Category Archives: public sector

DWP starts media campaign on Universal Credit IT tomorrow

Posted on 19/09/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has told MPs his department is launching a “major exercise” tomorrow to inform the media about Universal Credit, including progress with the IT project.

The public relations push will include a demonstration to journalists of the Univeral Credit front-end, and an explanation of the ability of “agile” to rectify problems as you go along. Duncan Smith said there is a lot of ignorance in the media, and suppositions, that need tackling head on.

His full statement on the PR campaign is at the foot of this article.

Comment

Iain Duncan Smith’s remarks to MPs sound remarkably like the statements that were made in the early part of the National Programme for IT in the NHS, when DH ministers and senior officials were anxious to correct ignorance and suppositions in the media – and to show journalists the front end of new electronic patient record systems.

Several times journalists were invited to Richmond house in Whitehall, the HQ of the DH, to hear how well the NPfIT was going. So anxious were the minister and leading officials to give a good impression of the programme that, on one occasion, trade journalists who had an insight into the NPfIT’s progress and could ask some awkward questions in front of the general media were barred from attending.

I would like Universal Credit to succeed. In concept it simplifies the excessively complex and costly benefit system. The worrying thing about the scheme, apart from the DWP’s overly sensitive reactions to scepticism in the media, is the way UC seems to be following the path which led to NPfIT’s downfall.

The Secretary of State attacks the media while trying to show UC in a glowing light and at the same time keeps secret all the DWP’s interview reviews and reports on actual progress. Duncan Smith says that the DWP wants to be open on UC but his department is turning down FOI requests.

There is no doubt that Duncan Smith has a conviction that the programme is on course, on budget, and will deliver successfully. But there still a morass of uncertainty for the DWP to contend with, and lessons to be learnt from pilots, some of which could be important enough to require a fundamental re-think. That’s to say nothing of HMRC’s Real-Time Information project which is part of UC.

Duncan Smith says the UC project is not due to be complete until 2017 which gives the DWP ample time to get it right. But ministers and officials in the last administration gave the NPfIT 10 years to complete; and today, nine years later, the scheme is being officially dismantled.

Did NPfIT ministers really know or understand the extent of the project’s true complexities and uncertainties?  Did they fully grasp the limited ability of suppliers to deliver, or the willingness of the NHS to change?  But they were impressed with the patient record front-end system and they organised several Parliamentary events to demonstrate it to MPs.

The NPfIT public relations exercises – which included DH-sponsored DVDs and a board game to market the NPfIT – were all in the end pointless.

Should Duncan Smith be running Universal Credit?

This is another concern. Duncan Smith is much respected and admired in Parliament but he appears too close to UC to be an objective leader. At a hearing of the Work and Pensions this week Duncan Smith took mild criticism of UC as if it were a verbal attack on his child.

It is doubtful anyone working for Duncan Smith would dare give him bad news on UC , though he attends lots of departmental meetings. Doubtless he listens to all those who agree with him, those who are walking press releases on the progress of the UC programme. He’d be a good marketing/PR man on UC. But surely not its leader. Not the one making the most important decisions. For that you would need somebody who’s free from the politics, who is independently minded, and who welcomes informed criticism.

Is there any point in a demo of front-end systems?

Seeing a front-end system means little or nothing. The question is will it work in practice when it is scaled up, when exceptions come to light, and when large numbers of people try to contact the helpdesks because they cannot get to grips with the technology and the interfaces,  or have particular difficulties with their claim.

What will a media campaign achieve?

If the NPfIT experiences are anything to go by, journalists who criticise the UC project will be made to feel stupid or uninformed.

In a totalitarian regime the media could be forced to publish what the government wants people to believe. Will the DWP’s PR campaign be designed to achieve the same end without the slightest attempt at coercion?

Duncan Smith’s comments to MPs

Below is some of what Iain Duncan Smith told Work and Pensions Committee MPs this week. He had been asked by a Committee MP to have a dialogue with the media to ensure that people believe that Universal Credit is a good thing.

Duncan Smith:

“On Thursday we are carrying out a major exercise in informing the median about what we are doing, looking at the system front-end, about budgets and all the elements the committee has been inquiring into.

“We will take them through that, show them that. We are going to open up much more. It is such an important system that I want people to learn what it is all about.  There is a lot of ignorance in the media and suppositions made; things that are important to tackle head on. Everyone says you mustn’t have a big bang; you are not going to be ready in time. The time we deliver this is 2017 when it is complete.  That is over four years…”

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, change, change management, culture, DWP, e-health, excessive secrecy, FOI, Government IT, IT projects, managing change, managing outsourced services, NHS, npfit, Politics, procurement, project management, public sector, public services, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Government Digital Service sets an example on cloud

Posted on 18/09/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Government Digital Service is putting its money where its mouth is. A leading public sector advocate of the cloud, GDS says that the first cloud hosting provider it is working with is Skyscape.

Mark O’Neill, Head of Service Delivery and Innovation at GDS, which is a team of innovators based at the Cabinet Office, writes that GDS is building GOV.UK, currently in beta at http://www.gov.uk.

“In the past, we might have looked at dedicated servers or possibly even our own rack in a datacentre somewhere. We would then have had to decide if we wanted to own the servers or if we should rent them some time to break out amortisation tables and spreadsheets.

