Outsourcing figure prompts warnings

Experts say the government must learn lessons from past IT failures as the value of outsourcing IT contracts head for £16bn.

Computing revealed last week that the £4.5bn-worth of deals struck since 1997 is to rise to £16.5bn over the next two years with the completion of a series of high-value contracts including the £2.3bn NHS National Programme and the £4bn Inland Revenue Aspire deal.

The scale of the projects is an enormous challenge to both government and industry, says Nick Kalisperas, egovernment programme manager at supplier trade body Intellect.

'There is a requirement on both the customer and the supplier. The customer needs to be sure they have confidence what theye tendered will be implemented and the supplier needs to produce the solution they promised,' he said.

Ministers needs to learn that deadlines for policy changes may be reliant on realistic technology implementations, says Robert Morgan, chief executive of outsourcing advisors Morgan Chambers.

'Government has no standard audit and reporting process in place to determine, when things do go wrong, whether the scope was wrongly described, or that the scope was right but the system was changed fundamentally in order to appease a political change of direction or fit in with politically imposed deadlines. You have to be thinking about auditability and transparency,' he said.

Departments' internal IT skills still aren't up to scratch, says Liberal Democrat IT spokesman Richard Allan.

'With spending on this scale, and across all departments, internal IT skills are still incredibly weak,' he said.

'The government can't and shouldn't rely on just pushing everything out to contractors.'