What an amazing piece of evidence Jack Straw, the Secretary of State for Justice, gave to the Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee last week. He said,"In all the departments that I have worked in so many of these [IT] schemes end up over budget and over time and are not quite up to spec.... It is very frustrating that so many people, including the private sector, are taken in by snake oil salesmen from IT contractors who are not necessarily very competent and make a lot of money out of these things. I am pretty intolerant of this."A startling display of honesty from Straw don't you think? He's basically just acknowledged that the Government regularly get taken in by consultants who sell them crap, produce crap, and charge them highly for the crap.
Question Secretary of State. If you're so intolerant of it, why does the Government keep giving out tenders to the same companies if they're nothing but con artists? It couldn't possibly be because some of them donate oodles of cash to the Labour Party or because so many of the projects are PFI so can be hidden of the balance books? Could it?
Amazingly, as he continued to give evidence to the Committtee he also accepted Lib Dem MP David Howarth's criticism that "the in-house team is not expert enough to judge what is being said to them and that is how these things go wrong" saying "It is a real problem". In other words, they not only get fleeced by IT consultants but their own IT staff are cluevoid too. Joy!
Hat Tip: Croydonian for mentioning this to me
11 comments:
The disregard for taxpayers money is quite shocking. Like you said Dizzy, a company screwing up once is once too many, but for them to then get awarded other contracts is jaw-dropping. Why is it legal to give contracts to organisations that have strong political ties?
Dizzy gives a very good translation of Jack Straw's NewSpeak.
In a nutshell Jack is saying: 'We're unable to stop wasting taxpayer's money.'
Now Jack..and this is very important.... WE ALL KNOW THAT
Brown blames the state of the NHS on 'lack of investment' at PMQ's. Candid.
I'm surprised you take the lazy Private Eye line that public sector IT contracts are usually characterised by wicked IT consultants fleecing naive civil servants. I've made a living selling technology to the public sector for 18 years. It's a highly competitive market; margins are lower than in the real world and entry costs are high. When I've seen projects go wrong (and I've seen a few) it's normally been because either the customer's project management team has been incompetent or the customer makes fundamental changes to the requirements post-contract - often becasue a minister has stood up in Parliament and made a pledge without understanding the possible IT implications
Wow now that is important news,one of da management has found out their IT is rubbish now wait and see if anything is done about it,more money will be thrown at it and someone will say the same words in a years time and so it goes on.
I don't take the lazy Private Eye line on public sector IT contract being characterised by wicked IT consultants. I take the Dizzy line of experience having had to work with three of the major four players and finding their IT consultants to mostly be technical idiots who talk the talk very well but are stuck in the past applying waterfall development strategies rather than agile ones which are fair better suited to rapid changing requirements that so often occur in Government projects.
the customer makes fundamental changes to the requirements post-contract
Wouldn;t matter if you were Agile and developing with fast small scoped interations rather than using waterfall. Like I say, not a lazy Private Eye line, but Dizzy's professional experience line. The vast majority of these analysts and consultants are superb at wasting money on scoping out grandiose schemes that will never deliver in budget or on time. If they concentrated on descoping and producing tangible working code and system within small iteration they would deliver something regularly for the money spent. And if scope changed, or requirements changed they could quite easily be scoped into a new iteration.
All the Government has to do is start using Agile and XP methodolgy and they will benefit in that their projects will deliver something rather than having projects run and run and run and then get canned with a budget write off. Sadly, the main players are not very good at Agile and talking the talk about how they get scope and design massive systems will almost always result in a shit at the end. Hell I have systems that have to interface with that sort of crap daily.
In all seriousness, this is obviously a Labour line - it got fed to us recently by Mike Gapes, Lab MP for Ilford Sth, at a meeting about the proposed closure of a local Hospital. He got his knickers thoroughly in a twist trying to save the hospital (which is in his constituency) from Govt cuts, whilst trying to defend the Government.
I have to say that we Tories sat there, open-mouthed, as he quite clearly labelled Govt ministers as incompetent at commissioning major IT projects. Then we fell around laughing.
We need more geek MPs. Any offers?
Well said Dizzy. From personal experience I would have to concede that Civil Service IT project management tends to be crap, but the consultants are often worse than useless.
As an ultimate end user I've had products presented to me by IT mgt and their consultants. Faced with questions about how to do x or y, the consultant will just turn round and say 'oh you don't want to do that'... 'er yes I do, and I specifically said so at the scoping meeting we had with you six months ago' 'Well, yes, but we couldn't see any real reason why you would you want to do that. You can do this instead".. and so on.
Mott MacDonald and the Firelink Project being a prime example. Mott MacDonald prime objective after initially negotiating the contract on behalf of the Fire Brigades for the then ODPM, is to now frustrate the implementation of the project, in order to maximise their profits.
The whole project is a another IT disater waiting to happen at huge cost to the tax payer.
"charge them highly for the crap."
You mean, of course "charge us highly for the crap."
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