A swift and sure way to computer disaster
Here we go again. Just two years after a new government promised to break with Labour’s record of IT-based policy fiascoes, along comes a high-profile public policy reform which looks set to go down the same dismal road.
The success of the revolution set out in the Swift and Sure Justice white paper depends entirely on the adoption of digital working. While the principle is fine - the white paper is right in saying that the delays and interruptions caused by current methods would be unacceptable in any other walk of life - the tone of the announcement rings alarm bells.
I’ve spent much of the past 20 years investigating and reporting on public sector IT fiascoes. The ingredients for failure are well known. They are: large-scale, tight deadlines and unenthusiastic users. Central government’s own ICT strategy, published last year by the Cabinet Office, acknowledges these risk factors.
Yet here we are with the Ministry of Justice confidently predicting that, by April 2013, digital case files will be in use throughout the police, magistrates’ court and Crown court systems and that, by the end of this year, an upgraded video system will link courts and prisons in a way that every camera can connect with every display screen.
The white paper admits that the ministry has a poor record when it comes to IT: the Libra court system and the Nomis offender-management system, both ordered under the last government, get namechecks. Yet when it comes to detail about how this time will be different, the white paper offers little more than blithe optimism about expanding, embedding and joining up good systems already being piloted piecemeal.
Actually, this is the difficult bit. It’s one thing to install new technology across a local community of users, especially when they are self-selecting and generously funded to try out a new idea: it’s quite another to impose the innovation nationally. Time and time again, schemes that were piloted successfully foundered in national implementation because of the problems of scale, unexpected complexity in the nooks and crannies of the system, or recalcitrance on the part of users. Any of this sound familiar?
Of course failure isn’t inevitable. Where national IT projects work - believe it or not, there are some good examples in the NHS, especially involving GPs - it is generally because they use proven technology and where users see a direct benefit. Most importantly, if there has to be a deadline, it has to be there for a real purpose, not for a minister’s electoral convenience.
Experienced IT project managers have a slogan: ‘We deliver excellence, speed and low cost: pick any two.’ Someone should nail it to the MoJ's door.
Michael Cross is Gazette news editor
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Comments
Imagine if the MoJ were supervised by the SRA
Given yet another MoJ cock up, wouldn't it be fun if the MoJ, like solicitors, had to put up with the levels of massive over regulation from the SRA. Just imagine the fines! Enough to keep the Legal Services Commission funded for decades!
Make MPs respect or, if not, fear their electors
MPs should lose their complete immunity. It was meant to make them immune to royal pressure, now it makes them immune to electoral pressure (Ha,ha, democracy) except in the minimal sense that a handful may lose their seats (and still get paid) or lose their ministerial salary, and still get their MP's pay.
We, the electors, need lawyers to come up with legal provisions that will make ex/MPs financially liable, without limit of time, to the public whose taxes they have misspent (not to individuals or corporate entites) to a degree that will cause them to have more forethought than they often seem to have exercised in the past (IT, dogs, you name it). They could be penalised for predictable, and especially predicted, failures. This might discourage them from ploughing on with some pet policy between elections and, especially, implementing it in an irremediable manner before the electorate can vote them out of government (Ha,ha, ditto), as with the triumphalist crowing over rail privatisation.
They must, of course, be protected or immunised against other pressures, notably lobbying, a right to be confined to constituents. It should become a criminal offence, with draconian penalties for corporate entities, inc imprisonment for their representatives. If this seems harsh, consider the following, from one of our most illustrious lawyers, judges and politicians:
“Any consultations regarding the public interest outside Parliament shall be punishable as treason." This statute was made so that the ruler and the elected representatives might not easily conspire together to oppress the people, and to change the state of the body politic.
Can it be justice that a rich trader or a financier or, to be short, anyone who either does nothing at all or nothing very necessary to the common good, should have a comfortable living, while ordinary workers, without whose labours no State could long survive, have to toil long and hard for wages that do not leave a sufficient surplus to provide for their old age? When I consider all the polities in existence, I can perceive nothing but a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own ease in the name of the common good. They devise all manner of stratagems by which to retain what they have unjustly acquired and to obtain the labour of the poor for as little pay as they can. These devices, which they have decreed to be for the common good, that is to say for the good also of the poor, they then make law.
Why should a utopian view not find its place here?
Computers
In the 47 years since I first set foot in a solicitors office we have gone from the height of technology being an electric typewriter and adding machine to a point where one can run cases from a beach in the Maldives with a Blackberry.
It is not surprising that we can be persuaded that the computer can do anything even if too often the expectation exceeds the result delivered.