“We would have to make sure that we were not locked in if we needed to move servers, so it would be necessary to negotiate break clauses in contracts; we would need to arrange access to server rooms for security accreditation; we would need to… well, the list goes on and on.

“The cloud has transformed all of this. Through the G-Cloud framework we are able to simply and rapidly buy highly reliable, highly cost-effective hosting services.

“Colleagues in GDS put together a statement of our requirements based on the experience we had gained during the alpha and the ongoing beta releases of GOV.UK and experience from the delivery of other major online services, both public and private sector.

“We then tested that statement of requirements against the list of suppliers on the G-Cloud framework. This allowed us to sift the number of potential providers down to four who met the statement of requirements.

“We then invited each of the suppliers in and used a consistent set of questions to explore their ability to meet our needs, their approach to operational service delivery and how they could provide flexible, scalable services through the cloud.

“To meet the needs of GOV.UK, we are planning to work with a number of different Infrastructure as a Service providers. We are happy to announce that the first cloud hosting provider we are working with is Skyscape.

“We have used G-Cloud previously for a number of small projects covering services like hosting and operations. We were very happy to discover that letting a major service contract for our flagship platform, GOV.UK, was equally straightforward and quick.

“Whilst the GOV.UK contract is the largest we have let so far, it is one of an increasing number we are letting through G-Cloud, which is now our standard way of procuring infrastructure services… If you have not used G-Cloud before then take a look, you will be pleasantly surprised. In the words of a song of my youth, ‘It was easy. It was cheap. Go and do it!'”

Introducing a new supplier – Skyscape

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Cloud, cost reduction, efficiency savings, Government IT, IT projects, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, public sector, public services, reducing cost strategically

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HMRC – you can change the people not the culture.

Posted on 17/09/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Years ago HMRC embraced openness by publishing minutes of its executive committee meetings.

Members of the monthly meetings of the HMRC “ExCom” [executive committee] include Lin Homer, the Chief Executive and Permanent Secretary, and CIO Phil Pavitt.  ExCom is the decision-making executive of HMRC.

The problem is that Excom minutes have been almost creatively uninformative. This is despite the cost to taxpayers of an ExCom meetings secretariat which provides support to the committee, co-ordinates papers and attends to take minutes.

Over the years the Excom members have changed of course, but the minutes from the start have parodied open government.

In its reporting what is said at Excom meetings, HMRC, it would appear, has rules based on a variation of BBC’s “Just a Minute”.  The title of the discussion can be mentioned as often as participants like but it’s against the rules to mention what HMRC does or decides.

In June Excom members discussed progress on RTI, HMRC’s highest-profile project, Real-Time Information, which is an essential part of Universal Credit.  This was recorded in the minutes under the heading RTI Overview … “The Committee went on to consider a range of elements…”  The minutes made no mention of any element.

This would be the ideal entry in HMRC Excom minutes:

6.2 Staff Survey

Excom members discussed the Staff Survey. The chairman and some members made remarks on the results. The discussion was wide-ranging and informative.  It included matters relating to risk and opportunities.  The results of the Staff Survey having been summarised, conclusions were reached, particularly on matters relating to HMRC, and proposals made for recommendations. A number of recommendations were agreed, some of which would be actioned shortly. Without any further discussion, and by a tacit mutual consent, members moved to the next item on the agenda.

Actual extracts from latest Excom minutes

Below are the first four items, taken from the latest Excomm minutes (the latest being 26 June 2012). I haven’t made these up.

If anyone reading these minutes is any the wiser about HMRC’s operations, and what recommendations have been agreed, please contact the department and let them know that a convention has been breached.

 Executive Committee summary minutes of meeting held on 26 June 2012

 Members:

Simon Bowles (Chair), Lin Homer, Dave Hartnett, Mike Falvey, Mike Eland, Stephen Banyard, Jim Harra, Phil Pavitt, Paul Gerrard (deputising for Craig Pemberton), Anthony Inglese.

 Attending:

Carol Bristow, Richard James, Stephen Hardwick, Will Cavendish (Cabinet Office Implementation Unit), Vicky Ranson (for item 2), Will Meehan (for item 3), Marie-Claire Uhart (for item 5), Janet Alexander (for item 6), John Atkinson (Secretariat).

Apologies: Craig Pemberton

1. Welcome

1.1 Simon Bowles opened the meeting and confirmed that Mike Falvey would be responsible for the meeting review and Stephen Hardwick would be responsible for drafting the key messages. He welcomed Paul Gerrard, who was deputising for Craig Pemberton. He also welcomed Will Cavendish, who was observing the meeting in the hub.

1.2 The minutes of the May 2012 meeting were agreed.

2. Risks to revenue raised

2.1 The Committee received a presentation on work aimed at increasing understanding of our 2011-12 performance and identifying the risks to the sustainability of this level of performance for the remainder of the SR period. They agreed to commission further work and to review the outcomes of this at their September 2012 meeting.

3. Performance hub

3.1 Following an overview of performance by the CFO, the relevant Directors General led a discussion around the hub visualisations on the following key aspects of current  performance – revenue raised, debt, tax credit error and fraud, contact centre performance, attendance management and employee engagement.

