Picture credit: austins_irish_pirate
It looks like the MOD has yet another poster child for The Trillion Dollar Bonfire. The latest Ministry of Defence Annual Report and Accounts make sorry reading; for a number of reasons, not the least being the following damning statements:
“It is difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of the failure of the Joint Personnel Administration programme” and: ”The lack of clarity in the design in the system at the outset has led significant costs being incurred by the Department which ought to have been entirely avoidable.”
I have analysed Government ‘IT failures’ over the past ten years and concluded that the fundamental cause is the Government’s persistence with approaching every problem as if it is simply a large IT challenge that can be entrusted to a fairly small group of purveyors of large IT solutions (sic).
Clearly Government’s thinking and confidence are misplaced, because we see the damning evidence so regularly.
The song remains the same
The JPA section of the report is yet another sorry litany of a failed Government initiative. It is a familiar, but still frightening, story of an apparently flawed design being poorly implemented and managed. All of which inevitably leads to a flawed business case; even if programme recovery eventually mitigates the early year shortcomings, the anticipated benefits will be diminished or obiliterated.
Over the past five or six years, the Government has placed too much confidence in so-called ‘new technology’ to achieve ambitious cost-savings. Many of these initiatives, however, create not only massive disappointment but also huge and unexpected costs, due to an apparent inability of Departments and major suppliers to deliver the goods.
Collateral damage
In this instance, though, it is not just the taxpayers who will suffer. The reported JPA failures show that service pay processes have been severely disrupted and created financial hardship for some of those affected; while others have been overpaid. The Government has been here before, of course, e.g. with the Tax Credits fiasco, but does not seem to have learned any lessons whatsoever.
One step forward, four steps back?
I am gobsmacked by this particular failure though because I know from personal experience that service payroll automation was computerised efficiently in the 1970s so the MOD can’t really play the customary Governmental joker card: “it’s a very complicated situation and we’re doing the best we can…”
I know that computerised Army pay used to work very well because I served in the Army for 8 years [in the 1970s] and I never had an incorrect payslip. Neither did my comrades, who would have soon let everyone know if they had.
So why, nearly thirty years later, can’t the MOD get things right now?
Perhaps some of the Government’s technology suppliers need a bit of squarebashing, or a few weeks embedded with their ‘end users.’
I suggest that it is time for the Government to forget about IT initiatives and start thinking instead about building effective information systems. Is this too much to ask?
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