Sign my petition to the PM to demand the UK Govt. reviews it’s failed IT processes

[Rob Bowley]

The Independent newspaper recently reported that the UK government has wasted £26 billion of it’s tax payers money on IT projects which have, “run millions of pounds over budget or have been cancelled altogether”.

£26 billion!

Of the projects mentioned in the article I’ve particularly been following the massive NHS balls up for some time and it’s quite clear that most of the reasons it has failed so badly can be attributed to following Waterfall type project management processes, dooming these behemoth’s to failure from the outset. The only value these projects are delivering is lining the pockets of people like BT and Fujitsu who having landed most of the contracts for this work. There’s no doubt that most of the other cash sink holes mentioned suffer from the same problems* (it was the UK government that created PRINCE2 project management after all).

I find this totally unacceptable, especially when we now know that there are now well-established alternative approaches to the way these projects are managed which would have likely saved the tax payer an absolute fortune.

Keith Braithwaite has also blogged his views about the Government IT failures here.

I have created a petition on the Number10 website asking the Prime Minister to  demand a review of the out-of-date manner in which government IT projects are undertaken. I urge you to sign it and Tweet, blog, Facebook this to everyone you know**:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ITProcessReview/

Thank you.

*Ironically the National Audit Office are currently producing a (delayed) report on the NHS IT project. They still advocate the Waterfall Approach according to this document found here. XtC members are in the process of writing to them about this. That letter can be found here.

[Dave Evans]

Registration is now open for Azure Open Space Code Day 27th Feb.

http://azureoscd.eventbrite.com

Dave