3.2 The Committee also discussed current causes for concern and risks related to departmental performance.

4. Causes for Celebration

4.1 The Committee reviewed the Causes for Celebration contained in the performance report.

My comment:

It’s a pity the Excom minutes are so defensive, even obfuscatory;  and it’s almost certainly because of HMRC’s culture and not the wish of members. Phil Pavitt is by any standard open and straightforward. He would probably change HMRC’s culture if he could. But could anybody?

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing (Ralph Emerson). Clearly HMRC is in the business of astonishing nobody.

Self-congratulatory

There is something revealing in the minutes, however. Now and again detail infiltrates them – and it is self-congratulatory.

“The Committee reviewed the Causes for Celebration contained in the performance report.”

And on Real-Time Information …

“Stephen Banyard [An HMRC  Director General] opened the session by giving a summary of progress to date in this area and the positive feedback received from customers, rep bodies and trade press.”

So while HMRC is facing significant levels of fraud and error – the National Audit Office has qualified HMRC’s accounts for the last  12 years – the Excom board appears to be in search of every opportunity to slap itself on the back.

The Excom minutes at least have a dream-like quality to them.  Perhaps, like Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the Excom Board members will overcome all the challenges and monsters and eventually reach the Celestial City. They may then wake up. Maybe.

Excom (and a link to its minutes).

Excom’s June 2012 minutes

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Government IT, HMRC, openness and transparency, operational issues, public sector, Universal Credit

Universal Credit – a chance to do things differently.

Posted on 13/09/2012 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Comment

In his comment on the article “Is Univeral Credit really on track – the DWP hides the facts”  Nik Silver asks in essence: why shouldn’t progress reports by IBM and McKinsey on Universal Credit be kept between the parties and not made public?

He says that criticism is usually helpful if the two parties can speak frankly without external interference.

It’s a reasonable point – if you are judging the public sector by the private sector’s standards. A private company would not make public consultancy reports it has commissioned on the progress or otherwise of a particularly costly project. Why should it?

Private v public sector approaches on big projects

But if the project goes wrong the private sector board will be accountable for the loss of money, or opportunity, or both. A private company’s board cares about a failed project because it cares about the bottom line.  If there is cogent criticism in a consultancy report, it will ignore that criticism at its peril.

Those standards don’t always apply in the public sector. There is no bottom line to worry about, no individual responsibility. What matters is reputation. We have seen too many public sector failed projects where the desire to maintain face, politically and internally, distorts the truth on projects.

Several ministers were proclaiming the £11bn NHS IT plan, the NPfIT, to be a success while it was going disastrously wrong. On the Rural Payment Agency’s IT-based Single Payment Scheme Parliament discovered that bad news was covered up. Ministers Lord Bach and Lord Whitty said they were misled by their officials.

When the truth financially came out it was too late to turn around the project cheaply and easily. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee said that if such a failure had happened at a major plc, the board would have faced dismissal.

Cover up when a project goes wrong also happens in the private sector. But case studies indicate that when a private sector board finds out it has been lied to, it does its utmost to put things right. The bottom line is the motivation.

In the public sector it sometimes happens that nothing is done to put serious problems right because there is no acceptance there are any serious problems. Nobody is allowed to accept internally that things are going wrong. A state of unreality exists. Some know the project is doomed.  Some at the top think it’s on track. The truth in the consultancy reports remains hidden, even internally. [The DWP couldn’t find the IBM and McKinsey reports when we first asked for them.]

Like Nik Silver, we would like Universal Credit to succeed. We are not sure it will, because the truth is not coming out. Unless serious problems are admitted they cannot be tackled.

Public sector

In the public sector a disaster does not usually become apparent until things are so bad the seriousness of the problems cannot be denied. It may be that Universal Credit will be a success if it is delayed or changed substantially in scope. That won’t be possible without reports such as IBM’s and McKinsey’s being published.  In the meantime Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, will  continue to be given papers showing that all is well.  If the IBM and McKinsey reports are published now, and they contain some serious high-level criticisms, perhaps impinging on policy and excessive complexity, the ills may be cured or at least tackled. If these and other progress reports are made public now the corrigible criticisms could create a political climate to address those ills.

At present Universal Credit looks like so many IT-based change programmes of the past.  One side says the project is becoming a disaster and the other side says all is well.  The truth I am sure is that some things look good and some things bad. The bad probably won’t be addressed unless Parliament, together with all those who have a professional interest in the project – and the public – know about it.

The way of the past is to keep everything hushed up until it’s too late. Now there’s a chance to do things differently.

Is Universal Credit really on track? – The DWP hides the facts.

Nik Silver’s website

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, change management, Government IT, IBM, IT projects, npfit, openness and transparency, operational issues, private sector lessons for the public sector, project management, public sector, public services, Universal Credit

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Fujitsu banned from Whitehall contracts?

Posted on 11/09/2012 | 6 comments

By Tony Collins

The FT reports today that Fujitsu has been deemed for the time being too high risk to take on new public sector deals, along with another unnamed IT services contractor.

The newspaper quotes “people close to the situation”.

It’s likely the article is correct in naming Fujitsu as a supplier that is deemed by the Cabinet Office to be high risk. It is unclear, though, whether being categorised as “high risk” by the Cabinet Office amounts to a ban for the time being on future government contracts.

The FT says that Fujitsu has “in essence” been blacklisted.  “The Cabinet Office refused to confirm the identities of either of the companies that have in effect been blacklisted,” says the FT.

