£100 MILLION lost on failed UK.gov IT projects - in just ONE YEAR

[NickFitz]

£100 MILLION poured down drain on failed UK.gov IT projects - in just ONE YEAR

Somebody forgot to negotiate a clause for a reduction in charges should sites be decommissioned early. The result was the Department was forced to continue paying for unwanted facilities, resulting in a constructive loss of £4.707m.

That one's not a particularly good example, as it wasn't a case of any kind of IT failure - it was a management failure. The effect would have been the same if it had been a cleaning or catering contract negotiated without such a clause.

[Zero Liability]

It is very different. Within a business there are lines of accountability that ultimately end up at the shareholder's feet. No such accountability in the public sector.

They still like to pretend we're their "customers", though.

[Batcher]

Kind of makes you wonder who does negotiate these contracts. Its rather hard to believe no one has any common sense to ask what happens if it does go tits up?

And surely the government have teams of lawyers at their disposal that should be checking contracts before signing.

[BolshieBastard]

£100 MILLION poured down drain on failed UK.gov IT projects - in just ONE YEAR

Somebody forgot to negotiate a clause for a reduction in charges should sites be decommissioned early. The result was the Department was forced to continue paying for unwanted facilities, resulting in a constructive loss of £4.707m.

Kind of makes you wonder who does negotiate these contracts. Its rather hard to believe no one has any common sense to ask what happens if it does go tits up?

[DodgyAgent]

This is no different to most companies. Everyone changes their mind before the end of the term sometimes. No one likes to think through exit plans or plan the real business requirements on the way into a deal. Its too hard so they try and use assumptions to give shape to the solutions.

Even less likely is successfully getting the departments to identify requirements and plot them onto the enterprise architecture plans because that takes time and is too hard for most of the people to fathom out in the timescales.

So contracts are entered into that are never going to be right and work starts...

After a while a new business owner turns up and changes their mind about everything because its easy to look backwards and say "That was a silly idea.... What we needed was X not Y, so lets dump Y and buy X..."

What they call waste is nothing compared to the money they spend on things that they think are working...

It is very different. Within a business there are lines of accountability that ultimately end up at the shareholder's feet. No such accountability in the public sector.

[bobspud]

This is no different to most companies. Everyone changes their mind before the end of the term sometimes. No one likes to think through exit plans or plan the real business requirements on the way into a deal. Its too hard so they try and use assumptions to give shape to the solutions.

Even less likely is successfully getting the departments to identify requirements and plot them onto the enterprise architecture plans because that takes time and is too hard for most of the people to fathom out in the timescales.

So contracts are entered into that are never going to be right and work starts...

After a while a new business owner turns up and changes their mind about everything because its easy to look backwards and say "That was a silly idea.... What we needed was X not Y, so lets dump Y and buy X..."

What they call waste is nothing compared to the money they spend on things that they think are working...

[DodgyAgent]

£100 MILLION poured down drain on failed UK.gov IT projects - in just ONE YEAR

Somebody forgot to negotiate a clause for a reduction in charges should sites be decommissioned early. The result was the Department was forced to continue paying for unwanted facilities, resulting in a constructive loss of £4.707m.

Which is precisely why we should not make it easy for these people to tax us

[GlenW]

Why is this seen as an IT failure rather than Procurement/Legal?!

What? You mean lawyers and civil servants made mistakes? Ridiculous idea!

[SimonMac]

Why is this seen as an IT failure rather than Procurement/Legal?!

[scooterscot]

Call my cynical, but when I first read the headline my first thought was how many vested interests exist between MP's and those companies.

[Zero Liability]

Could have been more beds in hospitals... or is that particular act of alchemy only possible when clamping down on "tax avoidance"?

[Flashman]

£100 MILLION poured down drain on failed UK.gov IT projects - in just ONE YEAR

Somebody forgot to negotiate a clause for a reduction in charges should sites be decommissioned early. The result was the Department was forced to continue paying for unwanted facilities, resulting in a constructive loss of £4.707m.

Failure? A lot of contractors got paid for their work. Didn't fail for them thank you.

[Batcher]

£100 MILLION poured down drain on failed UK.gov IT projects - in just ONE YEAR

Somebody forgot to negotiate a clause for a reduction in charges should sites be decommissioned early. The result was the Department was forced to continue paying for unwanted facilities, resulting in a constructive loss of £4.707m.