Tag Archives: government IT

FOI team hides already released Universal Credit report

Posted on 27/09/2011 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Universal Credit is one the government’s most important IT-enabled programmes, along with HMRC’s “Real-time Information” scheme, Whitehall Shared Services and the MoD Change Programme.

If the Universal Credit programme goes wrong benefits claimants could have payments held up or receive incorrect amounts.

For this reason it is important that the coalition doesn’t repeat Labour’s mistake of wrapping IT-related projects and programmes in so much secrecy that the public, MPs and the media only discover problems when it is too late to effect a rescue.

Early warning of faltering projects

There is an early-warning of projects and programmes that are likely to falter or are actually faltering: “Starting” gate reviews and “Gateway” reviews, which are independent assessments of big or risky schemes.

The coalition in opposition promised to publish Gateway reviews if they came to power but civil servants have persuaded ministers to drop the proposal: does the minister want opponents and the media picking up authoritative internal information on projects that may be going wrong?

Our FOI request

Because of the continued suppression of the reports Campaign4Change, on 20 May 2011, made a request under the Freedom of Information for the Department for Work and Pensions to release a copy of Gateway reviews on the Universal Credit project.

The reply was nearly helpful. “There have been no Gateway reviews on the Universal Credit programme.  There has been one Starting Gate review on the Universal Credit programme.” The reply, by Jack Goodwin of the DWP’s Universal Credit Briefing Team, did not include a copy of the Starting Gate review report, so we sent a follow-up email.

We pointed that that Public Administration Committee had already requested a copy of the Universal Credit Gateway Zero Review and, in response, the DWP had sent the Committee a copy of the Stating Gate review, though the Committee decided not to publish it.

On 13 July the DWP said it needed extra time to consider our request. Gina Talbot at the DWP’s “Freedom of Information Focal Point” said: “I need to extend the time limit because the information requested must be considered under one of the exemptions to which the public interest test applies. This extra time is needed in order to make a determination as to the public interest. Accordingly, I hope to let you have a response by 10 August 2011.”

DWP wasting public money

This extra time and consideration was unnecessary and a waste of public money because the DWP had already given the report to the Public Administration Select Committee. Indeed the Universal Credit Starting Gate report had also been lodged in the House of Commons library after an MP asked the Cabinet Office’s Ian Watmore for a copy in May 2011.

So the DWP was considering at length whether to release a report that the Department had already released twice – to two separate committees of the House of Commons.

Grounds for appeal

In August the DWP formally refused Campaign4Change’s request, so we appealed. These were some of the reasons we gave:

i) Universal Credit is one of the government’s “mission-critical” projects and its success will be potentially important to tens of millions of benefit claimants.

ii) In the public interest, MPs, the media and public should understand the project’s feasibility risks and chances of success – in short whether it has got off to a good start. The Starting Gate report could help provide such an insight.

iii) The Public Accounts Committee has recommended that Starting Gates be published. The refusal of our request would appear to be a denial of the wishes of the Committee.

iv) Sometimes statements in published Gateway reviews have turned out to be too weak, sometimes too strong. There is no reason to believe that if the reviewers know their reports are for public consumption they will weaken their comments; and if they do weaken them the published reports will allow the quality of advice to be questioned or challenged by what the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude calls armchair auditors.

v) The objection to publishing the reviews is that publication may inhibit candour. Starting Gate reviewers have a public duty to give the best advice they can (and indeed are paid for doing so). If they alter their advice to make it more acceptable to the public, media and Parliament they are failing in their public duty to give the best possible advice in all circumstances. Equally, if they give their advice in the expectation it will be kept confidential and therefore that they will not be held accountable for it, and alter their best advice on this basis, they could be failing in their public duty.

vi) There is no certain means for Parliament, the media or the public to know how large IT-based projects and programmes are progressing. Sometimes the National Audit Office reports on large IT-based projects, sometimes not.  The NAO cannot be relied on to produce the equivalent of a Starting Gate review on a large IT-based project or programme. Gateway reviews are not usually published contemporaneously.

vii) Coalition ministers have made it clear in numerous speeches that the public have a right to know how their money is being spent. Universal Credit is costing, as an IT-based  programme, several hundreds of millions of pounds. It is not in keeping with the spirit of ministerial statements on openness that the DWP keep confidential the Starting Gate review on Universal Credit. It is the only independent report on the feasibility of the project.

viii) Universal Credit is known to be a risky programme which senior civil servants have acknowledged. The Starting Gate review is likely to show whether or not those risks are understood.

ix) In refusing our request the DWP has not given any reasons for stating that it is satisfied that the “public interest in maintaining this exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosure”.

DWP rejects our appeal

Our appeal came to nothing. It was refused by the DWP’s David Hodgson Stakeholder Manager, who said in a letter:

“The case has been examined afresh, and guidance has been sought from domain experts to ensure all factors were taken fully into account. I have reviewed the original decision carefully and have decided to uphold the original decision withholding information for the following reason.

