Capita said to owe thousands to pharmacies

Posted on 09/03/2017 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Capita owes some pharmacy owners thousands of pounds, according to Chemist+Druggist.

One pharmacist Salim Jetha of Lewis Grove Pharmacy in Lewisham told Chemist+Druggist he had emailed Capita in February but it “bounced back because the inbox was full”. He said that if emails are unanswered and there is no phone number to ring “what are you supposed to do?”

Under its Primary Care Support Services contract with NHS England, Capita is due, among other obligations, to reimburse some of the costs of pharmacy trainees. The trainees are termed “pre-registration” pharmacists because they have not yet passed a General Pharmaceutical Council assessment.

Pharmacy owners can apply for an annual grant from NHS England for up to £18,440 for every pre-registration trainee taken on.

Capita took on responsibility for delivering NHS England’s primary care support services in September 2015, including overseeing the pharmacy training grants.

In response to the article, Capita spokesperson said it is aware of “some isolated issues” and that all claims that meet “the required checks” have been backdated, as will any further claims.

The spokesperson said that one of the “key improvements” under Capita has been the introduction of a centralised process for dealing with primary care.

The old system was localised, meaning grant claims “came in from various sources on an ad hoc and irregular basis”.

Chemist+Druggist article

Jeremy Hunt is prepared to end Capita’s NHS contract if necessary

 

3 Comments

Posted in Campaign4Change, Capita, NHS, NHS England, outsourcing

A classic “waterfall” IT project disaster – yet officials went by the book

Posted on 09/03/2017 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Some of those who read “Crash – 10 easy ways to avoid a computer disaster” may remember a warning that buying an IT system on the basis that it works well in another country and can therefore be adapted to the UK’s needs, is flirting with disaster.

First published in 1999, Crash said,

“There are graveyards of computer projects that began life as a simple adaptation of a package used elsewhere in the world.”

One example at that time was the failure of the London Stock Exchange’s Taurus project.

Now a report published today by Audit Scotland on the “i6” project goes into forensic – but lucid – detail on what went wrong and the conflicting views of police and the supplier Accenture.

Says the report,

“The belief that most of the i6 system could be based on an existing IT system proved incorrect.”

It became clear well into project that

“a virtually fully bespoke system was required”.

The plan was for i6 to replace 130 paper-based processes and IT systems but on 1 July 2016, after many well-publicised difficulties and delays, the Scottish Police Authority and Accenture agreed to terminate the i6 contract.

Police in Scotland had chosen Accenture’s bid in 2013 largely because it had successfully implemented a system for Spain’s Guardia Civil police service.

To its credit Accenture refunded all the money the police in Scotland had paid for the i6 system, £11.06m, plus a further £13.56m – but Audit Scotland says the failure of the project …

“means that some of the benefits that should have arisen from implementing it, have been, at best, delayed. There was a need to modernise police ICT systems six years ago when the procurement of i6 began. That need has not been met. Police officers and staff continue to struggle with out-of-date, inefficient and poorly integrated systems.

“This also hinders how Police Scotland interacts and shares information and intelligence with the other parts of the justice system. There is an urgent need to determine what the next steps should be…”

The lessons are clear from the report:

  • Don’t buy an overseas system without realising that it’ll need to be built almost from scratch for the UK. The ideal is for the business processes to be greatly simplified and adapted to fit a tried and tested system, not the other way around. Audit Scotland says the police programme team and Accenture believed that the majority of the i6 system could be based on an existing IT system that Accenture had developed for Spain,  with the remainder being bespoke development work.  But there was an “over-reliance” on Accenture’s work for Guardia Civil”.
  • The “waterfall” systems development contributed to the fact that Police Scotland “only discovered the true extent of problems with the system when it was delivered for testing”.  Waterfall meant that Accenture produced the software in distinct phases, in a sequence resembling a waterfall. Once a phase was complete, the process moved to the next phase – and no turning back. “It meant that all of the design, coding and construction of i6 would be completed before Accenture released it to Police Scotland for testing. Police Scotland would pay for each phase when it was completed.” [Agile, on the other hand, is a “test and see” approach and is far more flexible. It can adapted according to what the end-user needs and wants, and changes in those needs and wants.]
  • Don’t trust the demonstration of a waterfall system. The demo may look great but rolling it out successfully across various regions may be a different story. Accenture had demonstrated i6 but much later, after a period of testing, the i6 programme team reported to the programme board in August 2015 that there were: critical errors in the technical coding, flaws that Accenture was unable to resolve as quickly as expected, serious concerns about the criminal justice module, which did not comply with the Integrated Scottish Criminal Justice Information System data standards, errors in the search and audit modules and “problems around the limited functionality in the administration module”.
  • External assurance reports may tell you that you have complied with good practice and they may give you detailed praise for your attention to detail but they probably haven’t looked at the big question: will the systems ever work? Audit Scotland said external assurance reports such as the Scottish Government’s “Gateway reviews” suggested improvements but “raised no major concerns”.  Throughout the course of the i6 programme, most of the external reviews suggested that delivery confidence was either amber or green.
  • If the plan is for a waterfall development, doing everything by the book before a contract is awarded will not guarantee success, or even make it more likely, if you haven’t asked the big question: Is this ever likely to work given the complexities we don’t yet understand? For officials in Scotland, everything went smoothly before the award of contract: there were even 18 months of pre-contract discussions. But within weeks of the contract’s start, Police Scotland and Accenture disagreed about whether the proposed system would deliver the requirements set out in the contract. Soon there was a “breakdown in relationships and a loss of trust between Police Scotland and Accenture that never fully recovered,” said Audit Scotland.
  • The supplier may be just as optimistic as you. “As the design and development of i6 progressed, it became apparent that Accenture would need to develop significantly more than had been originally anticipated. Despite delays and serious problems throughout the lifetime of the programme, Accenture provided regular assurance, in the face of strong challenge, about their confidence in delivering the i6 system. This assurance proved misplaced.”
  • When planning a waterfall system that has complexities and inter-dependencies that are not fully understood at the outset, expect ever-lengthening delays and projected costs to soar. At one point Police Scotland estimated that the level of effort Accenture would require to complete i6 was around eight times greater than the resources Accenture had estimated when signing the original contract. “The i6 programme team believed that the functionality of Accenture’s solution did not meet the requirements it had agreed in the contract. Accenture maintained that Police Scotland had not specified a detailed description of business requirements. This issue had not emerged during months of pre-award dialogue. Accenture also believed that it had set out clearly what its solution would do and maintained that Police Scotland, as part of procurement process, had accepted its qualified solution. A dispute followed about the interpretation of the contract requirements. Police Scotland argued that, after months of competitive dialogue, the requirements of the i6 system were well-defined, and that in line with the contract, these took precedence. Accenture argued its solution had precedence and that Police Scotland was trying to extend the scope of the programme. Accenture stated that, to meet Police Scotland’s interpretation of requirements, it would require more time and money.”
  • As soon as things start going badly awry, stop and have a re-think. Cancel all existing work if necessary rather than plough on simply because failure isn’t an option. Above all, take politics out of the equation. The Scottish Police Authority was anxious about i6 being seen to be a success after the failure of a previous police ICT project in 2012 – the Common Performance Management Platform. At the same time the i6 programme was “extremely important to Accenture at a global level. “This may have led to misplaced optimism about the prospects of success and unwillingness to consider terminating the programme,” says Audit Scotland.
  • When things start to go wrong, the truth is unlikely to emerge publicly. Even those accountable for the project may be kept in the dark. “Police Scotland were cautious of commercial sensitivities when providing assurances on i6 publicly. The Scottish Parliament’s Justice Sub-Committee on Policing held a number of evidence sessions with the Scottish Police Authority and Police Scotland to explore progress with the i6 programme. In March 2014, the Sub-Committee expressed frustration at the lack of information about the problems with the i6 programme that had been ongoing since August 2013. Police Scotland did not disclose the severity of the issues facing the programme, nor was it overly critical of Accenture. This may have reflected a desire to maintain relationships with Accenture to keep the programme on track or to maintain the commercial confidentiality of the contract.”

