Lessons Learned from Government ICT Projects (B)

The Court of Audit issued its final report entitled Lessons Learned from Government ICT Projects, Part B on 1 July 2008. The final report includes the response of the Minister of the Interior, who is responsible for the coordination of government ICT projects, and the Court's afterword on the measures announced by the government. The Court is pleased, for example, that the coordinating minister will define cost categories for ICT projects. It is rather less pleased with the Minister's undertaking to issue an annual report. An overview in each minister's annual report would make a greater contribution to a government-wide learning process. It is also still uncertain what will be done with ICT projects that are not the sole responsibility of one minister.

Government ICT projects often turn out to be far more expensive than budgeted, take longer than planned and do not deliver the intended results. This is serious because government ICT projects cost a great deal of public money. Furthermore, the consequences of failure are often considerable and socially undesirable.

The Court of Audit published Lessons Learned from Government ICT Projects, Part Aon 29 November 2007 (Court of Audit, 2007a).

Conclusion

The main cause of the partial or complete failure of ICT projects to emerge from the first part of our audit was that government ICT projects often become too ambitious and complex owing to a combination of political, organisational and technical factors. If a project is too complex, it lacks balance between the ambitions and the available people, resources and time. Effective management is essential to ensure that the ambitions are realistic and a grip is kept on ICT projects. Management should be professionalised so that it is an authoritative participant in the tense playing field described in part A. A minimum amount of information is needed to monitor the progress of an ICT project and manage it. Our audit also found that management of the information supply could be organised in a variety of ways, differing from one organisation to another and from one project to another.

Recommendations

In our opinion, the following recommendations can be implemented relatively quickly:

• General recommendations to the ministers:

• Make sure that reliable information is available on timing, size, available people and costs.

• Make agreements with the House of Representatives on the 'minimum' information the House needs to take well-considered decisions both before and during a project.

• Introduce portfolio management.

• Try to learn from the experiences of others.

Recommendation to the Minister of BZK: find out how to promote learning from each other.

Current status

The report was submitted to the House of Representatives on 1 July 2008.