to record his concern that the exercise of the veto in this case extends its use into other areas of the policy process. It represents a departure from the position adopted in the Statement of Policy and therefore marks a significant step in the Government’s approach to freedom of information.”

The Government’s decision to ban publication of the health service risk register is particularly relevant to IT-related projects. This is because the government uses exactly the same arguments to ban contemporaneous publication of Gateway reviews and other independent assessments of IT-related projects and programmes.

Risk registers and Gateway reviews of IT-enabled change projects are similar. They are designed to identify all the main risks associated with the project or programme and have a red/amber/green system of rating the risks.

The Government’s argues that risk registers (and Gateway reviews) are researched and written in a “safe space” that allows civil servants to give advice and recommendations in a frank way. This candour would be compromised if the civil servants thought their advice would be published, says the Government.

In issuing a veto on the health risk register Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary said, in essence, that he could not trust civil servants to be entirely honest if they knew their reports would be made public.

Said Lansley:  “If risk registers are routinely or regularly disclosed at highly sensitive times in relation to highly sensitive issues, or there is legitimate concern that they could be, it is highly likely that the form and content will change: to make the content more anodyne; to strip out controversial issues or downplay them; to include argument as to why risks might be worth taking; to water down the RAG [red,amber, green] system.

“They would be drafted as public facing documents designed to manage the public perception of risk; not as frank internal working tools. These consequences (many of them insidious) would be to the detriment of good government.”

Lansley also wanted to ban publication to pre-empt sensational media coverage.  In this he was repeating the arguments made by civil servants under Labour who refused, under the FOI Act, to publish risk registers and Gateway reviews.  Said Lansley “I consider that the form and the frankness of the content of TRR [health service Transition Risk Register] would have been liable to create sensationalised reporting and debate.

“The content would also have been inherently highly open to misinterpretation by both the press seeking a headline and/or for political reasons. The likelihood of this occurring is particularly acute where the subject matter is, as with the Transition programme, controversial and the proposals at a highly sensitive stage.”

But the Commissioner did not accept that disclosure of the Transition Risk Register would affect the frankness and candour of future risk registers. The Commissioner also said that a ministerial veto should, by law, be made only in exceptional circumstances.  But the Government has failed to explain why there are exceptional circumstances in this case.  Said the Commissioner:

“The Commissioner does not consider that sufficient reasons have been given as to why this case is considered to be exceptional, particularly in light of the [Information] Tribunal’s decision dismissing the Department’s [Department of Health’s] appeal.

“The Commissioner notes that much of the argument advanced as to why the case is considered to be exceptional merely repeats the arguments previously made to Commissioner and the Tribunal and which were in part dismissed by the Tribunal.”

Graham concludes:

“In light of previous commitments he has made, and the interest shown by past Select Committees in the use of the ministerial veto, the Commissioner intends to lay a report before Parliament under section 49(2) FOIA on each occasion that the veto is exercised. This document fulfils that commitment.

“ Laying this report is an indication of the Commissioner’s concern to ensure that the exercise of the veto does not go unnoticed by Parliament and, it is hoped, will serve to underline the Commissioner’s view that the exercise of the ministerial veto in any future case should be genuinely exceptional…

“The arguments employed by the Department at the Tribunal and by the Secretary of State in explanation of the subsequent veto, both in the Statement of Reasons and in exchanges in the House of Commons around the Ministerial Statement, certainly use the language of ‘exceptional circumstances’ and ‘matter of principle’. But the arguments are deployed in support of what is in fact the direct opposite of the exceptional – a generally less qualified, and therefore more predictable, ‘safe space’.

“As such, the Government’s approach in this matter appears to have most to do with how the law might be changed to apply differently in future. This question falls naturally to consideration by the Justice Committee who have been undertaking post-legislative scrutiny of the Act.”

Comment:

The reason for the veto in the case of the health service risk register has little to do with protecting a safe space for frank discussion.

Civil servants already compile risk registers, Gateway reviews and similar reports on the basis that they may, at some point, be published. Officials are no more likely to be frank if they know their reports will be confidential than more guarded if they know the documents will be published. They will do what their job entails. Their job requires honesty. They will do that job whether or not reports are published.

The real reason for the veto – and the refusal of departments to publish all contemporaneous internal reports on large and complex programmes, particularly those with a large IT element – is that some new schemes within Government operate at a shambolic level.

Any new government, whatever its hue, soon learns to keep secret the fact that such programmes are sometimes characterised by near anarchy.

One outsider to the UK government, Australian David Pitchford, discovered the truth when he became Executive Director of Major Projects within the Efficiency and Reform Group which is part of the Cabinet Office. Pitchford may not have realised his comments would be reported when he told a project management conference in 2010 that “nobody in the UK Government seems to know how many projects they have on the books, nor how much these are likely to cost”.