Accenture’s response

Accenture said,

“As the report acknowledges, the scope and the complexity of the solution for i6 increased significantly during the project.  This was driven by the client.  There were challenges and issues on both sides, but we worked closely with Police Scotland to review the programme and recommend revised plans to successfully deliver i6.

Despite our best efforts, it was not possible to agree the necessary changes and we mutually agreed to end the project.”

In May 2017 Audit Scotland is due to publish a report that summarises the lessons from a number of public sector ICT projects it has investigated.

Some of what i6 was intended to cover …

Comment

Tis a pity officials in Scotland hadn’t read Crash before they embarked on the i6 project – or if they had, taken more notice of the dangers of assuming a system that works overseas can be tweaked to work in the UK.

We commend Audit Scotland for its expert investigation and a fine report.

Clearly the failure of i6 is not entirely Accenture’s fault.  The project was commissioned on the basis of assumption and when things went wrong politics intervened to prevent a complete stop and a fundamental re-think.

Fatally, perhaps, there appears to have been no discussion about simplifying police administration to make the IT more straightforward. If police administration is so enshrined in law that it cannot be simplified, officials would have to accept before awarding the contract that they were buying an entirely new system.

The UK armed services simplified volumes of rules and practices before it introduced pay and personnel administration systems. It was hard, inglorious work. But simplifying ways of working first can make the difference between IT success and failure.

i6 – a review. Audit Scotland’s report. 

Waterfall approach damns £46m Scottish police system – Government Computing

Another public sector IT disaster – but useful if the lessons are learned.

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, Audit Scotland, Campaign4Change, criminal justice IT, Deloitte, Gateway reviews, IT-related failures, Police IT, procurement, project management, public sector, supplier relationships

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Crazy – millions of citizens offered two competing government identity systems

Posted on 07/03/2017 | 15 comments

 

From HMRC’s website on Gov.UK … Which should you choose to confirm your identity?
HMRC and other government departments are offering millions of citizens the choice of two “competing” identity systems – the Cabinet Office’s GOV.UK Verify, or HMRC’s Government Gateway.
There’s no guidance offered on which to choose; and no explanation for the absence of joined-up thinking.

By Tony Collins

When Whitehall departments do their own thing, the public rarely notices the duplicated time, effort and cost, at least when it comes to IT.  Now the “silo” approach has spilled out into the public arena.

The Government Digital Service – part of the Cabinet Office – developed GOV.UK Verify to enable people to confirm their identify when they want to use government services online.

At the same time, HMRC continued to work on a separate identity system: Government Gateway.

The cost of the two developments isn’t known.

HMRC prefers its own development work on Government Gateway because it enables companies as well as individuals to identify themselves. Verify is designed for individual use.

But instead of adapting one or the other to serve individuals and companies, or using Government Gateway for companies only, central departments are offering both  – with no guidance on which system citizens should choose; and there’s no explanation for the absence of a joined-up approach to IT.

The BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones says of the two separate identity systems that GDS and HMRC are engaged in a “bitter turf war”.

Comment

Today I went online to renew a driving licence and was shepherded by DVLA to use the Government Gateway identity system. A few weeks ago I had already successfully registered with GOV.UK Verify.

Government Gateway didn’t work properly, for me at least, although I had all the correct documents.

When I registered to use a different government service a few weeks I had no choice but to use GOV.UK Verify to confirm my identity. Verify was thorough, seamless and worked perfectly. Impressive. It left the impression of a system that had been well thought out, with the citizen in mind.

Putting aside the fact that Government Gateway did not work for me, it seemed dated, much less thorough than Verify, and left an impression of transience – that it was a temporary “make-do” system. For instance, the help screens were not tailored to the particular question being asked. Not impressive.