It is also unclear whether the Cabinet Office could exclude a supplier from shortlists even if it wanted to. The Cabinet Office awards few large IT contracts of its own; contracts are awarded by departments, and the Cabinet Office has no unambiguous power to exclude particular suppliers from shortlists drawn up by autonomous departments that take their own decisions on which companies to award contracts to.

Mega-contracts to be awarded by central departments must, however, must go to the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority for approval.  The Authority could in theory require that Fujitsu be excluded from a shortlist before it gives approval.  This blacklisting would require Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, and the minister signing the mega-contract to be in agreement.

If a departmental minister refused to exclude  a supplier from a bid or shortlist because of its past performance what could the Cabinet Office do, especially if the minister argued that the supplier’s continued work , in the form of a renewed contract, was not just desirable but essential?

The FT says that the latest initiative to ban companies with troubled histories in government from new contracts is being spearheaded by Bill Crothers, formerly of Accenture.

He was appointed as chief procurement officer two months ago to inject private sector rigour into Whitehall’s contracting system. He is quoted in the FT as saying that his new approach would allow past performance to be taken into account for the first time when a company is bidding for a fresh tender.

Comment

The idea of a blacklist is a good one; indeed it would be the most important innovation in government IT since the general election. For decades MPs and others have said that under-performing suppliers should not be awarded new contracts. Now at last that may be happening.

After Fujitsu sued the Department for Health for about £700m over the NPfIT a settlement has been elusive, despite the intervention of the Cabinet Office. It is likely that Fujitsu UK’s hands will have been controlled by its parent in Japan.

Fujitsu’s performance on the “Libra” contract for IT in magistrates’ courts was strongly criticised by MPs and the National Audit Office which exposed repeated threats by the supplier to withdraw from the contract unless its terms were met.

Fujitsu could circumvent any blacklisting by becoming a subcontractor on a mega-contract, as it is at HMRC on the “ASPIRE” contract and at the DWP where its hardware runs benefit systems. Or a department could ignore the Cabinet Office and award non mega-contracts to Fujitsu.

We hope the Cabinet Office finds a way to make its blacklist – if that is what it is – stick. A  private sector company would not award a new contract to a supplier that had bitten in the past. Why would the public sector?

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Posted in EU procurement, Fujitsu, Government IT, IT-related failures, legal disputes, Major Projects Authority, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, project management, public sector, supplier relationships

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Well done Eric Pickles – more open government to engulf councils

Posted on 29/08/2012 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Few people have noticed but changes to the law next month could force councils to be much more open about big spending decisions including those that involve contracting out IT and other services.

It is a pity though that similar changes will not apply to the NHS.

The Local Government Association says that councils are already more open than Whitehall which is true.

Even so some councils are innately secretive about IT-related spending decisions, and discussions about projects that go wrong. Somerset County Council was notoriously secretive about its Southwest One joint venture with IBM in 2007. The deal has not made the expected savings and has consistently made losses. IBM claims the deal is a success.

Haringey Council’s “Tech refresh” project which went way over budget is another example. Evasive answers to opposition questions and meetings in secret were the norm.

Liverpool City Council was extraordinarily defensive and secretive about progress or otherwise on its Liverpool Direct Ltd joint venture with BT. The deal included giving BT control of IT.

Better public scrutiny

Now Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles has announced that changes to the law will mean that all decisions including those affecting budgets and local services will have to be taken in an open and public forum.

Ministers have put new regulations before Parliament that would come into force next month to extend the rights of people to attend all meetings of a council’s executive, its committees and subcommittees.

Pickles says the changes will result in greater public scrutiny. “The existing media definition will be broadened to cover organisations that provide internet news thereby opening up councils to local online news outlets. Individual councillors will also have stronger rights to scrutinise the actions of their council.

“Any executive decision that would result in the council incurring new spending or savings significantly affecting its budget or where it would affect the communities of two or more council wards will have to be taken in a more transparent way as a result.”

Councils will no longer be able to cite political advice as justification for closing a meeting to the public and press. Any intentional obstruction or refusal to supply certain documents could result in a fine for the individual concerned.

The changes clarify the limited circumstances where meetings can be closed, for example, where it is likely that a public meeting would result in the disclosure of confidential information. Where a meeting is due to be closed to the public, the council must now justify why that meeting is to be closed and give 28 days notice of such decision.

Chris Taggart, of OpenlyLocal.com, which has long championed the need to open council business up to public scrutiny, said

“In a world where hi-definition video cameras are under £100 and hyperlocal bloggers are doing some of the best council reporting in the country, it is crazy that councils are prohibiting members of the public from videoing, tweeting and live-blogging their meetings.”

These are the changes to be made by the  The Local Authorities (Executive Arrangements) (Meetings and Access to Information) (England) Regulations 2012 (the 2012 Regulations) which will come into force on 10 September 2012.

– Local authorities will have to provide reasonable facilities for members of the public to report council proceedings (regulation 4). This will make it easier for new ‘social media’ reporting of council executive meetings, opening proceedings to blogging, tweeting and hyper-local news/forum reporting.