“While we recognise that publication of this information would provide an independent assessment of the key issues and risks, we have to balance this against the fact that the review document includes operational details of a sensitive nature whose publication would prejudice effective conduct of public affairs.

“The Department is satisfied that the public interest in maintaining this exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”

The report was  released months ago

The DWP lodged the report in the House of Commons library months ago so it is in the public domain anyway. The department’s effort and time twice refusing the release of the report wasted public money.

Campaign4Change has now obtained a copy of the report via the House of Commons’ library.  We  will, separately, publish an article on the contents of the Starting Gate review report on Universal Credit.

Comment:

This episode suggests that officials at the DWP default to secrecy whatever the coalition says about openness and transparency. There are many superficially valid reasons officials can give to keep Gateway and Starting Gate reports secret. It is up to ministers to challenge that secrecy. If they don’t, the same mistakes and cycles will be repeated:

a) IT-related projects and programmes will continue to falter in secret, as they did under Labour

b) MPs and the media will try and find out the truth

c) Ministers will go on the defensive

d) The truth will eventually emerge and the coalition will be branded as inept when managing large IT-based projects and programmes – as inept as Labour.

If ministers publish Gateway progress reports now – as early warning reviews – we and others will applaud if early action is taken to stop or rescue a failing project. If ministers continue to pander to civil service secrecy the media and Parliamentarians will be right to criticise the coalition. Ministers have a chance to avoid the stigma of mismanagement of public funds. But will they take it?

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change, change management, Freedom of Information, Government IT, improving communications, managing change, procurement, public sector, public services, reforms, Universal Credit

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NPfIT: NHS CE is still positive after all these years

Posted on 26/09/2011 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

 Last week the Department of Health announced the dismantling of the NPfIT. In the Department’s press release the comments of Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, were harsh.

“The National Programme for IT embodies the type of unpopular top-down programme that has been imposed on front-line NHS staff in the past,” said Maude.

Not quite in accord with these sentiments is a letter that has been sent out by the Department of Health’s top civil servant Sir David Nicholson the Chief Executive of the NHS. Nicholson is the Senior Responsible Owner of the NPfIT. The letter sums up the current state of the NPfIT without a word of criticism of the scheme.

“The National Programme has provided us with a foundation, but we now need to move to more local decision making if we are going to truly unlock the potential of information to drive improvements for patients and achieve the efficiency and effectiveness required in today’s health service,” says Nicholson.

Having taken on the job in 2006, Nicholson was not responsible for the NPfIT – which was founded in 2002 – but he was appointed by Labour in part to promote the scheme within the NHS.

His positive view of the NPfIT remains a little out of step with the coalition’s criticisms. But Nicholson is part of the permanent civil service and ministers hold office temporarily. It’s easy to get the impression that senior officials see their ministers this way.

Nicholson’s stance reflects the view of senior civil servants that the NPfIT has been a success. Nicholson was party to a briefing in February 2007 of the then Prime Minister Tony Blair on the state of the NPfIT. The briefing paper was entitled “NPfIT Programme Stocktake and said  “ … much of the programme is complete with software delivered to time and to budget.”

In fact much of the National Programme is incomplete, late and the costs far exceed the original budgets, according to the Public Accounts Committee. Nicholson was knighted in 2009.

This is his letter last week to NHS chief executives on the “National Programme for IT and the latest steps to no longer run it as a centralised programme” …

Dear Colleague

In September 2010, we announced that the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) would no longer be run as a centralised programme and today I am writing to update you about the renewed steps being taken to achieve that change.

A modernised NHS needs information systems that are driven by what patients and clinicians want. Restoring local control over decision-making and enabling greater choice for NHS organisations is key as we continue to use the secure exchange of information to drive up quality and safety.

We are undertaking a review, led by Katie Davis, Managing Director for Informatics, of the full portfolio of Department of Health informatics applications and services to determine how we will take this work forward. I expect this to conclude and report in the Autumn. Alongside this, we are introducing new governance arrangements to support local decision-making, which we expect to be in place in the Autumn.

It is important to be clear that this review will build on the substantial achievements that have now been firmly established and are delivering real benefits to patients. Applications and services such as the Spine, N3 Network, NHSmail, Choose and Book, Secondary Uses Service and Picture Archiving and Communications Service will all carry on providing vital support to the NHS. Similarly, key national applications such as the Summary Care Record and the Electronic Prescription Service will continue to develop in line with our commitment to give patients real information and choice about their care.

We are working in partnership with Intellect, the Technology Trade Association, to develop proposals for how we can stimulate the healthcare IT and technology marketplace in future, to offer greater choice of supplier to local NHS organisations, while still achieving value for money across the service.

The National Programme has provided us with a foundation, but we now need to move to more local decision making if we are going to truly unlock the potential of information to drive improvements for patients and achieve the efficiency and effectiveness required in today’s health service.

Yours sincerely

Sir David

Comment:

There is no doubt that Nicholson’s actions are guided by sincerity and integrity. But his letter is a reminder that it is the civil servants that are in charge of Whitehall, not the ministers. The National Audit Office has exposed the blight on NHS IT of the National Programme for IT, as has the Public Accounts Committee and many others including academics.

