Convergence Conversation

The public sector "business plan" and IT

[Dave Birch] I'm not the only one who wonders if political meddling in IT isn't a major cause of chaos and delay in the public sector.

Certainly when it comes to IT it's easier to think of the public sector as a series of small businesses - departments, quangos, NGOs, NHS trusts, police forces - that occasionally work together but more often work against each other, cynics would say.

[From Editor's Blog: Time to take the politicians out of technology? - Public Sector - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com]

But there's a fundamental error in that perspective. Government is not made up of small business -- in fact it not made up of businesses of any kind, and nor should it be, and nothing annoys me more in meetings that people from the public sector talking about their "business plan" when they are not and never will be a business (it's just management consultant guff) -- but a variety of cottage industries, co-operating and competing almost at random. Every single week there's a story like this in the papers:

Northern Ireland IT disaster leads to £130m arrears... Government auditor can't sign off accounts, original specifications inadequate

[From News – Computerworlduk - The latest, breaking IT news, reviews and analysis on Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe Reader, IBM, Open Source]

And it doesn't seem to be getting any better, despite endless reviews, councils, audits and so forth. No lessons appear to be learned, whether its for the world's biggest IT project or a departmental website.

Surely the key issue is accountability. I remember, many years ago, working on a networking project for a large British retailer. At that time, they had another outsourcing project going on. This failed miserably and wasted millions of pounds, so naturally the IT director was fired. Not retired early on a massive gold-plated pension, or sent home on gardening leave, or shuffled to another department, but fired. I'm convinced the reason that so many gigantic public sector IT projects crash and burn is because it's no-one's fault when they do: not the civil servants, not the management consultants, not the systems integrator and not the hardware and software suppliers. I'm absolutely not saying the problem rests only with the civil servants, but with everyone in that chain. If the government spends a hundred million pounds on a project that gets scrapped, well, so what? All of these people have been paid, and they get to move on to planning the next hundred million pound disaster: So from their point of view, what's the problem?