“Lessons learned” from eGov to inform £28m IT strategy

Thursday 06 February 2020

The Assistant Chief Minister has admitted that serious failings within the fruitless £11.6m eGov project are “lessons learned”, as the government launches a fresh attempt to modernise civil service IT systems.

Leading on the £28million project – which aims to achieve many of the ambitions that eGov failed to realise – Deputy Scott Wickenden has said the government had taken away many insights from its last attempt to bring different departments' IT systems together.

The resurrected £28million project will see an IT procurement specialist, DMW Group, source specialist technology providers to entirely update the way Government works online.

The vision is to do away with outdated systems and ways of working to replace it with “tried and tested” services, which will be installed across departments to join up the finance, payroll and recruitment systems. 

During a briefing on the government’s new ‘Integrated Technology Solution’, Chief Operating Officer John Quinn revealed that the accounting system currently used in the civil service is a “2005 vintage”.

“If you think about that, we were all using Nokias in 2005. If you can imagine trying to operate today with just a Nokia where all you could do was text and phone people, smartphones weren’t invented; that’s the kind of technology we’re working with.”

Mr Quinn later told Express that in his 30 to 40-year career during which he has done five other IT overhauls within similar organisations, he said that Jersey’s was “probably the oldest finance system I’ve come across.” 

This isn’t, however, the first time that the Government has attempted to invest in its online services. Described by the then President of the Chamber of Commerce Eliot Lincoln as “a lesson in how not to run a programme”, eGov ended up going nearly £2million over budget with serious questions raised over its spending, achievements and oversight. 

Speaking to Express, Deputy Wickenden, who also took a major role in the eGov project, shed some light on what went wrong with the former project - which went around £2m over budget, and was slammed by the Chamber of Commerce as a lesson in "how not to run a project" - that overspent and underachieved: “I think there’s a lot of lessons learned from the eGov.

"One was about 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’.

“Now we’ve got the OneGov programme, we’ve got a what’s called a corporate portfolio management office which will oversee the projects as they go forward that they’re delivering what they said they would deliver. And that’s going to make a massive difference whereas we’re not going to have Chief Officers overrule project managers to get things changed which means that it gets more and more expensive as we go along and that’s a real problem with the eGov that there never seemed to be an end date because all of the Chief Officers kept changing the finish line to suit what they wanted.”

Deputy Wickenden also said that he’ll be taking learning points from the recent digitisation of the tax system, which has faced a number of challenges in putting revenue records online.

“The difference between the Revenue Jersey approach was they went to what was a start-up company so the product didn’t exist, but the company that was going to deliver it did. It was building a product to deliver our tax system – we’re not going to be doing that ever going forward again. 

“What we’re going to be doing is finding the best products that have been tried and tested in similar or larger organisations that come out of the box and we’re going to just be delivering those products. So we’re not going to be trying to do anything dynamic, or new, or interesting we’re just going to be safe, proven, tried and tested. So that will get rid of most of the teething problems that we’ve seen in previous delivery of IT services.”

In terms of the new IT strategy, it’s hoped that some forms of artificial intelligence and systems which automatically process information will make working and interacting with Government much easier. 

Deputy Wickenden explained: “The AI and the remote process automation is going to be more around things like invoices and time sheets and making sure that instead of somebody sending an invoice in, and then somebody typing that into a programme and then at the other end somebody then printing it out and checking it and then sending it off, that it all gets done very smoothly, digitally and there’s as little personal interaction with it as possible.”

When asked if this will mean the jobs of those staff who process invoices will be at risk, Deputy Wickenden said: “We are absolutely committed to make sure that everyone that may be affected from a technology change point of view will have opportunities to train in other areas that they might want to be doing… it’s not going to be about people losing their jobs, it’s about retaining our people but doing things in a better way.”

The contracts for the IT services will be going out to tender soon with open days being held both in Jersey and the UK. 

The results of that process are expected by the Autumn.