He found that projects were launched, and continued, without agreed budgets or business cases.  Today, there is better scrutiny of major projects, by the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority. But the MPA is limited in what it can do or scrutinise. Which leaves government in a general mess when it comes to implementing anything new.

Evidence for this mess comes from the National Audit Office. Its auditors tend to investigate departments as a whole more than they do specific projects but when they do the careful reader can see that projects such as the Rural Payments Agency’s Single Payment Scheme (a scant regard for public funds, said the NAO) and the C-NOMIS project for the prison service (kindergarten mistakes, said chair of Public Accounts Committee) were without a structure. Chaos prevailed – and ministers were among the last to know.

Publication of project reports encourages professionalism. Departmental heads can be held to account if Parliament knows what has gone wrong. That’s precisely the reason departmental heads don’t want risk registers and other project reports published. It’s why all internal reports on Universal Credit, the government’s biggest IT-related project, are kept secret in spite of FOI requests.

The ministerial veto in the case of the NHS risk register is the government and civil service colluding in keeping the public and Parliament in ignorance of internal management’s inability to run complex new projects and programmes in a professional way.

Ministers and permanent secretaries don’t especially mind media criticisms that are based on speculation. They don’t want their critics having authoritative internal reports. That’s why the Cabinet agreed the health service veto – and it’s one reason the government has a not-very-hidden aversion to the FOI Act.

The coalition cannot justly claim to cherish open government while it is refusing so many requests under FOI to publish contemporaneous taxpayer-funded reports on its major schemes.

We agree with the Information Commissioner that use of the ministerial veto is a step too far. No number of announcements by the Cabinet Office on open government will gloss over the fact that the coalition is even more secretive about mega-projects than Labour. That’s saying something.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Freedom of Information, Gateway reviews, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, NHS, operational issues, Politics, private sector lessons for the public sector, project management, public sector, public services, Universal Credit

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Cerner project over budget by 100 times amount of local heart monitor donations

Posted on 25/04/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

When the Lord Mayor of Bristol presented a cheque for £20,000 to buy 10 cardiac monitors for local hospitals he could not have known that NHS officials were quietly spending more than 100 times that amount on an over-budget Cerner project.

A charity, the Frenchay Cardiac Support Group, raised the £20,000 through a shop and fund-raising events. It was 100th the amount  of the overspent element on a project to install an NPfIT Cerner patient administration system at the North Bristol NHS Trust.

Officials at NHS Connecting for Health and the Trust may consider it unfair of Campaign4Change to compare a charity donation with the unplanned extra costs of an IT-enabled change programme. But whereas North Bristol is accountable to local patients and fund-raisers for the £20,000 donation, it has no duty to explain to its patients (or anyone) how or why it has spent £5m on a Cerner project that was expected to cost the Trust about £3m.

The figures are buried deep in the Trust’s latest board papers. There has been no discussion of the overspend during the public part of the Board’s March meeting. Nor was it mentioned on the Board’s agenda for the meeting.

What the Trust says

The Trust declined our invitation to explain the overspend saying that it has commissioned a review of the Cerner project by PWC. Its statement to us said:

“North Bristol NHS Trust has commissioned an independent review into the issues surrounding the implementation of its new electronic patient record system. This will be carried out by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.  The outcome of the review will be published in due course.  We do not feel it is appropriate to comment further until the conclusion of the review, which is expected to take several weeks.”

The Trust’s papers say that the majority of capital spending in January and February was on the Cerner project. The anticipated spending on the project will be more than £5m which would see the Trust considerably overspent because of the difficulties encountered, say the papers.

The same Board papers put the Trust’s IM&T overspending at about £2.3m. This is on top of the hundreds of millions of pounds that NHS Connecting for Health is paying BT to install Cerner at sites in the south of England, including north Bristol.

Comment:

NHS Trusts across London and the south of England are expected to install new Cerner systems in the coming years. London is in the midst of a major procurement, as is the south. If the disruption is as serious as in some earlier implementations thousands of patients will be affected. So what?

At North Bristol the NPfIT implementation of Cerner has gone seriously awry. Besides the duplication of medical records, disruption to appointments, and, for the first time, the missing of a two-week wait target for cancer patients, there have been at least 16 clinical incidents; and the Trust’s papers say there has been a “significant increase in DNA [Did Not Attend an appointment] rates since the implementation of Cerner”.

Time heals?

Does it matter? It will all settle down in time say NHS officials.

Indeed some in the NHS and the scientific community in general have a view that taking known risks are part and parcel of achieving Progress. If lives are lost pushing back frontiers of knowledge it is for the greater good. Hence the justification for risks taken in launches of the Space Shuttle and building new designs of bridges, tunnels and aircraft.

The greater good

It’s a philosophy not lost on officials at NHS Connecting for Health. Go-lives of electronic patient record systems will be disruptive and may even affect the care and treatment of patients. But it’s for the greater good and the damage won’t last too long. Besides, if the health of any individual patients is affected, this will be supposition: no official evidence will exist.

