Reference no: EM133238885

Government IT Projects

Large government IT projects over a number of years have been beset with failures which have cost billions (Table 1). Often systems are abandoned and written off. Work has to restart. The most prominent failure has been the UK NHS's National Programme for IT (NPfiIT) which did not result in a central patient database of electronic health records, and in which the Choose and Book system was only abandoned in late 2014.

Table 1. UK Public Sector Information Systems Failures (note that other governments do have significant IT failures too)

Acronym	Project Title	Start Month	Cancellation Month	Outcome	Financial Loss	Source Report
C-NOMIS	National Offender Management System	June 2004	Dec 2007	Partial delivery of revised system	£41 million	NAO (2009)
FIReControl	National Fire Incident Management	July 2004	Dec 2010	Nothing delivered	£469 million	NAO (2011)
NPFit	National Patient Record and related systems	April 2004	Sept 2011	Partial delivery Choose and Book. Non-delivery of core electronic patient record system	£2.1 billion	Committee of Public Accounts (2011)
Child Support Agency CS2 System	CSA Payments system	July 2000	Oct 2005	Live system abandoned	£152 million	NAO (2006)
Rural Payments Agency	Single Payment System	August 2006	Oct 2009	Live system replaced due to failure	£350 million	NAO (2007) Computer Weekly, (2009)
e-Borders	Advanced passenger information programme	2007	2014	Cancelled	Over £412 million	Computer Weekly, (2014)

Tasks

Question 1. Produce a description of the FIReControl case study and identify possible reasons for the failure of this government IT system. To what extent has the failure to do with the technology and to what extent was it to do with the management, organisational and political structures? Are there any lessons we can learn about the role of IT systems in organisations and the connection between organisational structure and politics?

Question 2. Investigate the current state of the Universal Credit IT system. Produce a brief overview of the Universal Credit IT system and how it reached its precarious current position. Produce a table that compares FIReControl and come to some conclusions on how we might protect the taxpayer from bankrolling future IT failures.