Nicholson’s voice is the only one that really counts, though.

His views are in line with the institutional resistance in Whitehall to admit mistakes when anything undertaken by the civil service goes wrong. Senior civil servants who preside over failures and defend them in the face of outside criticism  – particularly criticism from MPs and the media – are much more likely to be knighted than those that share the concerns of outsiders.

Andrew Lansley should take control of his civil servants, which may set a precedent for a secretary of state, Department of Health. If this is beyond Lansley,  Francis Maude and Cameron should seek to exercise more control of the department.

Until ministers run the civil service, not vice-versa, reforms of central government IT, or indeed any major change in the machinery of government will not happen. All the signs are that senior civil servants are biding their time until after the next election when, they hope, reforms of government will have run out of steam. If the reforms fizzle out a great opportunity will have been lost.

NPfIT to be dismantled brick by brick

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change, change management, Government IT, NHS, npfit, Uncategorized

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End of NPfIT? – Campaign4Change on BBC R4 Today programme

Posted on 22/09/2011 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Link to Campaign4Change audio on BBC R4 Today programme

BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning reported a Daily Mail article that the National Programme for IT in the NHS is being scrapped and that a coalition announcement is to be made this morning.

The Mail says that the money spent on the NPfIT would pay for 60,000 nurses for a decade, and that the scheme will be replaced by a “cheaper alternative”.

It says that there will be a new urgency in “dismantling the scheme”. Campaign4Change told the BBC R4 Today programme this morning that the NPfIT is not being scrapped and that about £4bn has yet to be spent on it. It said that trusts have the freedom to buy their own IT systems but using their budgets. The NPfIT will continue to provide Cerner and Lorenzo systems that are subsidised centrally, which gives the NHS an incentive to continue using NPfIT.

There is a difference of opinion within Whitehall over the NPfIT: that the Cabinet Office takes a rigorously independent view of the NPfIT and wants to wind it down. The Department of Health’s civil servants at a press conference last year justified the spend on the programme and said the contracts with CSC and BT would continue.  Campaign4Change told Today that the Cabinet Office should have the final say, not the Department of Health.

The Government clearly wishes it to be known that the NPfIT is being scrapped but that is not what is happening in practice. Contracts with CSC, which at present are worth about £3.2bn, are unlikely to be scrapped because of the compensation that would have to be paid to the supplier. The contracts may be cut back  by about £800m, though the cost of deployments remaining may double. BT’s contracts worth more than £1bn are also likely to remain.

The Daily Mail says the NPfIT will be “replaced with cheaper regional alternatives” and that the Coalition will “today announce it is putting a halt to years of scandalous waste of taxpayers’ money on a system that never worked”.

“Following an official review, the ‘one size fits all’ IT project will be replaced by much cheaper regional initiatives, with hospitals and GPs choosing the IT system they need.

“And a new national watchdog will be established to ensure such huge sums can never again be thrown away on uncosted projects.”

The decision to accelerate the dismantling of the scheme has been made by Health Secretary Andrew Lansley and Francis Maude, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, says the Mail.

It quotes from what appears to be a leaked memo from the Major Projects Authority of the Cabinet Office which has been reviewing CSC’s contracts.

“The authority said the IT scheme, set up in 2002, is not fit to provide services to the NHS – which as part of austerity measures has to make savings of £20billion by 2014/15.

It concluded: ‘There can be no confidence that the programme has delivered or can be delivered as originally conceived.’

The report is said to recommend that the Government  “dismember the programme and reconstitute it under new management and organisation arrangements”.

It added: “The project has not delivered in line with the original intent as targets on dates, functionality, usage and levels of benefit have been delayed and reduced.

“It is not possible to identify a documented business case for the whole of the programme.Unless the work is refocused it is hard to see how the perception can ever be shifted from the faults of the past and allowed to progress effectively to support the delivery of effective healthcare.”

Daily Mail article on the NPfIT today

Department of Health announcement

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Posted in change, Government IT, NHS, npfit, procurement, public sector, Uncategorized

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Firecontrol: same mistakes repeated on other projects

Posted on 20/09/2011 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

A report published today by the Public Accounts Committee on the £469m Firecontrol project reads much like its others on government IT-enabled project disasters.

Margaret Hodge, chair of the Committee said:

“This is one of the worst cases of project failure that the committee has seen in many years. FiReControl was an ambitious project with the objectives of improving national resilience, efficiency and technology by replacing the control room functions of 46 local Fire and Rescue Services in England with a network of nine purpose-built regional control centres using a national computer system.

“The project was launched in 2004, but following a series of delays and difficulties, was terminated in December 2010 with none of the original objectives achieved and a minimum of £469m being wasted.

“The project was flawed from the outset, as the Department attempted, without sufficient mandatory powers, to impose a single, national approach on locally accountable Fire and Rescue Services who were reluctant to change the way they operated.

