Report - Guardian

The LSE Identity Project Report: June 2005 221Two trends that may be identified from the above list of failures are the problems withsecurity and the poor relations with contracting companies. This was subsequentlyhighlighted by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, which raisedprivacy, security and accordingly confidentiality as a particular concern to users. 532These prior failings led the UK Computing Research Committee to warn the HomeAffairs Committee:“UKCRC believes that a major factor in these failures is theunwillingness of Departments and of major IT suppliers to accept thatdeveloping software-intensive systems is an engineering task ofequivalent complexity to designing a modern aircraft or building anovel sky-scraper. Because the engineering complexity of the task isnot recognised, insufficient attention is given to using the best scienceembedded in the strongest engineering processes (a mistake thatwould never be made by aeronautical or civil engineers). We believethat the quality of software engineering employed on many projects islamentable and exposes the projects to unacceptable risks of failure;unless this problem is addressed vigorously and successfully, webelieve that any national ID card system will overrun dramatically andwill almost certainly fail to achieve its objectives.” 533The UKCRC is an Expert Panel of the British Computer Society, the Institution ofElectrical Engineers and the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing. Theyconcluded that significant changes in the practice of Government Computing would berequired.A Challenging Environment for Successful ProjectsThe UK Government has been generally unsuccessful at reigning in costs andconcluding successful projects. According to one report,“[Private Finance Initiatives] processes were supposed to cut costs andimprove deliver reliability by forcing contractors to internalise therisks of new IT systems development and to manage these processesmore rigorously and tightly. For almost a decade a body of evidenceaccumulated casting doubt on this fundamental logic in relation to ITprojects, where government could rarely bare the costs of catastrophicnon-delivery and the asset value of non-working systems forcontractors was also negligible. Only in 2003 did Treasury advice atlast acknowledge that this was a doomed hope for government IT,withdrawing PFIs for IT projects because agencies and departmentseffectively had to keep intervening to bail out PFI contractors indifficulties every bit as much as with conventional procurements.” 534532 ‘Progress in Achieving Government on the Web’, Sixty-Sixth Report of Session 2001-02, HC 936, p.6 and 9.533 ‘Memorandum submitted by the UK Computing Research Committee’, submitted to the Select Committee onHome Affairs, available at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmhaff/130/130we52.htm.534 Ibid., p.20.