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Public Sector: IT Projects

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on raising this important issue and applaud the thoughtfulness and balance of his contribution. Although our emphasis is different on some matters at least, as he will hear—possibly to his surprise—we are in accord. I also declare two interests: I am a former member of the Cabinet Office Strategy Board, and my wife is the managing director of a technology company supplying to government. Information technology can transform the effectiveness of almost any major institution. For government, it offers the prospect of new products and services for the citizen, with previously unimaginable speed and convenience. It brings mobility, enhanced capability in the field and services available anywhere at any time. It enables policy-makers to collect and analyse massive amounts of data and to acquire new and penetrating insights. It can facilitate a step-change in operational productivity and effectiveness. Technology can enable us to fight crime more effectively, to deliver better health and education outcomes or to improve our overburdened transport system. Yet no one should underestimate the awesome difficulty of introducing new IT systems in practice. I have been closely involved as a non-executive director with companies that have been among the most successful in the world at deploying technology. I have witnessed at first hand what a herculean task it can be and how much capability is needed to do it well. At the BBC, I oversaw the transition of the corporation from an analogue rustbelt to a digital pioneer. That long journey, with plenty of stumbles and trip-ups along the way, demonstrated to me just how difficult it is to make the right decisions on infrastructure, how hard it is painstakingly to re-engineer core processes and to integrate different systems and what a challenge it is for any organisation and its people to acquire wholly new skills and capabilities. Whitehall came a little late to a full and rich understanding of how the true power of technology can be unleashed to achieve better public outcomes. Decades of underinvestment in the UK public sector in general and in technology in particular were part of the reason for that. Ian Watmore’s appointment as essentially the Government’s chief technology officer marked a sea change. Now, the Government’s leadership in technology, in the Cabinet Office and the departments, is the strongest functional support in government. I include Richard Granger in that. Ian Watmore, John Suffolk and their colleagues have professionalised the IT function within Whitehall. Alongside the Office of Government Commerce, they have sought to improve the procurement process. The technology market is very competitive, and government is undoubtedly striking hard bargains. The CIOs have begun to wrestle with cross-governmental issues such as identity and interoperability. They have championed the importance of improving the service to the citizen. If you renew your motor vehicle licence online, sort out your pension entitlements in minutes, not months, or navigate your way to some critical piece of information on Directgov, you will appreciate the improvement that they have wrought. Most technology in the public sector works seamlessly—it is not a disaster—and we never hear about it, which is the way of the world. However, it is plain that some technology does not work well and some projects have not gone well. We need to learn the lessons of that and improve. Many thoughtful people in the system, and there are many of them, believe that success on large projects would be more assured if the specification process were far more sophisticated than it is now. They believe that can best be achieved by a far more intensive dialogue between the purchaser and potential providers in advanceof the formal bidding process and before the specification is carved in stone. Such a Green Paper dialogue would need to involve all practitioners, not just technologists. The line managers and the policy makers must also own the specification, and, eventually, the procurement. The dialogue should cover outcomes and the means of delivering them; it should identify what is deliverable and not just desirable; and it must be a true partnership and joint venture involvingall parties. Once the dialogue is over, the Government need to settle the specification far more speedily than they sometimes do, and to a previously declared timetable. Many suppliers justifiably complain about the length and expense, as well as the limitations of the current process. I have one last point on procurement. This is not aimed at anybody present. Ministers have sometimes made unachievable demands of systems and have as a result launched a ship holed below the waterline that will never float. OGC needs—and here is the echo of what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said earlier—an independent gateway process to vouchsafe that the scope is truly deliverable before the bidding process begins; and, while I am at it, if, wholly commendably, Gus O’Donnell can publish the departmental reviews, could he not, with benefit, extend transparency to the gateway process too? I have already said that most technology projects in the public sector succeed—they do. None the less, I suspect that the failure rate is higher than in the private sector. I do not think that the reason for that is likely to lie with the technology companies, for self-evidently they work freely across both public and private sectors; rather I fear that the skills gap lies elsewhere and in the public domain. Managing a complex IT project tests the most skilled manager. He or she will face myriad issues, and only a few will be purely technological. Entrenched interests, for example, will dig in and resist system change. Therefore, managing a large IT project normally means managing whole system change. That requires not only a highly and widely skilled senior responsible officer but managers with the appropriate skills set throughout the system undergoing change. These skills are not yet widely available in Whitehall. Successive Cabinet Secretaries have identified this issue, and Gus O’Donnell is running hard with this particular ball. His vision is to add modern business disciplines to the silky private office skills of the old mandarinate. That process of training has long begun. But until it is complete the drivingof many large projects in government will remain significantly underpowered. There is much to be pleased with. Public sector IT in the UK is undergoing a fundamental transformation. It is a job not yet done, but one very much begun.