“Yet rather than engaging with the Services to persuade them of the project’s merits, the Department excluded them from decisions about the design of the regional control centres and the proposed IT solution, even though these decisions would leave local services with potential long-term costs and residual liabilities to which they had not agreed.

“The Department launched the project too quickly, driven by its wider aims to ensure a better co-ordinated national response to national disasters, such as terrorist attacks, rail crashes or floods. The Department also wanted to encourage and embed regional government in England.

“But it acted without applying basic project approval checks and balances – taking decisions  before a business case, project plan or procurement strategy had been developed and tested amongst Fire Services. The result was hugely unrealistic forecast costs and savings, naïve over-optimism on the deliverability of the IT solution and under- appreciation or mitigation of the risks. The Department demonstrated poor judgement in approving the project and failed to provide appropriate checks and challenge.

“The fundamentals of project management continued to be absent as the project proceeded. So the new fire control centres were constructed and completed whilst there was considerable delay in even awarding the IT contract, let alone developing the essential IT infrastructure.

Consultants made up over half the management team (costing £69m by 2010) but were not managed. The project had convoluted governance arrangements, with a lack of clarity over roles and responsibilities. There was a high turnover of senior managers although none have been held accountable for the failure.  The committee considers this to be an extraordinary failure of leadership. Yet no individuals have been held accountable for the failure and waste associated with this project.”

Comment:

Firecontrol was a politically-motivated project which used  bricks, mortar and IT to try and change the way people worked. The users in the fire service didn’t want a single national approach of nine new regional centres – complete with new hardware and software – just as NHS clinicians, in general, did not want the National Programme for IT [NPfIT]. The Firecontrol regional centres were built anyway and the NPfIT went ahead anyway.

One lesson is that, in the public sector, you cannot engage users who won’t support the scheme. If they want to change, and they want the new IT, they’ll find ways to overcome the technology’s deficiencies. If they don’t want the scheme – and fire personnel did not want Firecontrol – the end-users will be incorrigibly harsh evaluators of what’s delivered, and not delivered.

It’s better to get the support of users, and involve them in the prototype design and test implementations, long before the scheme is finalised. It’s different in the private sector because the support of users is not essential – those who don’t accept business change and the associated IT will be expected to quit.

So what today is the mistake that is being repeated? The Public Accounts Committee touched on it when it said that the Department for Communities and Local Government – which was responsible for Firecontrol –  “failed to provide appropriate checks and challenge”.

During the life of Firecontrol, the Office of Government Commerce carried out “Gateway reviews” which independently assessed progress or otherwise. The reviews  could have provided an early warning of a project that was about to waste hundreds of millions of pounds. But the Gateway review reports were not published. They had a limited internal distribution and, it appears, were ignored.

According to the Public Accounts Committee, a Gateway review in April 2004, near the start of the Firecontrol project, said the scheme was in poor condition overall and at significant risk of failing to deliver.

Why was this Gateway review not published? If it had, Parliament and the media could have held ministers to account – and perhaps have campaigned to stop the project before millions were thrown away.

There was indeed a media campaign in 2004 – and before – to have Gateway reviews published, but ministers – and particularly civil servants – said no.

Now the same thing is happening. The civil service has persuaded the coalition government to carry on Labour’s tradition of keeping Gateway reviews secret. So Parliament and the media will continue to be kept in the dark on whether a major project is going wrong.

By the time details of the reviews are published, perhaps years later in a report of the National Audit Office,  it may be too late to rescue the scheme. By then tens or hundreds of millions may have been wasted. Gateway reviews should be published around the time they are written, not years later.

Ministers do not have to pander to civil servants. They are paid to stand up to them. They receive a premium over the salary of MPs in part to be independent voices – to provide a challenge.

Subservient ministers in the DWP are among those who continue to allow Gateway reviews to remain hidden. If you ask the DWP under the Freedom of Information Act for the release of the Starting Gate report on Universal Credit (which I am told is not the same as a Gateway review report) the DWP will refuse your request. It refused mine.

So we have to accept the word of civil servants that the Universal Credit programme is going well; but haven’t there been enough IT-related disasters in government for all to know that the word of civil servants on whether things are going well needs to be tested independently? The publication of Gateway reviews – and Starting Gate reviews – could help outsiders hold a department to account. It’s time ministers began to realise this.

Are ministers such as Iain Duncan Smith in control of their departments – or are their civil servants in control of them?

Links:

Margaret Hodge on BBC “Today” programme 20/9/11 – “what could go wrong did go wrong” – did PA Consulting get away without blame?

What the NPfIT and Firecontrol have in common.

Firecontrol:  should PA Consulting share some responsibility for what happened?

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change, change management, Government IT, managing change, npfit, procurement, public sector, public services, risk, supplier relationships

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Agile – a series of London Tea Parties

Posted on 15/09/2011 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Anyone interested in agile techniques  – users and suppliers, public and private sectors – is invited to share ideas at a London Tea Party on 22 September at the Cafe Zest, 2nd Floor of the House of Fraser on Victoria Street, from 4pm – 6pm.

