Tag Archives: government IT

All change for police IT – again?

Posted on 18/07/2012 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

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

NSPIS contracts awarded in 1999 included:

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

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

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

– Crime: analysis of case histories and crime statistics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Police IT in a poor state?

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

Giving evidence to MPs he said

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

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

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

Comment

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

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

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

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

Mandating rarely works

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joint statement of Home Office and Association of Police Authorities

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

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All change at the DH, CfH and on NPfIT – or not?

Posted on 11/07/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Katie Davis is to leave as interim Managing Director of NHS Informatics, says eHealth Insider which has seen an internal memo.

.The memo indicates that Davis “intends to focus on being a full-time mother to her two children”.

She joined the Department of Health on 1 July 2011, on loan from the Cabinet Office where she was Executive Director, Operational Excellence, in the Efficiency and Reform Group.

Before that she was Executive Director of Strategy at the Identity and Passport Service in the Home Office.

The memo indicates that the director responsible for the day-to-day delivery of NHS programmes and services, Tim Donohoe, will take-over Davis’ role until NHS Connecting for Health shuts down at the end of March 2013.

CfH’s national projects look set to move to the NHS Commissioning Board in Leeds, while its delivery functions will move to the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

Davis had told eHeath Insider that her priorities included concluding a piece of unfinished business on the NPfIT – the future of the [CSC] local service provider deal for the North, Midlands and East.

Comment:

Davis has been a strong independent voice at the Department of Health. Partly under her influence buying decisions have passed to NHS trusts without penalties being paid by the NHS to NPfIT local service provider CSC.

It is a little worrying, though, that high-level responsibility for the rump of the NPfIT – CSC’s contracts, Choose and Book, the Spine, Summary Care Record and other centrally-managed projects and programmes – may fall to David Nicholson, Chief Executive of the NHS.

Labour appointed Nicholson in 2006 with a brief that included making a success of the NPfIT. He has been the NPfIT’s strongest advocate.

Indeed a confidential briefing paper from the Department of Health to the then PM Tony Blair in 2007 on the progress of the NPfIT said:

“… much of the programme is complete with software delivered to time and to budget.”

It is difficult to see the NPfIT being completely dismantled under David Nicholson. It’s probable that CfH will be shut down in name but recreated in other parts of the NHS, while the NPfIT programmes and projects run down very slowly.  It’s even conceivable that CSC’s and BT’s local service provider contracts will be extended before they are due to expire in 2015/16.

A comment on eHealth Insider says:

“My understanding is that NPfIT is leaving us with a legacy of ancient PAS systems barely fit for purpose which cost a fortune to operate and which will transfer to a massive service charge once national contracts end. That’s if you don’t count the most expensive PACS system in the universe. And I wonder what Lorenzo cost?”

It’s hard to argue with that. Meanwhile the costly NPfIT go-lives are due to continue, at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, for example.

End game for Davis and CfH announced.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change management, health records, IT-related failures, managing outsourced services, NHS, npfit, public sector, public services, reducing cost strategically

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Poor IT suppliers to face ban from contracts?

Posted on 28/06/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

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

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

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

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

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

The representatives will also be:

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

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

Spending controls made permanent

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

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

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

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

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Why is MoD spending more on IT when its data is poor?

Posted on 28/06/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Ministry of Defence and the three services have spent many hundreds of millions of pounds on logistics IT systems over the past 20 years, and new IT projects are planned.

But the National Audit Office, in a report published today – Managing the defence investory –  found that logistics data is so unreliable and limited that it has hampered its investigations into stock levels.

“During the course of our study,” says the NAO, “the Department provided data for our analyses from a number of its inventory systems. However, problems in obtaining reliable information have limited the scope of our analysis…”

The NAO does not ask the question of why the MoD is spending money on more IT while data is unreliable and there are gaps in the information collected.

But the NAO does question whether new IT will solve the MoD’s information problems.

“The Department has acknowledged the information and information systems gaps and committed significant funds to system improvements. However these will not address the risk of failure across all of the inventory systems nor resolve the information shortfall.”

MPs on the Public Accounts Committee, who will question defence staff on the NAO report, may wish to ask why the MoD’s is so apparently anxious to hand money to IT suppliers when data is poor and new technology will not plug information gaps.

Comment:

MPs on the Public Accounts Committee found in 2003 (Progress in reducing stocks) that the MoD was buying and storing stock it did not need. Indeed after two major fires at the MoD’s warehouses at Donnington in 1983 and 1988 more than half of the destroyed stock did not need replacing. Not much has changed judging by the NAO’s latest report.

