Silicon.com carries a story about one of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’ new IT projects. Apparently the “Aspire” project will come in at double the estimated 3 to 4 billion pounds. There is no hint of what the real-world functions of Aspire are supposed to be, but apparently this is part of the department’s attempt to cut the proportion of its costs that are IT below 20% at the same time as reducing its headcount by 12,500 (out of 90,000).
Readers who are in business may wish to pause at this point and admire the insanity. Breath the heady aroma of that pompous project name. Note lightly in passing the apparently conflicting goals. Savour a budget for a re-tooling exercise (if that is what it is) of £40,000 a head. Stretch your generosity (it’s good for you) and see that mere billion variance in the estimate as a calculated ±15% derived from risk analysis, not cluelessness at all. Then marvel as the costs bust the error-bars by multiple-sigmas… A Titanic of a project! How unlucky could they be?
So far so paradoxical. Business as usual for the government department that purports to oversee your every penny, and guarantees suffering if you can’t account for the office biscuit budget, or provide a full itinerary for a business trip taken five years ago. What’s sort of gobsmacking is this – the National Audit Office (NAO) finds things to praise:
The NAO estimates that if HMRC’s approach and best practice is adopted across the public sector, it could save 10 per cent in procurement and transition costs when re-competing major contracts – and called on the Office of Government Commerce to take a lead in providing guidance in the future.
Head of the NAO, Sir John Bourn, said in the report: “The department successfully completed the first major re-competition of a large public sector IT contract and transfer from one supplier to another without a loss in service to the taxpayer.”
I’m not sure I want to know what “re-competing” is.
Gordon Brown has managed to achieve a quantum change in one thing during his time in office. The unit of measurement of public sector waste has change from the “million” to the “billion”.
Re-competing means ensuring the contract goes to the group who donated the most money to your campaign.
Gotta love that line “without a loss in service to the taxpayer”.
I can’t help wondering whether this vast spend on IT projects is a misguided, keynsian, approach to compensating for the regulation out of existance of manufacturing. The beurothink goes “Unemployment going up.. must create jobs… new IT project”
Of course the flaw is that much of the work is contracted out to India or similar, the governance is “piss poor” (Private Eye description for one major contractor) and the beneficiaries are the owners of the big IT contractors and the sycophants who give the work to them once kicked out of office (cynicism strikes…)
Poorly scoped, subject to massive scope and objective creep and vastly over budget. Sums up most of these projects.
“… service to the taxpayer”?
So theft is part of the service sector. Always wondered. Or is that “service” in the sense used in livestock breeding?