The Blair IT projects
Published: 27 Jun 2007 12:08 BST
...almost a million taxpayer records, overpayments to the tune of £100m and payment delays for hundreds of thousands of taxpayers.
EDS and Capgemini nevertheless pocketed nearly £250m for their work. EDS's contribution to DWP IT also included the crashing of almost 100,000 desktop PCs during an upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP.
Junior doctors' online applications (2007)
The Medical Training Application Service (MTAS) was supposed to revolutionise the way in which trainee doctors applied to become consultants. In line with the modern, IT-friendly new NHS, this application process clearly had to be taken online, not conducted by the boring, old-fashioned method of traditional interviews.
This may even have worked out, if it weren't for the fact that some junior doctors' applications were easily visible to other users of the system, and for the way in which the system inexplicably treated an online questionnaire as a better indicator of good doctoring than qualifications or experience. Unsurprisingly, MTAS has been suspended.
The 30,000 young doctors who had been compelled to use MTAS while it was still operational were not at all pleased, as many felt that the automation of the application process had resulted in merit being ignored. The debacle even claimed the scalp of the chairman of the British Medical Association, James Johnson, who was deemed to have not conveyed the doctors' outrage sympathetically enough.
The NHS's National Programme for IT (ongoing)
Where to start? The way in which the vendors completely oversold the timescale of the project? The compatibility problems that came from importing a US software package into a radically different healthcare system? The bullish, and sometimes bullying, nature of the man in charge?
Even that man, Richard Granger, will now walk away. The world's largest civilian IT project, the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) is running years behind schedule and still lacks sufficient buy-in from the medical community. To Granger's credit, he set up the initial contracts with strong stipulations of non-payment in the absence of delivery, but those tactics — while stemming the haemorrhaging of NHS money that would have otherwise occurred — also resulted in the departure of one of the scheme's prime contractors, Accenture, and the near collapse of the company whose software formed the basis for everything, iSoft.
NPfIT continues, and the country watches with bated breath to see whether it manages to pull through.
ID cards (ongoing)
This is not so much a past disaster as a potential future catastrophe. Privacy issues aside, the ID card scheme is set to cost — at the bare minimum — over £5bn, while creating an ID database that even the police think will be hacked.
The lack of a transparent breakdown of costs is also causing great concern, as is the lack of proven biometric technology, but the biggest worry is the fact that there seems to be no clear rationale for the project. Is it for combating benefit fraud? Online fraud? Illegal immigration? National security? All have been given as reasons, but it has not been proved that any of those problems is solvable with ID cards — except for the issue of benefit fraud. And the cost of introducing ID cards would far outweigh the savings to be made by stopping benefit fraud.
The fight against e-crime (ongoing)
Once upon a time, the UK had a National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) which, as the name suggests, tackled technology-related crime. Then, for some reason, the NHTCU became one of several agencies to be folded into the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), a sort of British FBI.
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Businesses have since criticised SOCA for not openly telling them how to combat the rising tide of e-crime, and praised the late NHTCU for having performed that task very well indeed. SOCA has defended itself by pointing to the value of co-operation between its various departments, but it has been claimed that SOCA's e-crime-fighting credentials have been harmed by the decision to replace experienced police officers with "spooks".
Meanwhile the police are complaining that local specialist units are no longer able to cope with the levels of e-crime. These complaints could lead to a new national e-crime unit — rather like the old NHTCU, in fact.
E-voting (ongoing)
Some things seem to get more complicated with added technology, and electronic voting is one. The main problem seems to be the lack of an accessible audit trail, but systems design and security are also likely to cause some sleepless nights come election time, according to the Open Rights Group (ORG).
The ORG's report in June followed its monitoring of e-voting trials at this year's local elections. Of particular concern was the fact that these systems perform more slowly than manual counting, while costing a whole lot more. Even without these factors, the ORG went so far as to call e-voting a "threat to democracy".
To be fair, it is not yet certain whether e-voting will become widespread, but the government's track record on IT projects of this size does not inspire confidence.
Gordon Brown has a low base from which to start, so on Wednesday might the fortunes of our public-sector IT projects take a turn for the better?
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