– In the past council executives could hold meetings in private without giving public notice. From 10 September 2010 councils must give 28 days notice where a meeting is to be held in private, during which time people may make representations on why the meeting should be held in public. When the council wants to over-ride the notice period, it must publish a notice as soon as reasonably practicable explaining why the meeting is urgent and cannot be deferred (regulation 5).

– A document explaining the key decision to be made, the matter in respect of which a decision would be made, the documents to be considered before the decision is made, and the procedures for requesting details of those documents, has to be published (regulations 9).

– The new regulations create a presumption that all meetings of the executive, its committees and subcommittees are to be held in public (regulation 3) unless a narrowly-defined legal exception applies.

– Where the council has a document that contains materials relating to a business to be discussed at a public meeting, members of the local authority have additional rights to inspect such a document at least five days before the meeting (regulation 16). Previously no timescale existed.

– Where the council decides not to release the whole or part of a document to a member of an overview and scrutiny committee as requested by a councillor, it must provide a written statement to explain the reasons for not releasing such document (regulation 17).

– Documents relating to a key decision including background papers must be on the relevant local authority’s website (regulations 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 14, 15, and 21).

Comment

Well done to Eric Pickles and the coalition. These are important and welcome changes. If council decision-makers know their discussions will be open to scrutiny they may give proper consideration to risks as well as the potential benefits of big IT-related investments. With inadequate scrutiny the potential benefits often drive decisions, which was the case with the flawed setting up of Southwest One. The press office at Liverpool City Council was so used to controlling information that its spokesman was outraged at questions we asked about its outsourcing venture with BT.

But what about the NHS?

It’s a pity the NHS is not subject to the new legal changes. Few trusts are open about their big IT-related investments; and when things go wrong, as has happened with some Cerner implementations, NHS trusts tend to lock all the doors, talk in whispers and instruct their press offices to issue statements that claim “teething troubles” have been largely addressed. The trust and everyone reading the statement know it is disingenuous but the facts to prove it are kept under wraps.

Organisations such as Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust are taking decisions about major IT upgrades that could affect the safety, health and lives of patients without proper scrutiny. Pickles may want to mention his legal innovations to Andrew Lansley.

Eric Pickles announcement on opening up council discussions and decisions 

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Posted in BT Health, Campaign4Change, Cerner, decision-making, e-health, excessive secrecy, health, health records, improving communications, IT-related failures, local government, managing outsourced services, NHS, npfit, openness and transparency, operational issues, outsourcing, Politics, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships, shared services

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Ex Government CIO Joe Harley rejoins private sector

Posted on 13/08/2012 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Former Government CIO Joe Harley has taken a position as non-executive adviser to Amor Group, an IT and business technology provider to the transport, energy and public sectors.

Amor says is taking the place of large systems integrators whose “monopolies are ending”.

It is Harley’s first official role since retiring from the civil service earlier this year.

Amor Group says it has “succeeded in recruiting the man credited with reforming the UK Government’s information communication and technology strategy to act as a strategic adviser”.

Harley was UK Government CIO between 2011 and 2012 and CIO at the Department of Work and Pensions from 2004 to 2012.

Amor has a turnover of about £45m and nearly 600 staff at offices in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Manchester, Coventry, London, Dubai and Houston.

Harley said,

“Amor Group is a new breed of companies that is helping organisations to improve their business performance and to manage their ICT budgets to deliver maximum value in the current economic climate and I am delighted to be helping a company which has grown year on year in a tough market, and that has such great ambitions for growth.

“Businesses are looking to more agile, flexible firms who can act quickly and save costs whilst not lowering service levels. I am looking forward to helping Amor continue that trend.”

John Innes, CEO at Amor, said,  “The days of the large systems integrators and monopolies are ending and we are taking their place. We signed a £18.5m contract last year with the Scottish Government to run its eProcurement service and we’ve seen real traction in International markets with our passenger tracking technology being installed at Dubai Airport and a number of wins for our Energy team in the US.

“What sets us apart is our culture as a company. We understand that technology only has a value when it delivers benefits to an organisation and we focus on delivering those benefits rather than selling heavyweight solutions.”

Harley’s background:

1993 – 1996: BP Alaska, IT director
1996 – 1998: BP Exploration and Downstream Europe, CIO
1998 – 2000: BP, global IT vice president
2000 – 2004: ICI Paints, CIO
2004 – 2012 Director General of Corporate IT and CIO, Department for Work and Pensions. Government CIO from 2011-2012.
Harley led the Universal Credit IT scheme which is due to go live from next October.

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Posted in CIO, DWP, public sector, public services, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Maude gives up on plan to publish regular reports on major projects

Posted on 09/08/2012 | 6 comments

By Tony Collins

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has given up on publishing regular “Gateway” reports on the progress or otherwise of big IT and construction projects.

Publication of the independent reviews has proved a step too far towards open government.  Were Maude to insist on publishing Major Projects Authority “Gateway” review reports, it would alienate too many influential senior civil servants whose support Maude needs to implement the Civil Service Reform Plan of June 2012.

Gateway reviews are independent reports on medium and high-risk projects at important stages of their lifecycle.  If current and topical the reviews are always kept secret. One copy is given to the project’s senior responsible owner and the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority keeps another. Other copies have limited distribution.

In opposition Maude said he would publish the reviews; and when in power Maude took the necessary steps: the Cabinet Office’s “Structural Reform Plan Monthly Implementation Updates” included an undertaking to publish Gateway reviews by December 2011 .

