The revelation from the Public Accounts Committee that another government IT project has failed doesn’t feel like news as it all seems all too familiar. This time it was the turn of the FireControl project which wasted £469m. It should have replaced 46 local control rooms with nine state-of-the-art ones. Instead it has left a legacy of eight empty control rooms which cost the taxpayer some £4m a month just to maintain as empty buildings. Margaret Hodge said none of the original objectives had been achieved.

The Independent noted in an article in January 2010 that a series of botched IT projects had left ‘taxpayers with a bill of more than £26bn for computer systems that have suffered severe delays, run millions of pounds over budget or have been cancelled altogether’. Topping the bill is the £12.6bn NHS project to create electronic patient records linking 35,000 GPs with 300 hospitals. The number of organisations actually connecting to it is in the hundreds and the whole project may now be axed.

Since government started using IT in earnest in the late 1960s the results have been a mixed bag, though some of their early failures appear quite modest in comparison with our modern ones. For instance, in March 1984 the PAC was then asking civil servants about government IT and why projects were regularly failing. The staff were blamed (not enough skilled workers) but they were told that lessons had been learnt and new methodologies were being adopted. But they weren’t: that project was Opstrat and its costs rose from £713m to £2.6bn. Twenty-seven years later the answers seem surprisingly familiar as we are still being told that the lessons have been learned and next time it should be better. Of course, it never has been.

FireControl is the latest illustration: the PAC said that it was flawed from the start. I agree: it is often when contracts are being drawn up and because of the choice of supplier as all governments persist in engaging big suppliers who are too large to really care.

Those with longer memories will remember the fiasco of the London Ambulance Service Assisted Despatch Service which made ‘every mistake in the book’. This fiasco scored slightly higher than other schemes given that it actually went live, though was turned off after only two days. It was supposed to marshal and direct ambulances to call-outs, but failed abysmally and in one instance the ambulance arrived on the scene after the undertaker had already been and carried away the patient. The LASCAD project is now a textbook case of a bad project and is studied worldwide.

If you study that failure it wasn’t just technical reasons but design and analytical failure. Failure isn’t usually for technical reasons; usually stakeholders and users haven’t been properly consulted and you can end up with a system doing what it was designed to do but not what was wanted. They aren’t just computer projects they are people projects. Twenty-five years ago the solution was to bring in the private sector to run these projects. It has made no difference; they have just enriched big IT outsourcers who are now too large and powerful to cancel or sack. Besides failure doesn’t seem to stop them winning future work, much to the contrary as they claim to have ‘learnt the lessons’. Indeed to bid for government contracts they ask if you have done one before (but not how successful was it) which excludes small firms even getting in on the act.

I am not suggesting that private sector projects are any better, but fail there and it can be terminal and the money will run out. There have been successful government IT projects –  for instance the land registry system and the system to buy your tax disc online. Simpler projects done in smaller chunks tend to be successful like those to process Olympic tickets, book a ‘boris bike’and use an Oyster card.

The problem is that government has a tendency to engage large firms to run these projects because they are easier to deal with rather than lots of small businesses. Yet a number of smaller businesses landing a stake in a large government contract have a greater interest in it than a large multinational. To the small business it is often not one of many projects but their key project; it isn’t just about revenue but about reputation, just as in the home if you bring in a small firm you can trust, who are competitive and who want repeat business from you. The lesson from these failed projects is keep them simple and build them up slowly and engaged small firms not large ones, businesses big enough to succeed but small enough to care.

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Philip Ross is a chartered engineer and chartered IT professional

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Photo: JD Hancock