British Prime Minister Tony Blair has ordered an inquiry into the continued failure of UK public sector IT contracts. The Cabinet Office will announce details of its investigative team on Monday. It seems likely it will have authority to change current contracts, a move which may provide more embarrassment for both government and the companies involved.
The government has been dogged by accusations of incompetence in its IT outsourcing record. In March, Siemens Business Services was accused of failing to meet its finishing deadline in a contract with the Home Office Immigration and Nationality Department (IND) (CI No 3,622). It transpired that the IND had stored files in a room next to an underground car park, and no-one could access or computerize the files because of the fumes. In May ICL Plc, the UK IT services company lost a chunk of expected revenue from its Pathway contract to computerize the UK’s Post Offices when the Benefits Agency dropped out (CI No 3,668).
Companies in the private sector have expressing their displeasure at the structuring of public and private finance initiatives (PFI) before. Barry Grisdale, Bull’s UK CEO, told ComputerWire in May (CI No 3,665) that the PFI system puts all of the risk, all of the responsibility and quite frankly, very little of the reward on the commercial partner.