For me. GOV.UK Verify is the identity system of choice. It could surely be adapted to confirm the identities of companies – unless HMRC would rather continue to do its own thing.

It’s ludicrous that central government is spending billions of IT annually without a joined-up approach. Ministers keep promising it. Officials at conferences keep promising it. Whitehall press releases promise it.

A few weeks ago departments were offering only Government Gateway or GOV.UK Verify. Now many of them are offering both.

That’s progress?

Disturbing

A wider point of Whitehall’s dual IT approach to identity verification is that it’s the tip of the iceberg (apologies for the cliché but it’s apt).

With their ICT budgets, collectively, of billions of pounds a year, central departments are, in the main, doing their own thing.

A politician with the clout of Francis Maude may be needed to bang the heads of permanent secretaries together. But even if Maude’s replacement Ben Gummer had that clout – and he doesn’t – permanent secretaries and departmental boards would complain that the Cabinet Office was interfering.

Complaints along these lines would be made, perhaps, in off-the-record briefings to friendly journalists and to the National Audit Office in departmental responses to NAO surveys of senior officials, with the result that the Cabinet Office would end up backing away from trying to enforce a joined up IT approach.

That a genuine joined-up approach to government IT has been talked about for decades and hasn’t happened is largely because, outside of determining of the size of budgets, it is the permanent secretaries and their senior officials who hold power in Whitehall,  not transient politicians.

And bureaucracies always want to keep their departmental empires as intact as possible.

The current two top Whitehall officials, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood and John Manzoni, chief executive of the civil service, are consensus-seeking people, not at all confrontational. Probably their lack of a controversial edge is one of the main reasons they were chosen for their jobs.

All of which means there’s no chance of permanent secretary heads being banged together in an effort to cut costs and help bring about joined up government IT .

In 2012, Francis Maude, then Cabinet Office minister,  said, in a speech to the FT Innovate Conference,

“In the last decade our IT costs have gone up – while our services remained patchy. According to some estimates, we spend more on IT per capita than any other government.”

Is government ICT spending much less today? Perhaps HMRC’s Government Gateway officials would let us know.

**

Some Twitter comments





15 Comments

Posted in Campaign4Change, DWP, Government digital Service, Government IT, HMRC

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Capita’s chief executive to step down

Posted on 02/03/2017 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Capita’s chief executive Andy Parker is to step down later this year. The company has today announced that full-year results for 2016 were “disappointing”.

The company reported a sharp fall in annual profit.

Underlying pre-tax profit – which strips out restructuring costs – was £475.3m, well below the group’s expectations despite two profit warnings late last year.

Capita had said in December it expected annual pre-tax profits in the current financial year to be at least £515m.

Reported pre-tax profit was £74.8m, down 33 per cent year-on-year on slightly higher revenues of £4.9bn.

The company is moving some jobs to India, where it already provides outsourcing services for UK companies.

Capita is being dropped from the FTSE 100 from 20 March 2017. Its share price has fallen sharply over the past year but has risen gradually from its low about three months ago. The company’s share price fell sharply this morning, at one point down nearly 10% on yesterday’s close.

The company has had problems on multiple contracts.

In a statement this morning Parker said,

“2016 was a challenging year and Capita delivered a disappointing performance. We are determined to turn this performance around. We have taken quick and decisive action to reduce our cost base, increase management accountability, simplify the business, strengthen the balance sheet, and return the Group to profitable growth.

“We remain very confident that our target markets continue to offer long term structural growth. Capita is well placed in these markets with our unique set of complementary capabilities and the talent of our people. The bid pipeline of major contract opportunities remains active, and we are also seeing success in providing additional new, high value, replicable services to clients.

“The proposed sale of our Asset Services businesses and Specialist Recruitment businesses are on track. We have received good interest and, following regulatory approvals where required, we remain confident in concluding these transactions this year, which will leave us with a more focussed Group and significantly strengthen our balance sheet.

“We expect 2017 to be a transitional year for the business, as we complete our disposals, bed down the structural changes inside the business, and re-position Capita for a return to growth in 2018”.

Capita’s 2016 full-year results

Hunt is prepared to end Capita’s NHS contract if necessary.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Capita, local government, outsourcing

Hunt is prepared to end Capita NHS contract if necessary

Posted on 01/03/2017 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

During a short debate in the House of Commons on Monday (27 February 2017) MPs complained about continuing problems on Capita’s contract to provide various support services for GPs.

The health secretary Jeremy Hunt told one MP,

“If Capita does not perform what it is contracted to do, we will take all necessary measures, including ending the contract.

“… there have been a number of problems with that contract in its early days. We believe that the situation on the ground is beginning to improve, but a lot of progress still needs to be made.”

Despite warnings from GPs that the private sector would find it difficult to take over multiple in-house support services for GPs, NHS England awarded Capita a seven-year £330 contract to run the Primary Care Support Services from 1 September 2015. Promised savings in the first year were about £40m on a budget of about £100m.

But problems began even before Capita took over, because NHS England made staff cuts in preparation for the start of the outsourcing deal. GPs complained in August 2015 about significant and unpredictable disruption.

By last year NHS England was describing Capita’s performance on the contract as “unacceptable”. Problems have continued for nearly a year.

This week in the Commons, one Labour MP Kate Green, suggested that problems on the Capita contract were no longer teething.

“GP practices in my constituency told me only a couple of weeks ago that those problems not only continue but are worsening.”

Another MP Sarah Wollaston, who’s a  former GP and hospital doctor, and is now chairwoman of the Commons’ health committee, also told Hunt that problems on Capita’s GP support contract were “ongoing”.

She said,

“… there are ongoing problems with the transfer of patient records. GPs and hospitals spend endless hours chasing up results, investigations and letters on a daily basis. Is it not time that patients were given direct control of their own records, and will the Secretary of State provide an update on that to the House?”

