Just to prove that I'm not totally biased against Lib Dems, I want to take a moment to praise Dr Vincent Cable MP. Recently he has been writing to department and asking them how much cancelled IT projects have cost them since 1997.As you'd expect, some of them haven't answer on the grounds that it will cost too much to do so, or, and this is my favourite, because they had a name change therefore cannot answer questions about things that happened under the old name - quality blag. e.g. the Department of Transport was changed to Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions in 1997, then to Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions in 2001, and back to Department of Transport in 2002.
Where he has managed to elicit an answer it has been quite scary. The clearest example of this is DEFRA who, apparently, cancelled a document and records management project called Catalyst in March 2006 after the pilot scheme results were not satisfactory. The cost of the project at cancellation? £12,642,000.
4 comments:
Looks like Defra have more where that came from:
http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/finance/resource-accounts/accounts0506/resourceaccounts-0506.pdf
Page 87
Cash losses:
• one case totalling £2,266,620 relating to IT staff costs capitalised in previous years which cannot be
assigned to a specific project.
Fruitless payments and constructive losses:
• one case totalling £1,656,224 relating to projects for the Exotic Disease Control Project which has become
obsolete;
• one case totalling £1,371,189 relating to costs incurred under the Electronic Data Record Management
framework which does not support the replacement Catalyst Project;
• one case totalling £3,998,807 relating to balances cleared following the discontinuation of the Phoenix
Project, of which £1,398,956 has been written off during 2005-06.
Seems like they had already wriiten off £1.4m on the predecessor to Catalyst.
ouch!
Dizzy,
as you know more about such things, perhaps you can tell me the answer to this.
Companies normally by a piece of software off the shelf, and if necessary, customise it.
The government always seems to make everything from scratch.
Is this perception correct, and if so what could be the reason?
Because everyone knows that you must involve CapGem or EDS and they will always build bespoke.
To be fair a lot fo companies do bespoke to. The difference is it's their money they are spending so they tend to get it right.
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