When some officials, particularly those who had worked at the Office of Government Commerce, objected strongly to publishing the reports (for reasons set out below), the undertaking  to publish them vanished from further Structural Reform Plan Monthly Implementation Updates.  When asked why, a spokesman for the Cabinet Office said the plan to publish Gateway reviews had only ever been a “draft” proposal.

The anti-publication officials have thwarted even Sir Bob Kerslake, head of the Home Civil Service, who replaced Sir Gus O’Donnell.  When in May 2012 Conservative MP Richard Bacon asked Kerslake about publishing Gateway reviews, 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.”

Inexplicably there was a change of plan. The Civil Service Reform Plan in fact said nothing about Gateway reports. It made no mention of RAG ratings. What the Plan offered on openness over major projects was an undertaking that “Government will publish an annual report on major projects by July 2012, which will cover the first full year’s operation of the Major Projects Authority.”  (This is a far cry from publishing regular independent Gateway assessments on major projects such as the IT for Universal Credit.)

Even that promise has yet to materialise: no annual report has been published. The Cabinet Office originally promised Parliament an annual report on the Major Projects Authority by December 2011. The Cabinet Office says that the annual MPA report has been delayed because the “team is now clear that it makes sense to include a full financial year’s worth of data and analysis in its first report”.

When eventually published the annual report will, says the Cabinet Office,  “make for a far more informative and comprehensive piece, and will include analysis of data up to 31 March 2012. This will be the first time the UK government has reported on its major projects in such a coherent and transparent way.”

Even so it’s now clear that the Cabinet Office is discarding its plans to publish regular Gateway review reports. Maude wants cooperation with officials, not confrontation.  He made this clear in the reform plan in which he said:

“Some may caricature this action plan as an attack on the Civil Service. It isn’t. It would be just as wrong to caricature the attitude of the Civil Service as one of unyielding resistance to change. Many of the most substantive ideas in this paper have come out of the work led by Permanent Secretaries themselves.”

But Maude is also frustrated at the quiet recalcitrance of some officials.  To a Lords committee that was inquiring into the accountability of civil servants, he said

“The thing for me that is absolutely fundamental in civil servants is that they should feel wholly uninhibited in challenging, advising and pushing back and then when a decision is made they should be wholly clear about implementing it.

“For me the sin against the holy ghost is to not push back and then not do it – that is what really enrages ministers, certainly in talking to ministers in the last government and in the current government. It is by no mean universal, but it is far more widespread than is desirable.”

It’s likely that Maude will keep Gateway reports secret so long as he has the cooperation of officials on civil service reforms.

Why officials oppose publication

The reasons for opposing publication were set out in the OGC’s evidence to an Information Tribunal on the Information Commissioner’s ruling in 2006 that the OGC publish two Gateway reports on the ID Cards scheme.

Below are some of the OGC’s arguments (all of which the Tribunal rejected).  The OGC went to the High Court to stop two early ID Cards Gateway reports being published, at which time OGC lawyers cited the 1689 Bill of Rights. The ID Cards gateway reports were eventually published (and the world didn’t end).

The OGC had argued that publishing Gateway reports would mean that:

–  Interviewees in Gateway reviews gave their time voluntarily and may refuse to cooperate.  (The Information Commissioner did not accept that officials would cease to perform their duties on the grounds the information may be disclosed.)

– Interviewees would be guarded in what they said;  reviewers would be less inclined to cooperate; and disclosure would result in anodyne reports. These three arguments were given in evidence by Sir Peter Gershon, the first Chief Executive of the OGC.

– Civil servants would be reluctant to take on the role of senior responsible owner of a project.

– Critics of a project would have ammunition which could discourage other departments and agencies from participating in the scheme.

– Cabinet collective responsibility could be undermined if Ministers were interviewed for a review.

– Criticisms in the reviews could be “in the newspapers within a very short time”, and the media could misrepresent the review’s findings. (The Tribunal discovered that those involved in the reviews were generally more concerned with their programme than possible adverse publicity.)

– Reports would take longer to write.

– The public would not understand the complexities in the reports.

Why Gateway reports should be published

The Tribunal found that OGC fears about publishing were speculative and that disclosure would contribute to a public debate about the merits of ID Cards, and provide some insight into the decision-making which underlay the scheme. Disclosure would ensure that a complex and sensitive scheme was “properly scrutinised and implemented”, said the Tribunal.

Was OGC evidence to Tribunal fixed?

The Tribunal was also suspicious that the OGC had submitted several witness statements that used identical wording. The Tribunal said the witnesses should have expressed views in their own words.

It found that disclosure could make Gateway reviewers more candid because they would know that their recommendations and findings would be subject to public scrutiny; and criticisms in the reports, if made public, could strengthen the assurance process.

Importantly, the Tribunal said the disclosure would help people judge whether the Gateway process itself works.

Comment

Hundreds of Gateway reports are carried out by former civil servants who can earn more than £1,000 a day for doing a review (although note Peter Smith’s comment below). As the reports are to remain secret how will the reviewers be held properly accountable for their assessments? No wonder officials don’t want the reports published.

Any idea how many projects we have and what they’ll cost? – Cabinet Office.