Hunt replied that there were some teething problems that have been “causing problems for GPs”. He said his health minister Nicola Blackwood has been “meeting Capita and people relating to that contract on a fortnightly basis to identify the problems”.

He added that “we have become the first country in the world to give every patient access to their own records online”. From September, “people will be bable to do that without having to go to their GP’s surgery”.

Labour MP Margaret Greenwood told Hunt that a “number of GP practices in Wirral West have made clear to me their concerns about Capita’s handling of confidential patient records”.

She said,

“There have been cases of patient records being delayed when they move to another practice, and in some instances confidential records have not arrived at all… there is also concern that, if a patient is a risk to a doctor because of a mental health issue, that has not been flagged up to medical staff. That is a very serious risk to put staff under.”

She asked Hunt if he shared the view of the chair of the British Medical Association’s GP committee, who said that the GP support services contract was an example of what happens when the NHS tries to cut costs by inviting private companies to do work which they don’t do properly”.

3 Comments

Posted in Campaign4Change

What Google looks for when hiring staff … traits Whitehall’s culture abhors?

Posted on 14/02/2017 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

The contrast between what Google looks for when hiring staff and what Whitehall looks for when making some of its top appointments, could give clues as to why many government IT-based projects and programmes fail.

First, the strengths Google looks for.  These were set out yesterday on BBC R4 by Laszlo Bock,  human resources chief at Google for 10 years.

Google was named “Best Company to Work For” more than 30 times around the world and received over 100 awards as a top employer during Bock’s time.

In 2010, he was named “Human Resources Executive of the Year”. Under him, Google changed its clunky, arduous recruitment processes that relied on gimmicks like maths puzzles to those that helped the company grow to about 60,000 employees in less than two decades.

In 2015 he  published his first book, The New York Times bestseller Work Rules!, a practical guide to help people find meaning in work and improve the way they live and lead. He resigned from Google in 2016.

On the BBC  “Analysis” programme on Monday evening – which looked at intelligence and talent and what they mean, if anything, in job interviews –  Bock said the least important attribute Google screens for is whether someone knows about the job they are taking on. Crunching the data on successful hiring led Google instead to look for these characteristics:

  • Humility
  • Conscientiousness
  • A sense of responsibility not to quit until the job is done well
  • Comfort with ambiguity
  • A sense of fun
  • Courage

Why courage?

Bock said,

“It’s about the importance of people being able to raise their voices in organisations. One of the things that happens is, when organisations get large, people stop raising their voices and really bad things happen as a result. That’s where you get whistleblowing, insider trading, all kinds of things.

“Human beings are evolved, biologically, as social, hierarchy-seeking animals. We tend to conform. So courage is important because the really innovative, creative stuff comes from ‘I got this crazy idea’ and the bad problems get flagged by people who are willing to raise their hand and say ‘I don’t think this is a good thing to do’.

“Without that you can’t do great things.”

Comment

It’s too easy to generalise about the hiring and appointment of senior civil servants. But it’s possible to understand a little about the hiring culture within Whitehall’s biggest department, the Department for Work and Pensions.

An insight into DWP culture and thinking can be gleaned from the many Lever arch folders of documents filed by the DWP as part of an FOI case in which it spent several years fighting to stop the release of documents about the Universal Credit IT programme.

The documents include DWP witness statements on the “harm” that would be caused if the IT documents in question were published.

The judge in the case, Chris Ryan, challenged most of the DWP’s arguments.

In one of his rulings, Judge Ryan described the DWP’s claims as:

  • alarming and surprising
  • overstated
  • unconvincing
  • close to fanciful

He said that public confidence in the Universal Credit IT programme had been maintained for some time “on a false basis”; and he raised the possibility that an “unhealthily collegiate relationship had developed” between the DWP and private sector IT suppliers. [Campaign4Change will publish a separate blog post on this ruling in the next few days.]

As well as the insight into DWP culture that one can gain from the FOI case, it’s possible to gauge culture and thinking within Whitehall departments from the talented, free-thinking IT individualists who have joined the top layer of the civil service, quit and returned to the private sector.

It would be invidious to pick out some names as there are so many.

What all this suggests is that Whitehall’s culture appreciates conformity and consensus and shuns boat-rocking.

When top IT professionals who joined HMRC and the DWP spoke publicly at conferences about institutional problems that needed to be tackled, mandarins reacted quickly – and such disclosures were never repeated.

And after a leak to the Guardian about the results of a DWP staff survey of morale on the Universal Credit IT programme, the department launched a formal leak inquiry headed by a senior member of the security services.

At the same time, Universal Credit IT programme documents were no longer emailed but transferred around in taxis.

This bout of nervous introspection (the judge described the DWP’s arguments in the FOI case as “defensive”) when taken together with what else we know, indicate that Whitehall’s culture is insular, distrustful and inimical to open challenge and problem-solving (though there are some within the senior Whitehall ranks who successfully defy that culture).

When Bock talks of conformity being a danger within large organisations he would not have had the DWP in mind – but he aptly describes its culture.

When he speaks about the “importance of people being able to raise their voices in organisations” he was probably unaware of the extent to which Whitehall culture abhors raised voices.

As Bock says, when people don’t raise their voices “really bad things happen as a result”. Perhaps the lack of internal challenge was one reason the NHS IT programme – NPfIT – lost billions of pounds, and the DWP’s Universal Credit programme went badly awry for several years.

When Bock says the “really innovative, creative stuff comes from ‘I got this crazy idea’, he could have been describing the culture of the Government Digital Service. But that refreshing GDS culture is being slowly choked by the conservatism of traditional Whitehall departments.

As Bock says, “the bad problems get flagged by people who are willing to raise their hand and say ‘I don’t think this is a good thing to do’.”  But bad problems are things senior civil servants avoid talking about, even internally. A Disneyland”good news” culture pervades central departments.

