The Department of Work and Pensions has, like most departments, spent large sums of money on IT projects in the past few years. It also has great plans to spend much more over the coming years. There has of course been project abandonment, such as the Contact Management system that IBM was meant to deliver but the Department scrapped at a cost of £4,966,939 to the taxpayer, but largely it's full steam ahead for the DWP.
Over the coming four years, the DWP plans to spend around £1.2bn on IT projects and what's important to note here is that the delivery dates for the largest financial pot of this spending (approx £1bn), will be sometime in 2010, after the next General Election. That means that someone else will be lumbered with the (inevitable?) mess.
The biggest single slice of this spending comes in the form of the "Pensions Transformation Project" which will apparently, "transform the Pension Service, bringing together business and IT change in ways that improve customer service and deliver efficiencies." The current projected cost is £829m.
Call me a cynic but with planned costs like that, the project needs to be monitored very closily by MPs for deliverables and cost overruns. If it isn't the chances are it will become another NHS Connecting For Health abortion.
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