Yet spectacular though the Passport Agency and IND failures were in terms of their public profile—there's nothing like queues of people on the television news to alert media and opposition members of Parliament (MPs) to savage the government—the systems' difficulties were relatively small fry in the fast-growing pantheon of British government computer fiascoes. In fact, one of the real surprises in both imbroglios was that opposition MPs and media commentators still had the energy to lambaste the government for its information technology record—or, indeed, that they could come up with new and different synonyms for shambles, disaster, fiasco and bungle.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER
Take a look at some other recent British government computer fumbles. After massive computer failures in a new Social Security system installed by Andersen Consulting, for example, some 400,000 people received compensation payments of £10 ($15) each—a National Audit Office investigation had reportedly found no fewer than 1,900 separate failures. The system, which was supposed to track Social Security contributions and calculate benefits owed to widows, pensioners and the unemployed, crashed within days of its debut in January 1999, resulting in 17 million contributions being unprocessed and forcing civil servants to guess at the benefits payments due to people. Even so, 160,000 pensioners were out of pocket by up to £100 ($150) per week, newspaper reports claimed.

Or consider the continuing saga of the new national air traffic control computer system being implemented by Lockheed Martin, the cost of which will have tripled in the seven years it has been in gestation, and which was deferred yet again in 1999, with the result that it may not come online until winter 2002-03—or even later. Or the high-tech system that bar-coded patients' clinical notes in Britain's National Health Service. Implemented only in 12 hospitals (after eight years of work), the costs of the project spiraled over £32 million ($48 million) by 1998, attracting criticism from the Public Accounts Committee in a report published in January for "almost unbelievably weak management."

Or the even more expensive cancellation of a system that was to have automated benefit payments by issuing claimants magnetic swipe cards, usable in the U.K.'s 19,000 post offices. The project, which started in 1996, was finally canceled in late 1999 with just 205 post offices converted to the new system after an estimated expenditure of £1 billion ($1.5 billion). Far from fining the outsourcing contractor in question—ICL, a subsidiary of Fujitsu—the government promptly awarded the company a contract to automate the operations of the post offices themselves, figuring that the company must have learned something about them in the three years it spent working on the project.