Sharpe's Opinion

What I always find amusing about the NAO report is that it never identifies the obscene amount of money spent on governance as a problem.

In my experience there are three main areas where Government IT programmes fail to deliver what’s needed:

The requirement is generally too ambitious, driven by political pronouncements rather than operational need and doesn’t go through a rigorous prioritisation exercise. That leaves lots of hooks for change control later in the project.

There are too many stakeholders, so that any project is inevitably a fudged compromise that’ll suit nobody when it arrives. that leads to a lot of the governance expenditure because appeasing the stakeholders takes study after study after audit after inspection.

The requirement changes persistently through the programme, frequently without any control around how or why.

The conservatives talk a good game, but the vast majority of government IT isn’t citizen facing, it’s about running the departments. The web services approach is reasonable for small organisations, but not really once you get to the scale of some of the big departments. Essentially standards are great, there are so many to choose from. Of course their credibility wasn’t helped by Bagshaw not realising that National Programme for IT (NPfIT) is the NHS programme when she blogged about it on the Blue Blog recently. The New Media team talk about new meadia, not delivering operational IT to large organisations.

fwiw Tom Watson impressed me when he was in Cabinet Office, but his SCS were completely uninspiring and willing to accept whatever the sales reps told them.