It is arranged by Abby Peel who has recently joined Mark O’Neill in the Innovation and Delivery team within the Government Digital Service. Peel is Head of Community.

Peel says that “AgileTea”  is an informal get-together for those who work with agile methods, are interested in it, or who know nothing about it but want to know more.

An example of agile in government is the Government e-petitions website which was launched recently to much public interest after being developed by the Innovation team in six weeks.

AgileTea will be the first of a regular series of informal, BarCamp style events that will bring together like-minded people to hear, contribute and engage in discussion of agile methods.

Each meeting will have guest speakers. Anyone can ask to give a short presentation of up to 10 minutes.  At the first AgileTea speakers will be Richard Pawson  from Naked Objects who’ll talk on “Experience of very large scale agile development at the Irish Department of Social Protection” and Mark Foden of Foden Grealy who’ll speak on “Where agile fits”.

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, change, change management, collaboration, Government IT, innovation, Lean, managing change, SME, Uncategorized

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Met Office has IBM secondee as CIO

Posted on 25/08/2011 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

The Met Office gained ministerial approval to appoint an IBM employee for a year as secondee CIO, until the end of October 2011, according to information released under the FOI Act.

It appears that the salary of the IBM executive David Young is being paid, at least in part, by the Met Office. In documents released under the FOI Act the Met Office has redacted [edited out] details of Young’s proposed remuneration and performance bonus.

As a trading fund within the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Met Office is required to operate on a commercial basis. It was part of the Ministry of Defence at the time of Young’s appointment. His recruitment was approved by the Secretary of State.

Internal emails show that the Met Office apparently overcame a recruitment ban and constraints on secondments.

Having your CIO seconded from your biggest IT supplier may be novel but it could be controversial because of the perception of a potential conflict of interest.

It would not the first time a public authority has been involved in a controversy after seconding an IBM employee as head of IT.

In 1993 a report of the district auditor criticised the then Wessex Regional Health Authority after it transpired that a member of the health authority was a director of IBM. The IBM director at Wessex promoted a controversial and successful bid for core systems to be supplied to the health authority by IBM and Andersen Consulting (later Accenture). The director later asked that his letter lobbying for the contract be destroyed.

The auditor also found that the Wessex authority bought an IBM mainframe without proper legal authority, the members of the authority having not been informed. The authority paid an unnecessarily high sum for the mainframe and there were doubts the machine was needed. A decision to proceed with the purchase of the mainframe at Wessex was made on the advice of the regional health authority’s new regional information systems manager who was an IBM secondee.

The Met Office, however, has given full consideration to the potential for a conflict of interest in appointing Young as its CIO. It said in a statement this week:

“Full consideration of any potential conflicts of interest regarding David Young’s appointment were fully considered prior to his appointment and his terms of engagement specifically cover these.

“The Met Office complies with specific rules set by the government with regard to procurement and purchases of IT equipment must be agreed by the Met Office Executive.”

The Met Office is one of IBM’s biggest customers. It says on its website: “We are now using an IBM supercomputer which can do more than 100 trillion calculations a second. Its power allows it to take in hundreds of thousands of weather observations from all over the world which it then takes as a starting point for running an atmospheric model containing more than a million lines of code.”

The Met Office reports that Young is responsible for the organisation’s IT strategy and ensuring that it adapts to support the business strategy.

Its website says that Young worked for IBM but does not make it clear he is still employed by the company while on secondment to the Met Office. It says that before joining the Met Office he “held a number of executive position within the IT industry, working for IBM, CSC and Siemens”.

Young’s Linked In profile says he is CIO at the Met Office and Director, System zStack and Mainframe Platform, Central Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa at IBM.

In response to an FOI request by Dave Orr, the Met Office has released internal emails relating to Young’s recruitment and later appointment. Young is described in the Met Office’s Register of Interests 2010/11 as an “Executive, IBM UK Ltd (non-active)”.

The email exchanges show that the Met Office was keen and anxious to employ Young. Talks over Young’s recruitment, initially as Chief Technology Officer, began in July last year and took several months to conclude.

In August 2010 John Hirst, Chief Executive at the Met Office, wrote to Young mentioning, among other things, a ban on recruitment.

“It was good to talk to you on the phone this afternoon. This is to confirm that you are interested in joining us at the Met Office and we are interested in offering you a post.

“As we discussed there are issues of the recruitment ban, terms of secondment and security clearances amongst others but we have both declared an intent to try and get something organised between us.”

Also in August 2010 Diana Chaloner, the Met Office’s Director of Human Resources, emailed IBM on the costs and restrictions relating to the “possible secondment of David Young”.

Her email said: “I will need to get confirmation from John Hirst (our CE) before committing to the costs as outlined below. Whilst I don’t see it as a problem, I do also need to seek a way to overcome external secondee restrictions placed on us by central government recently. I will attempt to get this moving as quickly as possible at this end.”

