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Helping Find the Way to Better Public Sector IT
IT in the UK public sector is under intense scrutiny and needs to deliver better results: much investment has been made which has too often failed to deliver. Projects have a history of being protracted and complex, offering significant challenges to all involved. The questions being asked are: has the government lost its way? does it really know how to obtain success from these big projects? This paper looks at the challenges posed by public sector IT and suggests better ways of managing these projects to deliver benefits quickly.
Key Findings

  • Government IT is challenging: projects are high profile; public sector organisations are risk-adverse; the scale is huge with frequently changing demands of departments and agencies; there are legacy systems, different applications and many, often inconsistent, sources of data which are hard to discover and difficult to bring into new applications
  • Across all parts of the public sector, pressure is increasing to bring together different IT systems and different data sources to develop pan-department services which provide maximum benefits for the citizen whilst enabling working practices to be more efficient. Here, re-use of existing systems and timely access to accurate data is of the essence.
  • However, government IT has a poor track record. Too much money is wasted on complex projects which fail to deliver the anticipated benefits. The political objective to have consistent services delivered locally across the country with centralised reporting requirements, and (often) frequent changes in requirements, means that at present neither citizens nor public sector employees are sufficiently engaged in the process, with the result that big projects often fail to deliver the expected benefits.
  • In IT, the fact that technology changes is a given – but much already exists to solve these problems and if used properly, can enable government to take a more staged approach to IT developments, using standardised interfaces which enable the easy integration of legacy systems, delivering quick wins and a roadmap to service transformation. The challenge is managing this to deliver best value.
  • Government urgently needs to re-assess its approach to large-scale IT projects. It needs to understand technology better to be able to talk more openly to suppliers. It needs to better understand the way risk is handled and that if project risk is totally passed to suppliers, then this will have a cost attached and will not necessarily deliver the benefits sought. In the long term, passing all of the risk to the supplier may lead to a vicious circle in which trust is lost between customer and supplier and all projects are carried out in a confrontational atmosphere.
  • Government also needs to improve its approach to project organisation: the fact that procurement cycles are so long means that the business issues and available technologies have often changed by the time the project starts, hence a further reduced chance of success. To improve the situation, a detailed, upfront project strategy is required to assess the strategic choices available and make sure that they still meet the business’ needs over time.
  • The other major change in project management needed is to take a more modular approach; structuring the project into manageable chunks with shorter timescales and quicker deliverables. Such an approach should also involve users early in seeing what the project is going to deliver.
It is possible to deliver IT projects successfully in the public sector; the keys to success lie in combining sensible business and technology strategies within a strong project management framework and working in a spirit of mutual understanding and respect.