Details to emerge about Gov’s long-awaited £28m tech plan

Tuesday 09 March 2021

More details are set to be announced this afternoon on the Government’s long-awaited £28m project to ‘join up’ all of its IT systems.

The Integrated Technology Solution (ITS) was launched last February, to deliver the key ambition of the former ‘eGov’ project: to do away with decades-old systems and bring together different departments’ finance, payroll and recruitment platforms, among many others, to make the Government as a whole more efficient, and easier for islanders to work with.

The £9.9m eGov project went around £2m over budget, and was slammed by the island’s main business lobby group, the Chamber of Commerce, as a lesson in “how not to run a programme” due to its “adhoc” project expenditure and apparently ill-defined lines of accountability.

In launching its revitalised ‘ITS’ plan last year, having signed a contract with DMW group to source specialist technology providers to update the way Government works, Assistant Minister Deputy Scott Wickenden promised that there were many “lessons learned” from eGov. 

The Government was expected to announce its key supplier for the project in January this year, but cancelled a media briefing on the matter on 25 January just hours before it was due to go ahead.

It was rescheduled for the following week on 3 February, but that announcement was also then delayed. 

That same week, the Council of Ministers met to consider an ‘update’ to the project’s business case.

Government officials declined to respond to questions from Express on why the announcement was suddenly cancelled, instead saying more details would be provided this afternoon.

Explaining what went wrong with ITS’ predecessor, eGov, Assistant Chief Minister Deputy Scott Wickenden, who has political responsibility for the ITS project, told Express last year that one of the main issues revolved around “making sure that we’ve got the right oversight above the organisation and the right authority.” 

“So in the eGov programme, there was a lot of ‘scope creep’ a lot of the then departments of the old days would be trying to push programmes onto the eGov programme and then they would continue changing what they wanted throughout the programme. So it wasn’t scoped properly. Then there was no authority within that area to say ‘No, we’re doing it this way’,” he said.