In another email to IBM in August 2010, Chaloner referred again to the costs of seconding Young. She said:

“Following John’s earlier meeting with David (in his garden!) Alan Dickinson [then the Met Office’s Director of Science and Technology] and I met him last week. John has now spoken to David and is keen to try to progress a secondment. I know David is very keen too, but inevitably, with all the various restrictions placed on us, cost may be an issue, as will enabling the secondment contract to be approved.

“Whilst this might be quite challenging , I think there are usually ways to manage these things, so would really like to understand cost and timing…”

The following month, September 2010, Chaloner emailed Hirst on the need for Young’s appointment to be approved.

Her email has in the subject heading: “IBM Confidential: Secondment of David Young to the Met Office”.  Says the email: “At the moment we cannot give a precise date for David to start his secondment. I did mention in an earlier email that there are some added constraints across Government, and one of those is around recruitment and secondments…”

In October 2011 Hirst emailed IBM about a possible delay in appointing Young. “I am sorry this has taken so long and been more complex than anticipated but the rules of engagement have changed at least twice over the last couple of months and therefore keeping things moving forward steadily has been more difficult. I am still confident we can conclude this although I have suggested to David we might need a weeks (sic) delay in starting … the contracts are signed and sitting in my draw awaiting final clearance of the admin hurdles so there is no decrease in my intent to make this happen.”

On 29 November 2011 Chaloner wrote to Hirst saying that Young’s appointment needed the approval of the Secretary of State. “… The situation is looking very positive but we require final approval from Secretary of State. I was told that there seemed no reason for the secondment not to be approved, but it has to go through the appropriate channels. I can only apologise in the delay in David starting, and continue to nudge it from this end, almost on a daily basis.”

Young was appointed by the end of December 2010. The business case for a new Chief Technology Officer (which became a CIO role) says the secondment from IBM would finish on 31 October 2011. It says there is a “need to bring a professional IT expert into the organisation, to reshape the function in order to achieve greater efficiency in delivery of information technology, as well as ensure it is fit for purpose in the future, hence the need, at this time, to manage this as a short term secondment.”

The Job Description, which is headed “Management in Confidence”, says the IBM secondee will “lead the IT function in the effective delivery of 24/7 IT services and enhance our world leading supercomputing and infrastructure capabilities to secure achievement of future corporate objectives.” The main responsibilities will include directing and co-ordinating 300 information technology, programme/project management professionals, and support staff…”

The job also involves overseeing the “selection, acquisition, development and installation of major information systems”. It further includes the need to “determine and manage all outsourced  external IT service provision as appropriate to meet service level agreements.”

Comment:

There is nothing wrong with the Met Office’s decision to hire an IBM secondee except perhaps that it underlines the reliance of the public sector on its major suppliers.

It’s clear that the Met Office has struggled hard to employ David Young because of his expertise. Nobody would understand the Met Office’s IBM systems better than IBM.

But we have seen evidence from the National Audit Office that suppliers all too often understand customer installations in the public sector better than the civil servants know their own systems. In the case of the NPfIT, auditors had to rely on suppliers to explain what they had been paid and why.

It’s time for the civil service to build up its expertise so that it ceases to rely on suppliers that dominate government IT.

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Posted in change management, Government IT, managing change, npfit, public sector, public services, supplier relationships, Uncategorized

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Capita says govt can save billions but frontline cuts are “criminal”

Posted on 24/08/2011 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Paul Pindar, Chief Executive of Capita, makes the valid point that billions of pounds can be cut from the costs of government back offices without the need for “criminal” cuts to frontline services such as police, libraries, youth centres or healthcare.

The Financial Times today quotes Pindar  as saying: “When you can see local authorities closing libraries, swimming pools, it’s criminal. It’s a political agenda. Billions of pounds could be saved and the public wouldn’t notice the difference.”

He said Capita, for example, could cut £2.5bn from the costs of police IT and human resources, without putting at risk uniformed jobs.

Comment:

Pindar sounds as if he’s making a pitch for more government work, which he probably is. But it’s hard to argue with what he says. Except that the savings can be made by SMEs rather than the big suppliers, like Capita, that already dominate government IT spending.    

It may cost more for the civil service to handle SME contracts rather manage a single large deal – but the savings may be greater through an imaginative use of IT and changes in working practices.

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Posted in change, change management, innovation, managing change, outsourcing, procurement, public sector, public services, reforms

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Open Government? Up to a point Lord Copper

Posted on 11/08/2011 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

There is much we know about Universal Credit.

Ian Watmore, the permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, has told MPs that the project is built on agile methods: it is split into two-to-three-week drops of code. The coding is divided into customer types  – and there are several thousand different types of customer. The simplest cases are those who have lost their job and the complicated ones are people who are in and out of work.

For each customer type the whole IT solution is being developed and is then tested with benefits claimants. Following agile principles, the problems encountered during testing are understood and the software re-coded.

The plan is to go live  with selected customer types by October 2013  – and it’s probably right that nobody in government will guarantee the deadline will be met.