It’s clear that the MoD lacks good management information. Says the NAO in today’s report:

“The summary management and financial information on inventory that is provided to senior staff within Defence Equipment and Support is not sufficient for them to challenge and hold to account the project teams…”

But will throwing money at IT suppliers make much difference? The MoD plans the:

–  Future Logistics Information Services project, which is intended to bring together and replace a number of legacy inventory management systems; and

–  Management of the Joint Deployed Inventory system which will provide the armed services with a common system for the inventory they hold and manage.

But is the  MoD using IT spending as proof of its conviction to improve the quality of data and the management of its inventory?

Managing the defence inventory

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Posted in cost reduction, Defence, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, oversight, private sector lessons for the public sector, project management, public sector, public services, software quality, supplier relationships

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Gateway reports on major projects to remain secret?

Posted on 20/06/2012 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Comment

The civil service reform plan, which was published yesterday, is disappointing. It is so consensual that it has nothing particularly punchy to offer. It reads like the report of a tennis club match in which the finalists were such good friends that neither wanted to win; and each surrendered alternate points until those watching drifted into the bar.

The reform plan has been approved by senior civil servants and even former Labour ministers. In the House of Commons yesterday Labour’s spokesmen reacted with indifference and unions too have said little.

One reason, perhaps, is that the plan is full of good intentions that promise further documents and consultations that are full of good intentions. In short there’s nothing for potential opponents to worry about.

On improving the delivery of major projects, the reform plan is vague to the point of being self-mocking. It proposes:

– Requiring greater testing and scrutiny of major projects by departmental boards and the [Cabinet Office’s] Major Projects Authority before they move to full implementation;

– Regular publication of project progress and the production of an annual report on progress, scrutinised by the Departmental Board;

–  Commencing training of all leaders of major projects through the Major Projects Leadership Academy by the end of 2014; and

– Significantly reducing the turnover of Senior Responsible Officers.

The phrase “significantly reducing” means nothing in practice; and does the promise of “regular publication of project progress reports” mean anything in practice, other than, perhaps, the publication of press releases on project progress written by the PR departments of HMRC, the DWP and the MoJ?.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude could have confronted permanent secretaries with an important policy change that required the civil service to publish independent Gateway review reports on the progress or otherwise of major IT and construction projects. Perhaps Maude has not done so because he wanted consensus. But he has probably ended up with a reform plan that nobody believes in and to which nobody objects.

The Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority will do its best to stop IT-related project failures but it has limited control and civil service secrecy working against it. The reform plan changes none of this.

Doubtless the disasters will continue.

Civil Service Reform Plan

Useful critique of Civil Service Reform Plan by Institute for Government.

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Posted in change management, excessive secrecy, Freedom of Information, Gateway reviews, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures

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Civil service reforms not dramatic but mean real change says Maude

Posted on 19/06/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

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

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

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

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

– Shared services should be the norm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Permanent secretaries wll have their objectives published.

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

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

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

Civil service reform plan.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change management

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Cabinet Office promises unprecedented openness on risky projects

Posted on 13/06/2012 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

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

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

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

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

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

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

The statement continues:

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

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

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

Comment:

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

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

Preventing failure

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

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

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

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

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

Whitehall to relent on secrecy over mega projects?

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

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HMRC loses an important voice on its board

Posted on 11/06/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

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

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

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

Was Lamey an unexploded force at HMRC?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But was Lamey muzzled?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attempts to constrain HMRC directors.

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

HMRC honcho poached.

Time for truth on Universal Credit

Hungry re-seller bags Steve Lamey.

Whistleblower punished?

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

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Farewell to Ian Watmore – the antithesis of Sir Humphrey

Posted on 17/05/2012 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

A good insight into the departure of Ian Watmore comes from Peter Smith of Spend Matters who says:

 “He (Watmore) lives in Cheshire still (and does a weekly commute to London) and this seems to be driven by personal factors – he wants to do more non-executive stuff,  work with charities, education bodies, and support his wife who is being ordained as a vicar shortly.

“There will be a competition to replace him but Melanie Dawes (?) will be the interim Perm Sec.”

Watmore leaves in June at the height of his civil service career. It would be too easy to cite his background as UK Managing Director of Accenture to say that he came to the civil service with a sympathy for big suppliers and not upsetting the smooth-running of the government IT machine.

Indeed he will not go down in civil service history as a heavy-handed enforcer of central government reforms: he respects too much the work of senior civil servants and particularly CIO colleagues to be seen as an opponent whose will cannot be overcome.