Whitehall cost cutting saves £5.5bn

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Posted in excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, Gateway reviews, governance, Government IT, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, openness and transparency, project management, public sector, Universal Credit

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Some lessons from a major outage

Posted on 31/07/2012 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

One of the main reasons for remote hosting is that you don’t have to worry about security and up-time is guaranteed. Support is 24x7x365. State-of-the-art data centres offer predictable, affordable, monthly charges.

In the UK more hospitals are opting for remote hosting of business-critical systems. Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust and Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust are among those taking remote hosting from Cerner, their main systems supplier.

More trusts are expected to do the same, for good reasons: remote hosting from Cerner will give Royal Berkshire a single point of contact to deal with on technical problems without the risks and delay of ascertaining whether the cause is hardware, third party software or application related.

But what when the network goes down – across the country and possibly internationally?

With remote hosting of business-critical systems becoming more widespread it’s worth looking at some of the implications of a major outage.

A failure at CSC’s Maidstone data centre in 2006 was compounded by problems with its recovery data centre in Royal Tunbridge Wells. Knock-on effects extended to information services in the North and West Midlands. The outage affected 80 trusts that were moving to CSC’s implementation of Lorenzo under the NPfIT.

An investigation later found that CSC had been over-optimistic when it informed NHS Connecting for Health that the situation was under control. Chris Johnson, a professor of computing science at Glasgow University, has written an excellent case study on what happened and how the failure knocked out primary and secondary levels of protection. What occured was a sequence of events nobody had predicted.

Cerner outage

Last week Cerner had a major outage across the US. Its international customers might also have been affected.

InformationWeek Healthcare reported that Cerner’s remote hosting service went down for about six hours on Monday, 23 July. It hit “hospital and physician practice clients all over the country”. Information Week said the unusual outage “reportedly took down the vendor’s entire network” and raised “new questions about the reliability of cloud-based hosting services”.

A Cerner spokesperson Kelli Christman told Information Week,

“Cerner’s remote-hosted clients experienced unscheduled downtime this week. Our clients all have downtime procedures in place to ensure patient safety. The issue has been resolved and clients are back up and running. A human error caused the outage. As a result, we are reviewing our training protocol and documented work instructions for any improvements that can be made.”

Christman did not respond to a question about how many Cerner clients were affected. HIStalk, a popular health IT blog, reported that hospital staff resorted to paper but it is unclear whether they would have had access to the most recent information on patients.

One Tweet by @UhVeeNesh said “Thank you Cerner for being down all day. Just how I like to start my week…with the computer system crashing for all of NorCal.”

Another by @wsnewcomb said “We have not charted any pts [patients] today. Not acceptable from a health care leader.”

Cerner Corp tweeted “Our apologies for the inconvenience today. The downtime should be resolved at this point.”

One HIStalk reader praised Cerner communications. Another didn’t:

“Communication was an issue during the downtime as Cerner’s support sites was down as well. Cerner unable to give an ETA on when systems would be back up. Some sites were given word of possible times, but other sites were left in the dark with no direction. Some sites only knew they were back up when staff started logging back into systems.

“Issue appears to have something to do with DNS entries being deleted across RHO network and possible Active Directory corruption. Outage was across all North America clients as well as some international clients.”

Colleen Becket, chairman and co-CEO of Vurbia Technologies, a cloud computing consultancy, told InformationWeek Healthcare that NCH Healthcare System, which includes two Tampa hospitals, had no access to its Cerner system for six hours. The outage affected the facilities and NCH’s ambulatory-care sites.

Lessons?

A HIStalk reader said Cerner has two electronic back-up options for remote hosted clients. Read-only access would have required the user to be able to log into Cerner’s systems, which wouldn’t have been possible with the DNS servers out of action last week.

Another downtime service downloads patient information to local computers, perhaps at least one on each floor, at regularly scheduled intervals, updated say every five minutes. “That way, even if all connection with [Cerner’s data centre] is lost, staff have information (including meds, labs and more) locally on each floor which is accurate up to the time of the last update”.

Finally, says the HIStalk commentator, “since this outage was due to a DNS problem, anyone logged into the system at the time it went down was able to stay logged in. This allowed many floors to continue to access the production system even while most of the terminals couldn’t connect.”

But could the NHS afford a remote hosted service, and a host of on-site back-up systems?

Common factors in health IT implementation failures

In its discussion on the Cerner outage, HIStalk put its finger on the common causes of hospital IT implementation failures. It says the main problems are usually:

– a lack of customer technical and implementation resources;
– poorly developed, self-deceiving project budgets that don’t support enough headcount, training, and hardware to get the job done right;
– letting IT run the project without getting users properly involved
– unreasonable and inflexible timelines as everybody wants to see something light quickly up after spending millions; and
– expecting that just implementing new software means clearing away all the bad decisions (and indecisions) of the past and forcing a fresh corporate agenda on users and physicians, with the suppplier being the convenient whipping boy for any complaints about ambitious and sometimes oppressive changes that the culture just can’t support.

Cerner hosting outage raises concerns

HIStalk on Cerner outage

Case study on CSC data centre crash in 2006

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Posted in Cerner, Disaster recovery, e-health, health, health records, IT-related failures, NHS, npfit, public sector, public services, Remote Hosting, software quality, supplier relationships

Trust buys extras-laden system for 20% of BT’s price

Posted on 30/07/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

An NHS Trust has paid £1.8m for the “Rio” patient record system and a host of extras – which raises fresh questions about why the Department of Health paid BT £9m for each Rio deployment under the NPfIT.

