THE government’s multi-million-pound IT upgrade will not be delivered on time – which the Chief Minister has attributed to ‘an extremely poor set of decisions’ made by the previous administration.
The Integrated Technology Solution (ITS) project sought to replace the government’s disparate finance, HR, inventory and asset management, health and safety and supplier systems and move them onto cloud-based technology.
Initially earmarked to cost £28m in the 2020–23 Government Plan, spending on the project increased to more than £60m in successive plans.
During a hearing of the Corporate Services Scrutiny Panel, Assistant Chief Minister Alex Curtis said the project would not meet its completion date of 30 October.
He explained that its ability to ‘reliably integrate’ with some existing systems – as had been originally intended – ‘was not possible’ and had required a ‘rethink’.
‘It has to be stated that if we were looking for the benefits of a system against the investment one would be making, this wouldn’t have been the project that this government would have chosen to have done,’ he said.
Echoing the comments of her Assistant Minister, Chief Minister Kristina Moore said: ‘We are trying to make the best of an extremely poor set of decisions.
‘The previous government spent tens of millions of pounds on this system and, as the Deputy said, it is not one that we would have chosen.’
She continued: ‘We are doing our best to make the best of a bad lot and move forward, so that we can deliver a more efficient public service – which is ultimately why organisations choose to adopt different technological solutions.’
Panel chair Deputy Sam Mézec asked what the strategy had been to rectify the situation.
Deputy Curtis said: ‘With ITS, the ship largely had sailed – and that was part of the problem with the programme. What we found when we came into government was a programme that had pretty much been signed away and required the government to be able to function as fast as the delivery team.
‘We have to be frank about the benefits and challenges of investing significant sums of money in IT, because I am confident we have taken many lessons learnt from this previous approach and we are not repeating [the mistakes].’
