Comical mismanagement

I used to work with Scottish Police Services Authority’s (SPSA’s) predecessor organisation, the Scottish Police Information Strategy (SPIS), and can understand and agree with many of the criticisms of the ICT provision in the Scottish Police Service contained in this report.

The lack of ICT competence in the Scottish Police Service has being going on since at least 1995, with various individuals continuing the same ill-advised practices under various labels. The SPSA is just the latest incarnation of the same disorganised mess. To put it mildly, the SPSA and SPIS were a managerial shambles, with chief executives and senior managers being fired on a regular basis during the 18 months I was there. However, the accountability and sackings never went deep enough to deal with the real problem, which is that a lot of middle managers at SPSA repeatedly get away with screwing up, and are allowed to move on to their next disaster when projects eventually collapse.

One project – the Scottish National Firearms Certificate Holders Register – underwent 10 years of misguided development before being binned for an off-the-shelf product. Another – the Scottish Criminal History System – was designed to be a duplicate of the system it was to replace, a mainframe application that had been designed in the 70s and 80s, because working that way “would save on training costs”.

Using modern tools to replicate outdated technologies in this way felt like being asked to design a modern car, and being told to use a steam engine for propulsion. Of course, it never saved anything on training costs – it’s not like newly recruited staff stopped needing training just because they were being asked to work with a system that was designed when they were still in primary school, or did SPIS/SPSA’s management imagine that we were using 70s staff as well as 70s design? The Criminal History System project ended up costing £10m – 10 times the original budget – and being delivered about five years late, all because of the incompetence of middle-level technical and project management.

I’m so glad I don’t work for this body any more. Like about 80 per cent of my former colleagues – who were, in the main, good people being asked to do stupid things – I left quickly when I saw there was no hope of ever being effective under management as incompetent, short-sighted and arrogant as those at SPIS/SPSA.

Ex-employee, now happily back in the private sector