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Monday October 10 2005 |
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Monday October 10 2005 |
By Jean Eglesham
Suppliers of information technology to the government will be held to account more in future as part of a drive to eradicate the huge systems failures of the past, the minister in charge of e-government will say today.
"We've had high-profile mistakes in a minority of cases . . . we're putting a system in place now that should make that sort of systematic failure a thing of the past," said Jim Murphy, the Cabinet Office minister with responsibility for e-government, yesterday. In a speech to a London conference today, sponsored by the Financial Times, Mr Murphy will pledge the government will use better management and monitoring of suppliers to "tackle the generic causes of failure".
An IT strategy covering the next seven to 10 years, due to be published this month, will include the use of government "portfolios", said Mr Murphy. These portfolios are designed to get maximum advantage from the public sector's IT spend of Pounds 14bn a year by introducing controls on suppliers across all the contracts they have with the government, rather than dealing with each one individually.
"At the moment, if you're looking at a big supplier like EDS, they'll have one arrangement with the Department for Education, another with the Department for Work and Pensions and so on. One of the things we're committed to doing is changing that to a system of portfolio management," Mr Murphy told the FT.
Other measures in the strategy include the phased introduction of projects, such as the recent "soft", largely unpublicised, launch of the Directgov website, which amalgamates a number of government sites.
"Rather than big bang introductions, where you go live and do everything on day one, we're moving much more to strategic roll-outs," said Mr Murphy.
The new strategy would underline the government's new willingness to pull the plug on projects even after money had been invested, the minister said. He cited the recent cancellation of the proposed road charging system for trucks as an example of ministers having learnt the lessons of past projects where "if you've started and put money into it, then you just keep going".
The paper will pledge a "real step change in IT professionalism across the public sector", the minister said.
The government is likely to face a high degree of scepticism from industry professionals, as well as political opponents, in its determination to improve the quality of its IT management.
Labour has suffered a series of high-profile cost-overruns and system failures on big projects in the eight years since it came to power. Examples include the scrapping of a child benefit payment system in 2002 at a reported cost of almost Pounds 700m; problems with the launch of the tax credit system in 2003, which deprived millions of families temporarily of benefits; and teething troubles with a new Passport Agency computer which left about 500,000 people waiting for passports in 1999.