This all sounds impressive but there’s one big drawback:  officials are refusing to release the “starting gate” review on the Universal Credit project.

Every major project now has to undergo a starting gate review to check it’s feasible before money is committed. It’s a good idea – and all credit to the team led by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude for enforcing it.

But officials are doing their best to stop starting gate reviews being published, even under the FOI Act. Officialdom  has even ignored an MP’s request for the starting gate report on Universal Credit. That MP, Richard Bacon, a Conservative member of the Public Accounts Committee, will pursue the matter.

Why the secrecy? 

It is likely that the civil service doesn’t want to publish starting gate reports for the reasons they don’t want to publish Gateway reviews: they’d rather not be accountable for what they say. If the advice is wrong it can be known years later when those involved have moved on. But the civil service would prefer that assessments of projects are not published while the advice is contemporaneous.

Hence the Department of Health has published Gateway review reports that are several years old. More recent reviews are published in a form that’s so heavily redacted – edited – that they contain no useful information.

Without the publication Gateway reviews,  the media, MPs and the public have no independent information on the progress or otherwise of large IT-based projects and programmes, unless they are scrutinised by the National Audit Office which has only limited resources. Without the publication of starting gates there’s no independent information in the public domain on the feasibility of big public sector projects and programmes.

So much for open government.

Links:

What is a starting gate?

The DH documents that mock open government

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, change, openness and transparency, public sector, public services, Uncategorized

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MP contacts Cabinet Office and No. 10 on future of NPfIT

Posted on 08/08/2011 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

A Conservative MP has sent detailed suggestions to the Cabinet Office and No.10 on what should happen with the NHS contracts, mainly CSC’s.

Richard Bacon, a member of the Public Accounts Committee, has proved to be an important influence in the Parliamentary debate over the future of the NPfIT. He has now sent to the Cabinet Office and Downing Street a recommendation that CSC’s NPfIT contracts should be cancelled and trusts left to buy systems of choice with a small amount of central subsidy.

His email reveals that NHS Connecting for Health, which is a part of the Department of Health that is responsible for delivering the NPfIT, is rehiring contractors and that the arbitration proceedings between the DH and Fujitsu over the supplier’s £700m legal claim are scheduled to continue until the end of next year. He also says that the DH failed to minute all meetings correctly, which could put the Department at a disadvantage in any legal action against CSC.

It’s possible that Bacon’s suggestions on CSC’s contracts will be considered by David Cameron who may be asked to intervene in any disagreement between the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority and the Department of Health.

The DH’s position is clear. The Health Secretary  Andrew Lansley and the NHS’s Chief Executive Sir David Nicholson are on record as expressing support for continuing CSC’s NHS IT contracts, although in a revised form.

The Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority under David Pitchford appears not to share the DH’s equanimity over CSC’s contracts. The recommendations of the Major Projects Authority have now gone to Downing Street.

Into the melting pot will go Bacon’s email to Pitchford, copied to No. 10, which is as follows:

Subject: Dealing with NHS IT’s Local Service Providers

“… As discussed, here are some comments on a possible way forward in dealing with Local Service Providers within the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

The LSP contracts have failed to deliver.  Fujitsu has been terminated.   The CSC contract needs to be terminated.  The BT contract has been renegotiated by reducing its delivery requirement by over 50% in return for a reduction in price of less than 10% (though it’s probably not worth terminating this now).

This would leave half of London acute Trusts, all but 11 Trusts in the South, and all Trusts in the North, Midlands and East outside of the Programme.

The simple answer is to have systems of choice for Trusts with small amounts of central subsidy.  Trusts would select and procure whatever system they wanted.  The NHS would make a contribution of, say, £2 million for every acute Trust purchasing a system within, say, 4 years (total cost for 166 Trusts is £332 million).  In return, the Trusts would allow regular reviews of progress and lessons-learned.  This is what the NHS did with primary care over ten years ago and it resulted in virtually all GP Practices computerising over that period.

GETTING OUT OF THE CONTRACTS

All Local Service Providers clearly failed to do what they promised:

All acute Trusts were to have Patient Administration Systems in place by 2006.

All clinical systems were to have been completed at all Trusts by 2010.

Lorenzo was supposed to ship in 2004.

The interim systems were not supposed to happen at all.

The problem is that in a legal dispute over something this complex, lawyers will be able to claim mitigating circumstances of every type and the NHS is likely to end up paying severance, even when terminating for clear non-delivery.  Problems for the NHS include:

CONTRACTS:  The contracts and deliveries are very complex.  It is easy to drown in the detail –  i.e. we couldn’t deliver ‘x’ because of ‘y’.  One could be arguing for ever.

MANAGEMENT:  CfH managed badly.  Records of Correspondence are poor.  Many meetings were not minuted correctly.  Governance was unclear.

PEOPLE:  Lots of different NHS people and contractors worked on the programme and many have since left.  The NHS made CfH fire the majority of its contractors in April 2010.  CfH has been reduced to writing to ex-employees and contractors and asking them if they will come in for interview.