A National Audit Office report on the Universal Credit programme referred to a “fortress mentality” within the DWP.

Maybe the consensus-seeking John Manzoni, head of the civil service, and his colleague Sir Jeremy Heywood, Cabinet Secretary, could seek to employ Bock as an adviser on appointments and recruitment.

Bock’s brief? To turn around the senior civil service’s culture of conformity, groupthink, denial, selective use of “good news” facts and a lack of open challenge.

Recognising the destructiveness within a big organisation of having the wrong culture – as Bock does – could be the start of a genuine Whitehall transformation.

BBC R4 “Analysis” on talent, intelligence and recruitment

Laszlo Bock steps down

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, culture, DWP, excessive secrecy, Google, Government digital Service, Government IT, IT-enabled projects and waste, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, National Audit Office, npfit, supplier relationships, Universal Credit

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Whitehall’s outsourcing of IT a “bad mistake” – and other Universal Credit lessons – by ex-DWP minister

Posted on 09/02/2017 | 5 comments

By Tony Collins

Lord Freud, former Conservative minister at the Department for Work and Pensions – who is described as the “architect” of Universal Credit – said yesterday that outsourcing IT across government had been a “bad mistake”.

He announced in December 2016 that was retiring from government. Having been the minister for welfare reform who oversaw the Universal Credit programme, Lord Freud yesterday went before the Work and Pensions Committee to answer questions on the troubled scheme.

He said,

“The implementation was harder than I had expected. Maybe that was my own naivety. What I didn’t know, and I don’t think anyone knew, was how bad a mistake it had been for all of government to have sent out their IT.

“It happened in the 1990s and early 2000s. You went to these big firms to build your IT. I think that was a most fundamental mistake, right across government and probably across government in the western world…

We talk about IT as something separate but it isn’t. It is part of your operating system. It’s a tool within a much better system. If you get rid of it, and lose control of it, you don’t know how to build these systems.

“So we had an IT department but it was actually an IT commissioning department. It didn’t know how to do the IT.

“What we actually discovered through the (UC) process was that you had to bring the IT back on board. The department has been rebuilding itself in order to do that. That is a massive job.”

But didn’t DWP civil servants make it clear at the outset that there wasn’t the in-house capability to build Universal Credit?

“The civil service thought it had the capacity because it could commission the big firms – the HPs and the IBMs – to do it. They did not see the problem, and government as a whole did not see the problem of doing it.

“It’s only when you get into building something big you discover what a problem that was…”

Accountability needed

But it was known at the launch of Universal Credit that government IT projects had a history of going wrong. Why hadn’t people [the DWP] learnt those lessons?

“I agree with you. People have found it very hard to work out what was the problem… you need someone doing it who is accountable. But when you commission out, you don’t have that process.

“You need a lot of continuity and that’s not something in our governance process. Ministers turn over very regularly and more importantly civil servants tend to turn over rather regularly because of the pay restrictions – they only get more pay when they are promoted – so there is a two-year promotion round for good people.

“Effectively we had a programme that had been built outside, or with a lot of companies helping us build it.”

Lord Freud explained differences between the two Universal Credit systems being rolled out.

First there is the “live” system [built at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds that interfaces with legacy benefit systems but is not interactive beyond the initial application form].

The DWP is also rolling out in some pilot areas such as Croydon a “full system” [built at a cost of less than £10m, run on agile principles and is interactive beyond the initial application form].

Lord Freud said,

“The difference between the two is that the live system has all of the essential features of Universal Credit – you get paid an amount at a certain time – but interaction with the system after the initial application is through the telephone or through the post.

“The interactive [“full”] system has the features of Universal Credit but interaction with it is much faster because it’s on the internet. That’s the difference…

“How would I have done it in retrospect?

“The other thing I have discovered about big organisations that I hadn’t understood was it’s very difficult for them to deal with something that’s purely conceptual.

“You need something on the ground. What you should do is get something on the ground quickly – small, maybe imperfect – but the organisation can start coalescing around it, understand it, and start working it.

“Oddly, not having an all-singing, all-dancing system that is now going out, was essential for the organisation to understand what it had and how to adapt it. The IT is only a very small element. Most of the work is around your operations and organisation and how you apply it.

“The second thing we introduced in the 2013 reset was “test and learn”. It’s a phrase but what it means is that you have a system you understand and then test and test, instead of going out with a big system at once. You test all the elements because it’s impossible to envisage how something as big (as Universal Credit) unless you do it like that.

Lessons for government as a whole?

“It was a mistake putting IT out. You have to bring it back in. It’s quite hard to bring it back in because the image of government with the IT industry is not great so you have to set up an atmosphere of getting really good people in, so it’s an attractive place to work; you have to pay them appropriately.

“Our pay scales are not representative of what happens in some of these industries.

Scarce skills

“There are three areas of specialisation that government finds it very hard to buy: various bits of IT, running contracts and project management. Those are three really scarce skills in our economy. We need in government to pay for those specialisms if we are to do big projects.”

Other lessons?

“There’s an odd structure which I don’t quite believe in any more, which is the relationship between the politician – the minister – and the civil service.

“The concept is that the politicians decide what their objectives are and the civil service delivers it. I don’t believe that you can divide policy and implementation in that way. That’s a very big issue because our whole government is built up with that concept and has been for more than 100 years.”

Where does project management fit?

“In theory the civil service produces the project management but it’s an odd circumstance. It didn’t quite happen with Universal Credit. In my first five years I had no fewer than six senior responsible owners and six project managers.

“You can imagine what that was like with something as complicated as Universal Credit when the senior people hadn’t had the time to understand what it was they were dealing with; and what that implied for the minister – me – in terms of holding that together.”

Lord Freud suggested that he was acting as the permanent project manager although he had his normal ministerial duties as well – including being the government’s spokesman in the House of Lords on welfare reform matters.

