€100 million down the drain on new IT system and counting...

NewDubliner

gandalf wrote:

Anyway we are going off topic.

SAP HR is available configured for the Irish system

How was the conversion financed?

ixoy

NewDubliner wrote:

For example, when Accenture developed ROS, onsite and at state expense, for the tax office, Accenture retained the right to sell the technology to other governments.

That may be but the software is very specific to the Irish Revenue office. It'd be an impossible sell for the most part because it's too ingrained in the Irish system. Any further sales from it would only be a tiny element of the site.

NewDubliner

ixoy wrote:

That may be but the software is very specific to the Irish Revenue office. It'd be an impossible sell for the most part because it's too ingrained in the Irish system. Any further sales from it would only be a tiny element of the site.

How tiny? I'd also heard that the state was picking up the tab for training Accenture staff on site. To be fair, Accenture has reciprocated by hosting golf tournaments for Revenue staff.

To get back on topic, the government has not said if the all the software work done on PPARS is now owned by the state.

To salvage that project, perhaps using another contractor, may be impossible if the source code and documentation is not available. It's called vendor lock-in.

ednwireland

just to add a more international flavour this a news article i just saw

http://mail.vnunet.com/cgi-bin1/flo/y/eihN0CB1re0Mzj0Cozt0Eu

(UK) Government 'on brink' of court action with EDS Talks on compensation prove fruitless

not that its any help hat the uk gov has the same probs, having worked for eds i'm not suprised, there trying to claw back the cost of a chepa outsourcing deal through projects.

i think all companies think that govs are bottomless pits

full article

Government 'on brink' of court action with EDS

Talks on compensation prove fruitless
Ken Young, vnunet.com 11 Oct 2005

HM Revenue and Customs is on the brink of taking its IT supplier, EDS, to court over the failure of the tax credits system, the Financial Times claimed today.

The newspaper reported a senior government official as saying that "patience is fast running out" with EDS after the informal process to agree compensation had proved fruitless.

EDS remains adamant that it was not given enough time by the department to test the system ahead of implementation.

The National Audit Office (NAO) said yesterday that it had "qualified" the accounts of the former Inland Revenue because of overpayments of tax credits due to fraud and error.

Overpayments of 3.4 per cent in 2003/2004 equated to £460m. The system's design also led to tax credit overpayments, put at £2.2bn by HM Revenue and Customs.

The NAO said that £961m in overpayments would have to be written off for 2003/2004 and 2004/2005.

EDS was famously dumped by the Inland Revenue in December 2003 after a catalogue of errors over tax credit payments.

The £3bn contract to run the Revenue's IT services over the next 10 years was subsequently awarded to Cap Gemini. EDS had run the Revenue's tax and National Insurance system since 1994.

A recent report by the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee found that the current system had failed to cut fraud as promised, and had "routinely" overpaid hundreds of thousands of claimants.

The Committee also noted that in 2003 the department found that a software cleansing system had wrongly deleted the tax records of one million people, leading to some not receiving payments and some not paying what they owed.

The Inland Revenue recently merged with Customs & Excise to create HM Revenue & Customs.

democrates

The letter from st james hospital ceo to the hse is telling - Quote:
"In essence," Mr O'Brien states, referring to the PPARS pilot project at St James's, "the hospital is now unwilling to continue with an arrangement which clearly threatens its basic functioning, its abilities to meet its fiduciary (monetary) accountability obligations with assurance, and its credibility and relationships with its workforce."
Techncally, it sounds like each hospital has it's own history of systems, you can imagine how these can evolve and end up in a nightmare of patches and manual workarounds. Nonetheless the mess works, and to try to replace one module without replicating it's links with others can be sub-optimal, even retrograde.

The problems seem to be both inherantly technical as well as around it's isolation from other systems, and lack of ease in upgrading. Also, having read this p-pars project presentation and the p-pars web page describing potential benefits, perhaps there is some local resistance to the process redesign it is intended to implement. I'm reading between the lines, this project seeks to apply the HSEA Rule-Book, whereas local hospitals currently enjoy existing alternative arrangements.

Trying to achieve these changes using an IT project as a trojan horse is common practice, but bad practice. The political difficulties around changing the relationships between management, consultants, doctors, nurses etc. can delay and subvert IT projects, ramp up costs, bring failure or even disaster. Achieving agreement for process redesign should in the main, be done first and seperately with all stakeholders represented around the table. And it shouldn't come out of the IT budget.

I wonder if that staff member who was paid €1m in error got mixed up with some consultant?

NewDubliner

democrates wrote:

Trying to achieve these changes using an IT project as a trojan horse is common practice, but bad practice.

The wisest advice I've ever read was: "Change the organisation in preparation for computerisation....then, cancel the order for the computer system.".

democrates

NewDubliner wrote:

The wisest advice I've ever read was: "Change the organisation in preparation for computerisation....then, cancel the order for the computer system.".

Sage! The sad truth is that many IT projects are so woefully inflexible (due to vendor savvy methinks) that they act as an enforced work-to-rule. Great if you are going for ISO9001 but then the 3M CEO who called that a corporate sedative might have been on to someting.

Meanwhile the government finances seem to be suffering from a political laxative, a bad case of fiscal dysentary.

But who can blame them, it must be fun spending other peoples money, especially when there's so much sloshing about as a result of the wholesale asset-stripping (ahem, I mean rationalisation) of the people's property portfolio.

jd

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1869851,00.html
//s

NHS chaos exposed by new e-mails
Jonathon Carr-Brown, Health Correspondent
A COMPUTER project costing £6.2 billion that is central to Tony Blair’s National Health Service reforms is in “grave” danger of being “derailed”, leaked Whitehall e-mails reveal.
The warning has been issued by Richard Granger, the £250,000-a-year civil servant in charge of what has been billed as the world’s biggest civil information technology project.
The scheme is central to the government’s plans to give patients wider choice by allowing GPs to book hospital appointments online with consultants throughout the country.
The problems have already caused a year-long delay in the booking system and now threaten to add millions to the cost of the project.
To date the system has made only about 20,000 appointments for patients. It was supposed to have made 250,000 by December 2004.
When it is fully operational the system is meant to be capable of making up to 9.5m first hospital appointments a year.
In the e-mail exchanges in September, Granger blames a senior civil servant in the Department of Health for the fiasco, criticising her repeated last-minute changes and failure to heed his advice.
Granger censures Margaret Edwards, the department’s director for access and patient choice, for adding numerous new specifications to the booking programme, known as Choose and Book.
Granger writes: “Choose and Book’s £20m IT build contract is now in grave danger of derailing (not just destabilising) a £6.2 billion programme.”
He concludes: “Unfortunately, your consistently late requests will not enable us to rescue the missed opportunities and targets.”
Sir Nigel Crisp, the NHS chief executive, was forced to admit to the Commons health select committee two weeks ago that the booking system was at least a year behind schedule. However, he failed to mention that the delay was having a serious impact on the entire project.
The National Audit Office has identified changes to specifications after the award of IT contracts as a key reason for regular delays and overspends on government projects.
Granger’s comments were triggered by an e-mail on September 9 from Edwards marked “Restricted — Policy” which begins: “We have a problem!” The e-mail reveals that patients and their GPs still cannot book treatment at any of the country’s 32 foundation trust hospitals by computer because they are not on its “choice menu”. The 10 private sector treatment centres, set up by the government to reduce waiting lists, are also absent from the official list on the computer. Edwards warns that the treatment centres and foundation trusts will not be on the “choice menu” until next summer.