BT’s deal with the Department of Health under the NPfIT costs taxpayers £224.3m for 25 deployments of Rio – about £9m for each one. The deal included support for five years, until October 2015.

But a deal struck directly between Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust and Rio’s supplier CSE-Healthcare Systems includes support for a year longer – six years in total. At £1.806m the cost of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough’s deal is about 20% BT’s price.

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough has secured more extras. CSE-Healthcare Systems will supply Cambridgeshire and Peterborough with:

  – Medical software development services

– Software consultancy services

 – Computer support services

– System implementation planning services

– Software implementation services

– Project management consultancy services

– Business and management consultancy services

– Medical software package

– Database and operating software package

– Information systems and servers

– Computer and related services

– Software support services

It’s not clear though whether the deal includes disaster recovery – which the Department of Health argues is one reason for the price paid to BT for Rio.

Comment:

Disaster recovery does not explain how or why the Department of Health agreed to pay BT five times more for Rio than paid by Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.

What is not in doubt is that if BT, like Accenture and Fujitsu before it, had left the NPfIT, the programme would have been indelibly stamped a disaster – at a time when the Department of Health and ministers were proclaiming it an unacknowledged success (in the run up to a general election).

Was BT paid a hugely costly premium to stay in the NPfIT?  If so, should tax money have been used to secure the affections of a supplier whose profits were otherwise being squeezed on the contract?

Last year the Department of Health gave the Public Accounts Committee an explanation of its Rio payments to BT, some of which is below. The explanation is long, vague and defensive enough to sound like the excuses of a young boy who, when questioned by his teacher, gives various accounts of why he took a classmate’s sweets.

What the DH told MPs

This is what the DH told the Public Accounts Committee last year, after one of its MPs Richard Bacon queried the payments to BT for Rio (and Cerner).

“Assessing the value for money of the RiO prices was part of the CCN3 [change control note 3] negotiation process … The CCN3 negotiation process was lengthy and involved many iterations challenging the component parts of the BT cost model. This included ensuring that rates offered were competitive and that the effort ascribed to various activities was justifiable.

Taken together, competitive rates and reasonable effort comprise value for money. BT was required to provide numerous iterations of financial models. These models were reviewed in detail by the Authority, resulting in multi-million pound savings.

The Authority negotiated reduced day rates on all of the BT labour within the contract. In addition, BT’s profit margin on the contract was also significantly reduced. Other commitments were also obtained by the Authority, in particular around sub-contractor pricing; for example, Cerner has confirmed that the pricing provided to the Authority (via BT) is the best it provides to any of its customers.

The Authority then requested further financial assurances and agreed with BT that a requirement of signing CCN3 would be that a verification exercise would be conducted by third party, independent financial experts (KPMG)…

In October 2010 KPMG were requested by the Authority to verify the costs presented by BT, including those for RiO, in the CCN3 Financial Model.

The approach adopted by KPMG was as follows:

—  Their work focussed on the Cost Data sheet within the CCN3 Financial Model and was conducted on a sample basis, designed to provide a high coverage of costs with a reasonable sample size.

—  The cost elements for potential duplicate entries were reviewed.

—  The cost rates associated with BT labour were validated to cost rate cards and payroll records.

—  The hours presented in the Model associated with BT labour were reviewed for reasonableness.

—  Sub-contractor and other supplier costs were validated to the agreements entered into by BT with their suppliers.

—  Cost elements and supporting documentation requested from BT were sampled to substantiate the costs provided…

On 3 November 2010 KPMG concluded that “BT has provided underpinning evidence to support the agreed delivery costs” and that “no proposed adjustments are required for Agreed Delivery Costs”.

None of the trusts consulted had purchased the same RiO product offering and all trusts varied significantly from the offering provided to NPFIT trusts, making a direct price comparison difficult. However, trusts within the programme typically had significant advantages to those outside the programme, namely:

—  The ability to influence the functionality of the product.

—  Centrally provided and hosted hardware.

—  Centrally-provided disaster recovery with 100% capacity and availability.

—  No additional development costs for subsequent releases.

—  Spine connectivity.

BT estimate that the monthly charge for hardware, disaster recovery, service management and Spine connectivity to be in the region of £42,500 per month or just over £2 million of value over a 48 month contract term.

Furthermore the NPFIT investment in the development of the RiO has significantly enhanced the functionality of the product to the benefit of all trusts. Examples of functionality in the latest deployed version (v5) and soon to be deployed (R1, 2011) of RiO include:

—  Standard assessment forms.

—  Care-plans and reports.

—  Spine connectivity, enabling integration with central demographics services, and functionality to support smart cards and role based access controls.

—  Waiting lists.

—  Results reporting.

—  Prevention, screening and surveillance.

—  SNOMED.

—  Inpatient prescribing.

—  Functionality to support multi-disciplinary care planning.

DH statement to MPs on Rio (and Cerner) prices paid to BT

MP seeks inquiry into £546m NHS deal with BT.

Breakdown of £546m NPfIT payment to BT

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Posted in BT Health, Government IT, health records, NHS, npfit, public sector, public services, supplier relationships

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