Sarah Arnott

There is no longer any doubt about technology’s central role in everything the government does, and everything it plans to do in the future.

With the £4bn Defence Information Infrastructure, the £6bn NHS IT scheme, and the £7bn transformation agenda at the Department for Work and Pensions – to name but three – the scope of the projects already under way is unprecedented.

And the scale of those waiting in the wings is similarly breathtaking. National biometric identity cards, electronic border controls, the children’s database, national police intelligence systems, the London 2012 Olympics, the shared services plan to cut administrative costs by sharing back-office systems such as human resources and finance between multiple organisations – the list goes on, and the numbers, and the risks, rise ever higher.

One of the main lessons learned from the IT debacles of the late 1990s was the need for adequate programme management skills on the government side.

But perhaps more crucial to future successes will be supplier capacity to deliver so many large-scale, high-profile systems at the same time.

There are already whispers on the industry side about the cost – both direct and indirect – of bidding in so many major, labour-intensive procurements simultaneously, with no guarantee of any business at the end of it. And that is before any project even reaches implementation.

It is not a question of giving commercial companies an easy ride with taxpayers’ money. It is about the reality of there being only a finite number of people with the necessary skills.

Multiple large-scale projects are nothing new. But so many, of such magnitude, on top of what is already being delivered, necessitate a pause for thought.

In an interview last autumn, Richard Granger, director general of NHS IT, told Computing that one of the reasons for what he called the ‘variable performance’ of
his major suppliers was the time it had taken, after the deals were signed in 2003, for the market to scale up to the size of the challenge.

‘These are challenging targets, at a massive scale, needing 10,000 people working on them, in an immature industry, so it was particularly challenging to mobilise the resource,’ he said.

There is nothing to suggest the situation is any better now. With those 10,000 people already absorbed, it may even be worse. Industry-watchers are also predicting that shared services will be as disruptive to the supplier market as the health service contracts have been. Industry consolidation is all well and good, but may cause an already small pool to shrink even further.

It is well to learn the lessons of the past, but they can also be applied to the bigger picture: incremental, phased implementation is not just a good idea for individual programmes, it should be applied across the board.

It is not that hard, but it does mean a bit of joined-up government.

The Kelly programme, run by Whitehall’s buying agency the Office of Government Commerce, is designed with precisely this in mind. The plan is to make best use of
market capacity and help cut costs by improving public sector procurement
planning. One study – construction – has been completed. A second is in the final stages, and a third is about to start.

A technology Kelly market would be useful, but there is a question as to whether it is possible to assess market capacity to deliver when there is so little clarity about how the demand will appear.

It is too easy to lay everything at the door of Ian Watmore, head of the chief
information officer council and recently promoted to lead the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit. But a government-wide assessment of emerging demand over the next five years might do as much to meet implementation problems in advance as even the most experienced manager can do from within an individual programme.

Such a review would not be out of place in Watmore’s new in-tray.