“As a minister you don’t have time to do project manage a big project. I was sending teams out to make sure we were on top of particular things, which were then reincorporated into the whole process. But it was a very difficult time as we built the department into a capability to do this. There is now a very capable team doing it.”

Comment:

Two of the questions raised by Lord Freud’s comments are: If outsourcing IT is now considered such a bad idea for central government, why is it councils continue to outsource IT?

Would it be better for taxpayers in the long run if the Department for Communities and Local Government intervened to stop such deals going ahead?

Lord Freud’s evidence on Universal Credit programme in full

 

 

 

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP, IBM, local government, Universal Credit

Southwest One – a positive postscript

Posted on 09/02/2017 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

somerset county council2IBM-led Southwest One has had a mostly bad press since it was set up in 2007. But the story has a positive postscript.

Officials at Somerset County Council now understand what has long been obvious to ICT professionals: that the bulk of an organisation’s savings come from changing the way people work – and less from the ICT itself.

Now that Somerset County Council has the job of running its own IT again – its IT-based relationship with Southwest One ended prematurely in December 2016 – the council’s officials have realised that technology is not an end in itself but an “enabler” of headcount reductions and improvements in productivity.

A 2017 paper by the county council’s “Programme Management Office”  says the council has begun a “technology and people programme” to “contribute to savings via headcount reduction by improving organisational productivity and process efficiency using technology as the key enabler”.

Outsourcing IT a “bad mistake” 

It was in 2007 that Somerset County Council and IBM launched a joint venture, Southwest One. The new company took over the IT staff and some services from the council.

In the nine years since then the council has concluded that outsourcing ICT – thereby separating it from the council’s general operations – was not a good idea.

The same message – that IT is too integral and important to an organisation  to be outsourced – has also reached Whitehall’s biggest department, the Department for Work and Pensions.

Yesterday (8 February 2017) Lord Freud,  who was the Conservative minister in charge of Universal Credit at the Department for Work and Pensions, told MPs that outsourcing IT across government had proved to be a “bad idea”.  He said,

“What I didn’t know, and I don’t think anyone knew, was how bad a mistake it had been for all of government to have sent out their IT…

“You went to these big firms to build your IT. I think that was a most fundamental mistake, right across government  and probably across government in the western world …

” We talk about IT as something separate but it isn’t. It is part of your operating system. It’s a tool within a much better system. If you get rid of it, and lose control of it, you don’t know how to build these systems.

” So we had an IT department but it was actually an IT commissioning department. It didn’t know how to do the IT.

“What we actually discovered through the (Universal Credit) process was that you had to bring the IT back on board. The department has been rebuilding itself in order to do that. That is a massive job.”

Task facing Somerset officials

Somerset County Council says in its paper that the council now suffers from what it describes as:

  • Duplicated effort
  • Inefficient business processes
  • A reliance on traditional ways of working (paper-based and meeting-focused).
  • Technology that is not sufficient to meet business needs
  • Inadequate data extraction that does not support evidence based decision making.
  • “Significant under-investment in IT”.

To help tackle these problems the council says it needs a shift in culture. This would enable the workforce to change the way it works.  

From January 2017 to 2021, the council plans “organisation and people-led transformational change focused on opportunities arising from targeted systems review outcomes”.

The council’s officers hope this will lead to

  • Less unproductive time in travelling and  attending some statutory duties such as court proceedings.
  • Fewer meetings.
  • Reduced management time because of fewer people to manage e.g. supervision, appraisal, performance and sickness.
  • Reduced infrastructure spend because fewer people will mean cuts in building and office costs, and IT equipment. Also less training would be required.
  • Reduction in business support process and roles.
  • Reduction in hard copy file storage and retention.

 The council has discovered that it could, for instance, with changes in working practices supported by the right technology,  conduct the same number of social services assessments with fewer front- line social workers or increase the level of assessments with the same number of staff.

Southwest One continues to provide outsourced services to Avon and Somerset Police. The contract expires next year.

Comment

Somerset County Council is taking a bold, almost private sector approach to IT.

Its paper on “technology and people” says in essence that the council cannot  save much money by IT change alone.

Genuine savings are to be found in changing ways of working and thus reducing headcount. This will require very close working – and agreement – between IT and the business end-users within the council.

It is an innovative approach for a council.

The downside is that there are major financial risks, such as a big upfront spend with Microsoft that may or may not more than pay for itself.

Does outsourcing IT ever make sense?

Somerset County Council is not an international organisation like BP where outsourcing and standardising IT across many countries can make sense.

The wider implication of Somerset’s experience – and the experience of the Department for Work and Pensions – is that outsourcing IT in the public sector is rarely a good idea.

Thank you to Dave Orr, who worked for Somerset County Council as an IT analyst and who has, since the Southwest One contract was signed in 2007, campaigned for more openness over the implications of the deal.

He has been more effective than any Somerset councillor in holding to account the county council, Taunton Deane Borough Council and Avon and Somerset Police, over the Southwest One deal.  He alerted Campaign4Change to Somerset’s “Technology and People Programme” Somerset paper.

One of Orr’s recent discoveries is that the council’s IT assets at the start of the Southwest One contract were worth about £8m and at hand-back in December 2016 were worth just £0.32m, despite various technology refreshes.

Somerset County Council’s “Technology and People Programme” paper

Whitehall’s outsourcing IT a “bad mistake” – and other Universal Credit lessons, by a former DWP minister

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, BT, Campaign4Change, capacity building, change management, culture, DWP, Fujitsu, Government IT, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP, IBM, IT-related failures, Legacy ICT, managing outsourced services, outsourcing, project management, public-private partnerships, supplier relationships

Birmingham Council to “close down” contract with Capita when it ends in 2021

Posted on 20/01/2017 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Birmingham City Council has said in a job advert that it plans to “close down” its joint venture contract with Capita when it expires in 2021.

The advert was discovered by Government Computing which has reported the job requirements in detail.

Capita and Birmingham City Council have one of the largest and longest IT-based outsourcing contracts in the public sector.