So should patients fear the implementation of new hospital-wide systems? It’s a little like the early flights of commercial aircraft. Most flights will go without incident but now and again a passenger jet will crash.

One difference between aircraft crashes and hospital IT implementations is that crashes are usually investigated by law, and lessons applied by regulatory authorities to make flying safer. The NHS has no duty to investigate or apply lessons from its IT-related mistakes. Which is one reason that the lessons from the Cerner implementation at Nuffield Orthopedic Centre in Oxford in 2005 have still not been learned. For example there were important differences in the way the Nuffield’s staff and doctors worked, and the way the system was designed to work.

Who would want to fly in an aircraft that hasn’t been certified as safe? So should patients experience an NHS that has uncertified patient record systems?

In aircraft crashes deaths are obvious. There is often a clear cause and effect. In the NHS there is no certification of IT systems. A hospital can go live with whatever systems it wants, whatever the effect on patients. Indeed the reporting of any damage to patients is down to the Trusts. That’s a clear conflict of interest – like relying on the builders of a supertanker to report the effects on wildlife and fish of an oil spillage.

It’s time for a change.

It’s time for the NHS – and the Department of Health and particularly NHS Connecting for Health – to get professional about hospital-wide IT implementations.

It’s time for regulation and certification, minimum standards of safety and independent reporting of disasters.

Links:

Does Hospital IT need airline-style certification?

Halt NPfIT Cerner projects says MP

NPfIT Cerner installation at Bristol as “more problems than anticipated”

Why is North Bristol Cerner project so expensive?

An ongoing IT crisis case study – North Bristol NHS Trust

Lessons from Cerner go-live at Nuffield in 2005.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Government IT, managing change, managing outsourced services, NHS, npfit, openness and transparency, operational issues, oversight, Politics, private sector lessons for the public sector

Summary Care Record plods on

Posted on 11/04/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Pulse reports that the Summary Care Record database had 13.1 million records by 22 March 2012, which is around the number the DH had expected for April last year.

It reports that the figures have prompted David Flory, deputy NHS chief executive, to call for ‘rapid further progress’ on the rollout.

In his latest quarterly report on NHS performance, Flory highlighted the SCR as an area for improvement. “Implementation does not meet expectations and rapid further progress is needed,” said Flory. “While performance has improved, the rate of this improvement is beneath the expected trajectory.”

The number of patients with an SCR has almost doubled from around seven million a year ago. Sixteen PCTs have more than 60% of patients with an SCR.

Critical Mass

In February, Kilburn GP and SCR director Gillian Braunold was reported in Pulse to have said the rollout has reached a ‘critical mass’ in some areas. Out-of-hours providers, and those in urgent care and hospitals are viewing about 1,600 records a week.

Braunold said information within the SCR was changing some therapeutic decisions. She also said there was also evidence from areas where end-of-life care plans had been uploaded to care records that more patients were dying in their preferred place.

Nurses at NHS Direct are to have access to care records and the DH is working on plans to replace HealthSpace and enable patients to access their full patient record.

Comment – The devil’s in the detail

It is difficult to put Dr Braunold’s comments into context without published independent evidence of which there is little or nothing that’s recent.

In public, NHS Connecting for Health has never wavered in proclaiming the success of the SCR but it has sought to control authoritative information on the SCR programme.

CfH commissioned an independent UCL report on the NPfIT SCR  “The devil’s in the detail”, but asked researchers to, for example, delete the cost of the SCR programme. CfH also removed passages from official SCR documents it gave the UCL researchers.

The final UCL report , which said in a footnote ” financial data deleted at the request of CFH”,   found that there were inaccuracies in the SCR database. UCL researchers also learned that the SCR database could not be relied on as a single source of truth.

Some CFH staff found the notion of possible ‘disbenefits’ of the SCR difficult to conceptualise, said the UCL report.

There is no doubt that an accurate and well-populated SCR would be useful, especially for out-of-hours doctors. They need to know – at least – what drugs patients are taking and what if any adverse drug reactions they have had.

As the DH tells patients: “Giving healthcare staff access to this (SCR) information can prevent mistakes being made when caring for you in an emergency or when your GP practice is closed.”

But a national database is not the way forward. It is unlikely to be trusted as accurate or up-to-date. It would be better to give patients and clinicians access to locally-held NHS-sourced information. We’ll report more on this separately.

Meanwhile the SCR plods on at a high cost – more than £220m so far. BT, the SCR’s main supplier, will be pleased the programme is continuing, as will those civil servants and consultants who have been involved with the programme for several years. But whether the database is of real value to doctors and patients we don’t know for certain. The DH tends not to publish its independent advice.

Summary Care Record a year behind schedule, DH warns – Pulse

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Posted in Government IT, health, health records, IT projects, IT-related failures, managing change, managing outsourced services, NHS, npfit, openness and transparency, operational issues, Politics