CHANGE:  The NHS has been in constant change with the introduction of major initiatives such as 18 week wait and the current restructuring.  The LSPs will claim ‘moving targets’.

In truth, the LSPs have been paid a lot and delivered little.  The factors above are convenient mitigation for them, but made no difference to whether or not they delivered.  iSoft (now CSC) is supposed to have delivered Lorenzo in every year for the last decade and even claimed to have done so in annual reports when it was a public company.  However, in 2006 a joint report by CSC and Accenture stated that there was “no believable plan” for delivery and in 2011 we still only have one large acute Trust using it.

The Fujitsu case is in arbitration and this is due to run until the end of 2012.  At the end of that period, the waters will have been so muddied that – although they didn’t deliver – it will be obvious that there were many “mitigating” circumstances and the final compromise will end up with the NHS paying half of what Fujitsu is demanding – say £300 million, plus enormous legal fees.

The same scenario will apply to CSC if the NHS tries to terminate them.  CSC’s defence is very well organised.  Morally, the NHS is completely in the right – i.e. there has not been “delivery” – but no matter how clear cut the moral case, it will not be so clear cut legally speaking; the contracts won’t really help the NHS “win” convincingly because it is so complex.  We shouldn’t spend more than a year and a lot more taxpayers’ money fannying around with this.  It will just end up with arbitration followed by some sort of 50 per cent deal plus £100 million to the lawyers. The only way of avoiding this is getting the right people in a room and applying a big stick.  In my view, the only way to terminate is to use the line from the PAC report  i.e. :

You haven’t delivered.  We know that this is so complex and badly documented that we could end up paying you for that non-delivery.  We want to can the arbitration, and save the legal fees and settle.  We are prepared to pay something.  But be aware that the outcome of this settlement and how you behave will have a direct impact on all other business you do now or in the future with the UK government.

The Cabinet Office’s emphasis on a Whole-of-Relationship-with-the-Crown approach to suppliers is vital here.

Avoid being over a barrel by including as part of the settlement a two or three year contract to CSC for the ongoing maintenance of the interim systems already installed (at Acute Trusts and also the others), so that the NHS does not end up in the position that the South ended up in when Fujitsu was terminated (i.e. paying hundreds of millions to maintain a handful of systems). This will give Trusts the time to make and implement alternative plans.

You could take the same approach in order to can the Fujitsu arbitration.”

Will CSC’s £3bn NHS IT contracts be cancelled?

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Posted in legal disputes, managing change, NHS, npfit, outsourcing, public sector, public services, supplier relationships, Uncategorized

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Will CSC’s £3bn NHS IT contract be cancelled?

Posted on 08/08/2011 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Several people have asked us whether the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority will cancel  CSC’s NPfIT contract or whether draft memorandum of understanding between the Department of Health and the supplier will be finalised and signed.

The position is that a deal with CSC has not yet been agreed – and it’s not clear when it will be. Recommendations from the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority have gone to David Cameron, according to yesterday’s Observer.

We’ve also been asked whether the The Major Projects Authority has any authority over CSC’s NPfIT contracts.

In January Downing Street  gave the Cabinet Office a mandate to “intervene” in projects that are poor value for money, have hit delays or are failing. If there’s a dispute between the Major Projects Authority and a department, the Cabinet Office can ask David Cameron for a decision.  So if the Major Projects Authority wants to cancel the CSC NPfIT contract it can – up to a point.

If the DH doesn’t agree, and it probably wouldn’t, it would be up to Cameron, who would probably back the Cabinet Office’s decision. It would then be the DH that dealt with the consequences.

The Major Projects Authority is under a clear-thinking Australian David Pitchford who is understands what goes wrong with big IT projects and why. He reports to Ian Watmore who also has a good understanding.

These are some of the reasons Pitchford gives for failing government IT-based projects:

1.Political pressure
2. No business case
3. No agreed budget
4. 80% of projects launched before 1,2 & 3 have been resolved
5. Sole solution approach
6. No timescale
7. No defined benefits

Most of these apply to the NPfIT.

One view about what should happen is that at least the part of the CSC contract that relates to acute hospitals should be cancelled, and the NHS should be under no further contractual obligation to buy from CSC – that was always an artificial device. CSC should be under no further obligation to deliver to the NHS.

CSC’s obligation has been a means of Whitehall, through CSC, maintaining some control over trusts and justifying a large central team. End that obligation and you don’t need a large central team. Last week’s Public Accounts Committee report on the NPfIT detailed care records systems said that NHS CfH has 1,300 people.

Whatever happens CSC will maintain a strong  presence in the NHS, at least through its purchase of iSoft. Many trusts with iSoft systems are likely to replace them with iSoft – CSC – products. Patient administration systems are huge investments and changing them can be risky.

EC procurement rules mean that trusts will need to go open tender when their existing contracts expire but some will find ways of awarding new contracts to existing suppliers, if that’s their wish.

So CSC’s future in the NHS is assured, whatever happens with its NPfIT contracts.

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