It began in 2006 when the council and Capita set up a joint venture “Service Birmingham”. The council has spent about £85m to £120m a year on the contract which puts the total cost of the deal so far at more than £1bn.

Government Computing reports that the council is seeking an assistant director ICT and digital services and CIO role. The job will include a task to “oversee the effective closedown of the current Service Birmingham ICT contract”.

This suggests the council is unlikely to renew the existing contract. It could decide to sign a new outsourcing deal but the signs so far are that the council will bring services in-house in 2021.

The council says in the job advert it wants to move to an “increasingly agile state of continuous business transformation”.

Nigel Kletz, director of commissioning and procurement for Birmingham City Council, told Government Computing,  “The current Service Birmingham contract has four years still to run (until 2021), so this role will lead the implementation of the ICT and digital strategy, which includes developing a transition programme to identify and then implement ICT delivery options going forward.

“Decisions on how ICT support is provided from 2021 onwards are yet to be taken.”

Capita did not add to the council’s statement.

Alan Mo, research director at public sector analysis group Kable, is quoted in Government Computing as saying,

“When it comes to ICT, Birmingham is the largest spending council in the UK. Given what’s at stake, we cannot over emphasise the importance of early planning…

“As we know, Service Birmingham has been under a huge amount of scrutiny over the past few years. Given the trends in local government, it would not surprise us if Birmingham prefers to go down the in-sourcing path; the council has already opted to take back contact centre services.”

Projected savings of “£1bn” 

Service Birmingham lists on its website some of the benefits from the joint venture.

  • Projected cost savings of £1bn back to the Council over the initial 10-year term, for reinvestment in services
  • £2m investment in a new server estate
  • Rationalising 550 applications to 150
  • Consolidated 7 service desks into 2
  • 500% improvement in e-mail speed
  • Help desk calls answered within 20 seconds increased from 40% to nearly 90%

Service Birmingham provides Birmingham City Council’s IT, along with a council tax and business rates administration service. The council has discussed taking back in-house the council tax  element of the contract. 

Capita has run into trouble on some of its major contracts, including one with the NHS to supply services to GPs.

Comment

It appears that Capita has served its purpose and put the council into a position where it can take back ICT services now that are in a better state than they were  at the start of the contract 2006.

Austerity is the enemy of such large public sector IT-based outsourcing contracts.  When councils can afford to spend huge sums – via monthly, quarterly and annual service charges – on so-called “transformation”, all may be well for such deals.

Their high costs can be publicly justified on the basis of routine annual efficiency “savings” which do not by law have to be verified.

The downfall for such deals comes when councils have to make large savings that may go well beyond the numbers that go into press releases. It’s known that Birmingham City Council has been in almost continuous negotiation to reduce the annual sums paid to Capita.

Capita is not a charity. How can it continue to transform ICT and other services, pay the increasing salaries of 200 more people than were seconded from the council in 2006, accept large reductions in its service changes and still make a reasonable profit?

It makes economic sense, if Birmingham needs to pay much less for IT, to take back the service.

It’s a pity that austerity has such force in local government but not in central government where IT profligacy is commonplace.

Job spec for senior Birmingham IT post looks towards end of Service Birmingham ICT deal – Government Computing

 

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Posted in Agile, Birmingham City Council, Campaign4Change, Capita, joint ventures, local government, outsourcing

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Can Birmingham City Council afford this jargon-laden Big Data project?

Posted on 17/01/2017 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

Birmingham council’s “Big Data Corridor” commits multiple offences against the English language. Could its jargon-heavy justifications threaten the usefulness of the project?

Birmingham City Council is running a budget deficit expected to be £49m in 2016/17. That hasn’t stopped it from pushing forward with plans to invest in a “Big Data Corridor” that has left at least one leading councillor confused as to its purpose.

Councillor Jon Hunt, leader of he Lib-Dems on the Labour-run council,  told a cabinet meeting that the project was “potentially exciting” and he thanked Aston University for its involvement but he added,

“I was a bit confused about the purpose of it.”

Birmingham City Council will be contributing hundreds of thousands of pounds towards the research project – money that Hunt said the council cannot afford.

He said Birmingham City Council may be best placed as an “enabler” of such projects rather than “putting in money it doesn’t have”.

A report to the council’s cabinet said,

“The proposed Big Data Corridor (BDC) project at a total cost of £2.568m will support Small/Medium Enterprises (SME’s) to understand the benefits of using data to design new services and products that will respond to specific challenges in East Birmingham, as a demonstrator.”

Quite what that means is unclear in the report; and leading councillors gave no direct responses to Hunt’s points about the unclear purpose of the project and  whether the council can afford it.

Birmingham Council says the Big Data Corridor is a “new initiative led by Birmingham City Council in partnership with Aston University, Future Cities Catapult, Centro, Telensa, Innovation Birmingham, local SMEs and community groups of the Eastern Corridor Smart Demonstrator.

The project is part funded by its participants, including Birmingham council, and the European Union’s European Regional Development Fund.

A report to the council’s cabinet said the project would “address specific challenges such as creating a healthy happy city”.

Comment

Birmingham City Council’s Big Data Corridor may be a fun research project to work on – but what’s its point?

The council says the aim of the project is to

 “create an innovative, connected data marketplace – a new disruptive economy – where SMEs use data to create new applications, services and experiences to serve personalised demand for businesses and communities in the Corridor, generating social and environmental value alongside hard economic impacts”.

But what’s its purpose for the citizens of Birmingham?

“SMEs will be supported to use data and technologies to create new services, and products that will respond to specific challenges in East Birmingham to deliver to beneficiaries in the Corridor, generating social, environmental and economic value….”

How is that useful to residents?

“Working with the Smart City Commission, we are exploring how the wider deployment of smart city / future internet-based technologies and services can help drive innovation and accelerate delivery of city outcomes bringing together both needs of public services, community and private sector.”

