Webstruxure is a small company – seven staff members. So how come we’ve got Government departments among our clients? Don’t public sector IT projects always go to the big players?
The answer to that is that, all too often, they do. And that isn’t just bad news for small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in the IT field. It is bad news for the Government, and therefore for taxpayers, as well.
In future posts, we’ll be discussing why Webstruxure thinks small is beautiful when it comes to Government IT procurement. But let’s start with a trip to the dark side. Let’s start with Dangerous Enthusiasms.
Robin Gauld and Shaun Goldfinch did the world a favour by writing this 2006 study of how and why large Government IT projects often fail, or if they don’t fail, cost much more and take much longer than intended. They focus on two projects that failed – the Police INCIS system and Health Waikato’s installation of software package SMS – and one that came in well over time and budget, Land Information New Zealand’s Landonline.
Every failed IT project is different, but Gauld and Goldfinch identify some common factors:
- government managers’ inflated expectations of what the project will do
- vendors’ inflated promises about system performance and delivery
- long lead times that make the technology obsolete by the time it’s installed
- staff resistance to the changes the project will bring about – especially when they have never been asked for their advice on the project or its impact on their work
- reporting designed to reassure superiors that all is well, rather than raise the alarm about projects in trouble.
Earl Mardle has more to say about Dangerous Enthusiasms.
The difficulties Gauld and Goldfinch identify are hard to avoid in large projects. At Webstruxure, we believe that many of these problems can be avoided by breaking these projects into smaller, more manageable chunks, and using small vendors who have much more capacity to be flexible, responsive, and focused on the user experience.
I’ll say more about this in future postings. In the meantime, does your experience of large Government IT projects, from either the vendor or the purchaser side, match what Gauld and Goldfinch have described?
