Friday, November 19, 2004
System failure
This has not been a good year for major public sector IT projects, or for IT projects in general.
An inquest into the Court Service's Libra system was published last year, and we're now onto the fourth project designed to provide the court service with a case management system. A recently leaked government document revealed that the Department for Constitutional Affairs is concerned about software errors and fit for purpose issues.
Last month, Computer Weekly reported:Magistrates' courts across England and Wales are largely autonomous and many have their own way of doing things. But the NAO said the Department for Constitutional Affairs "sought automation as a priority before questioning the existing business processes".
In response the department said it recognised that development of best business processes should have come before seeking an IT solution. However, with legacy equipment in danger of failing, it was under pressure to deliver new systems.
Also, the department, like the NHS in its implementation of a £2.3bn IT-led modernisation programme, pointed out that it did not have the authority to impose business process change on the independent Magistrates' Courts Committees. And it was reluctant to attempt further major change while the committees were going through other reforms.
But putting IT before consideration of business processes made it "difficult to obtain a single view of IT requirements across the various committees and this contributed to the difficulties in developing the new system", according to the report of the Public Accounts Committee. Which is a long way of saying that there was a failure to research existing processes and contexts of use.
The result is a system that cannot cope, for example, with offenders who move house, from one court's jurisdiction to another.
Last week, higher education minister Dr Kim Howells faced the music before the Education and Skills Committee over the UKeU (UK eUniversities) debacle. He admitted that a lot of money was put into constructing a platform and not enough into content - and there was a lot of ignorance about courses and added The people in charge should have been much more sensitive to the needs of students around the world. I doubt that Howells is the person who knows most about why this project failed - he has many other responsibilities. The fact that he has highlighted the lack of research concerning context of use speaks volumes. The Education and Skills Committee is expected to report on UKeU early next year.
This week, we've seen the resignation of the chief of the Child Support Agency (CSA), following computer chaos and a rapidly rising payments backlog. It seems the CSA system is unable to cope with real life, and suffered from unclear specifications from the outset. Webcast of Committee proceedings.
Also this week, Jonathon Ford resigned as managing director of the National Assessment Agency, which oversees national curriculum tests. This followed publication of a critical report which, among other things, documented IT failures such as a "poorly planned" implementation of web publishing of test results. The website suffered from a range of problems and collapsed when accessed by a high volume of users.
There have also been private sector failures - for example Sainbury's recent scrapping of a new logistics system which has apparently "not delivered". But we tend to hear less about them, largely I suspect because the private sector is better at keeping failures under wraps.
I suggest that there are two common threads running through these stories. The first is an attitude of 'we know best' on the part of senior decision makers, leading to unwarranted assumptions about how people work, erroneous requirements specifications, and finally systems that are not fit for purpose. If the requirements aren't right, it doesn't really matter whether there are software errors: perfect code will be useless if the system doesn't do what is needed.
The second thread is a belief that IT, merely through its existence, changes business processes and people's behaviour. If IT systems cannot deal with necessary processes and real life, people will be forced to work around them, forced back to manual systems, forced to make up for system failures themselves. That's why we have a CSA that currently has several systems, including manual ones, trying to do the same job, as staff try to reconcile people's lives and inadequate software; why we have hospital information systems with severely out-of-date data that cannot be trusted; and why court service workers have to use multiple terminals to answer the simplest question about a single person.
Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee chairman Sir Archy Kirkwood, speaking about the CSA case, said this week that, "This is not just about computers". He was talking about a general management failure within the CSA, but he could as easily have been referring to a problem with the way management thinks about projects involving computers.
1:02 PM|
link to this item
|
0 comments
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
|