Rather he has been an authoritative go-between, a pragmatist who has sought to implement the radical cost-saving measures demanded by the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude without giving departments any excuse to cite central diktats as the reason for disruption to frontline services.

Watmore gave an insight into his relationship with Maude at a Parliamentary committee hearing earlier this year. His comments also exploded the myth that the private and public sectors can be run on comparable lines.

“I have been on both sides of the divide on private and public,” said Watmore. “The thing that is different about  the public sector is the combination of leadership from the ministerial class and the civil service class. There is no corporate analogue for it. People talk about the way it analogises to the business world—I don’t think it does; it is different…

“I work on a daily basis with Francis Maude. I am not going to make any political comments about Francis, but as a man I feel that he cares about what he is doing;  he knows his stuff and he drives us very hard. In response, I give, shall we say, robust advice in return. Mostly, he listens and sometimes I defer to him and we come back to the same place we started, but more often than not we flesh out the differences behind closed doors and then we come out on a united front. I think that is the best way to get civil service and ministerial leadership. If you have a weakness in one part or the other, the whole thing breaks down.”

At Campaign4Change we will remember Watmore’s career in the civil service for his openness, honesty and lack of ego.

When answering questions before Parliamentary committees, some permanent secretaries seem to see MPs as adversaries. These civil servants’ replies are characterised by clever, evasive or adversarial comments.  They apologise if the mistakes were before their time but usually they’re protective of their departments, as if defending their children against criticism by outsiders.

Watmore is the antithesis of the archetypal civil servant.  Whereas, for example, most civil servants want to keep confidential internal “Gateway” reports on the progress or otherwise of high-risk IT and construction projects, Watmore is on record as saying he would like them published (though they haven’t been).

And he has earned respect among MPs for his straightforwardness. He’ll speak lucidly on his department’s achievements, but not his own.

How much effect he has had on other departments is hard to gauge. It’s difficult to see how the most ruthless enforcer in the Cabinet Office could ever have much influence in other departments.

For though the Cabinet Office has powers from David Cameron to enforce cost-savings,  departmental heads remain accountable for their own decisions. Watmore has spoken of the tensions between the Cabinet Office and departments.  He told MPs earlier this year:

“There are lots of examples where we and Departments have common cause. There will be times when we challenge what they want to do and it can be a tense relationship. Sometimes we agree with what they were going to do anyway, and other times they agree with us, but it means that we are engaging with them.”

Chair: How well is it working on a scale of one to 10 … on the cross-departmental working?

Watmore: “On the whole cross-departmental working, I would say it is somewhere around the six or seven mark. There is more to do.”

Watmore shuns the trappings of high office.  He doesn’t even have an office. “I refuse to have one,” he told MPs this year. “I don’t believe in physical offices for managers. I hot-desk wherever I happen to feel it is appropriate to work that week…

“What I tend to do is I move around and I sit with a different group in the Cabinet Office for a week. Initially people think it is a bit odd having the Permanent Secretary sitting next to them but once you carry on as normal they realise you are just another person working there.

“You actually get to find out quite a lot about how the operation works by being there with the staff for a week as well as hearing from them in a more formal setting…

“It is how I operated when I was in business so it is a long-term way of working. But when I came into Government I discovered it by accident; when I wanted to move the staff from two different bits of Government into a new building and introduce flexible working, hot-desking and all the rest of it, I said, ‘If it is good enough for the rest of the staff, it should be good enough for me…’

Will Maude find someone authoritative and influential but without a big ego to replace Watmore at the top of the Cabinet Office? A difficult assignment.

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Posted in capacity building, efficiency savings, governance, Government IT, Major Projects Authority, openness and transparency, procurement, public sector, supplier relationships

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Information Age article questions Cabinet Office scrutiny of IT projects

Posted on 23/04/2012 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

Information Age has written an interesting piece examining the Cabinet Office’s scrutiny of IT projects worth over £1m.

It says that despite pledging to publish regular performance data on IT projects worth over £1m, the Cabinet Office is not even collecting the data.

It reports, “The Cabinet Office is not collecting data about the performance of government IT projects worth over £1 million, despite having made a commitment to publish this information regularly as open data.

“In February 2011, the Cabinet Office published performance data for all major IT projects up until July 2010 (just before the current government came into office)  on open data portal data.gov.uk. At the time, it said that the data would “updated regularly”, but that “the specific form of future publications has not yet been determined”.

A Freedom of Information Act request from Information Age revealed that the Cabinet Office is not collecting this data. In its response to the request, the department revealed that it holds “no recorded information … relating to the performance of ICT projects over £1m”.

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