Why do government IT agencies fail?

The failure of Western Australia’s IT services office should deliver a wake-up call to governments all over the world, according to industry analysts Ovum. 

It stressed that the style of government inherent in the Westminster political system created a strong desire for autonomy amongst government agencies, which typically resulted in projects becoming too complex and costly and therefore prone to failure.

The scuttling of Western Australia’s shared IT services agency this week follows the failure of government IT agencies in Queensland and South Australia.

Earlier in the year the world’s largest ever public sector IT undertaking, the UK’s multi-billion dollar NHS (National Health Service) IT project keeled over and died with a subsequent audit office report revealing bungling and mismanagement on an alarming scale.

However, the solution to government IT agencies' woes may be staring them right in the face.

According to Ovum research director Steve Hodgkinson, the cloud model for computing and services is better than traditional procurement and deployment approaches at delivering large-scale projects that preserve a high degree of flexibility.

“As cloud computing services mature in Australia, governments would be well advised to take a good hard look at the cloud for shared infrastructure and applications,” Hodgkinson said. 

Ovum asks, for example, how some 100,000 organisations from around the world can meet most of their needs using Salesforce.com, yet a handful of Western Australian agencies can spend tens of millions of dollars failing to agree on how to share common HR and finance systems?

One of the reasons Ovum noted, is that government bureaucracies tend to focus on maintaining power and are therefore ill suited to cooperation and compromise.

One way to reduce the risks of project failure, it said was to keep shared services within a commodity-like infrastructure framework, such as was adopted by Victoria’s CenITex agency.

“No agency can mount a credible argument that it has unique requirements for data centre ops, application hosting and core desktop services,” Ovum said.

“Risks increase when the shared service attempts to provide business systems that need to be tailored to distinct agency requirements. Expecting agencies to agree to participate in a forced march towards common business requirements is a triumph of hope over experience.”

Providers of cloud services report difficulty in earning the trust of government IT agencies, which must resolve a number of challenging issues from data soverignty to security and performance. 

One of the key vendors trying to break through is Hewett Packard, which launched in Sydney last month the first of its cloud-based services targeting Australian government agencies.

"IT strategists and procurement executives [within government] often express reservations about the risks of cloud computing while ignoring the even greater risks of flawed shared services strategies," Ovum said.

"It is time for them to wake up to the cloud."