Which means?

“The demonstrator will aim to tackle local problems in a more holistic, layered and integrated way.

” It will drive greater connectedness along urban clusters – connecting assets, data, talent, location, infrastructure to combine innovative design, use of community and social spaces and services with housing and infrastructure developments; new models of commissioning and service delivery enabled through civic and social enterprise.”

Actual uses please?

“The demonstrator which links into existing City development plans e.g. Birmingham Connected City (formerly the Birmingham Mobility Action Plan); Birmingham Development Plan; East Birmingham Prospectus for Growth will focus on:

  • Mobility & connectivity – Improving how people travel around across all modes and enabling access to employment opportunities;

  • Health – Healthy ageing; improve quality of life / mental health & wellbeing indicators;

  • Skills & Enterprise – Manage supply and demand; Upskill local population and talent for innovation; grow level of enterprise and sustainable start-up & business growth

  • Information Marketplaces – enabling programme of activity creating conditions for data to be extracted and /or exchanged by multiple partners & stakeholders prioritised around above themes; creating the supply chain that may include business / developers that can create value with this new data

Yes, but one specific purpose?

“The Big Data Corridor will utilise a data platform provided by Birmingham City University, which will act like an address book to access a range of public and commercial service data sets, which will enable Small/Medium Enterprises with support through this project, to create new products and services to help address challenges faced by the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership.”

Its benefits for Birmingham council tax payers who would help fund the project?

“[The Big Data Corridor] aims to accelerate the digital capabilities of businesses to capitalise on the exponential growth of the Internet Of Things and Data Economy by developing solutions with citizens to address city in the areas of health, mobility and sustainability. This will be enabled through 3 key strands. All support for SMEs will be provide free of charge based on meeting eligibility criteria.”

Yes but specific benefits?

“[The Big Data Corridor] will host technology and data rich demonstrator activities to enable GBSLEP SMEs to develop new services and products enabled by the new data streams and tested in East Birmingham in response to specific challenges identified through work with stakeholders and communities. Note that this project will not compile data sets, but accesses those available openly or if will purchase them if necessary through this project.”

Specifically?

“[The Big Corridor will] provide technical and business support utilising the Serendip Incubator (a space for businesses to collaborate) at Birmingham Science Park – Aston to engage SMEs, manage their involvement, support rapid prototyping and commercialisation of products and services.”

Yes, but …

“To address congestion …”

Aha! A specific purpose. In what way will the Big Data Corridor reduce congestion?

“[It] could be for SMEs to access Telensa’s smart lighting application network, Centro transport data, personal data such as schemes that are already operating to enable individuals to share data voluntarily, as well as social media data to develop new products to incentivise behaviour change of citizens from cars to public transport to reduce congestion.”

Rarely before have so many offences against plain English been committed within one IT project.

The serious point is that unclear, abstract English and unclear thinking go hand in hand.

Orwell said that the “slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”.  He would probably have described Birmingham council’s phrases such as “accelerate delivery of city outcomes” and “generating social, environmental and economic value” as avoidably ugly.

Such phrases suggest that their author was indifferent as to whether the words meant anything or not. They are easily written – because they don’t require any thought.

Orwell could have been looking at Birmingham Council’s words on its Big Data Corridor when he wrote,

“This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.

“As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

Indeed it’s hard to see how Birmingham council found the money for the Big Data Corridor, based on the poor quality of information it has provided so far.

One explanation could be that finance councillors and officials watched in awe as the river of ostensibly worthy phrases flowed in front of them – phrases such as “greater connectedness along urban clusters”.

Possible big data uses

One possible specific use of the big data corridor would be to “develop a service to enable citizens to find the healthiest and safest walking routes to local chemist”.

How many Birmingham citizens will take the time to use such an app rather than get to the chemist in the shortest possible time?

Another potential app would show air quality in real-time. This would be useful.

Big data could also be used for street lighting – to allow for the manual brightening of lights when required – and for triggering CCTV and a local response when certain noises are detected.

But would such potential uses be forgotten while project professionals wriggle furiously to try and stop themselves sinking into the Big Data Corridor’s mudflats of jargon?

It’s possible the project will create 56 jobs, which would be one tangible benefit. But what the new recruits will do for local residents is unclear.

Ideally, perhaps, they’d have the skill to translate abstract words and phrases into jargon-free English so that Birmingham’s residents would know how their Big Data Corridor money is being spent.

Perhaps the project may even win an award. Campaign4Change nominates Birmingham’s Big Data Corridor for the Golden Bull award 2017. It’s an award for the year’s worst written tripe.

This is from Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”,

“A speaker who uses that kind of [abstract] phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved …”

He added,

“This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them.”

In a report on the use and abuse of official language, the House of Commons’ Public Administration Committee criticised  “unlovely” words and phrases such as “step changes”, “stakeholder engagements”, “win-wins”, “level playing fields” and “going forwards”.

It concluded that a poor use of language by officials can amount to “maladministration”. The committee said,

“In our view, using confusing or unclear language that is so bad that it results in people not getting the benefits or services to which they are entitled, or which prevents them from understanding their rights or the choices available to them, amounts to ‘maladaministration’.

The Parliamentary Ombudsman at that time agreed with this view.

She said,

“I think if it got to the point that it was actually incomprehensible, then it would be in contravention of my principles about providing information that’s clear, accurate and not misleading.”

Click here to generate gobbledygook similar to Birmingham Council’s (Plain English Campaign’s gobbledygook generator).

 

Use and abuse of official language – House of Commons Public Administration Committee

Big Data Corridor bid goes through to the next stage

Big Data Corridor report

Big Data case studies

Birmingham council savings too ambitious and too many uncertainties.

Birmingham blog

Digital Birmingham

 

 

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Posted in Birmingham City Council, Campaign4Change, IT projects, IT-enabled projects and waste, jargon, local government, private sector lessons for the public sector