THE INQUISITION
But the problems that bog the systems down don't appear to be radically unusual or different. As Heeks says, the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee have for years been looking at the failures as they have occurred, and have generally come up with similar reasons for them. Heading the list: a failure to set clear objectives, a lack of senior management support and taking on projects that were technically overambitious (see "Lessons Learned?"). Coupled to this list, Heeks points out, the challenges facing public sector projects are usually larger than those facing typical private sector projects; staffing and skill levels are lower because of the private sector/public sector remuneration imbalance; and government organization structures are more conservative and less flexible than in the private sector.

Apart from better public relations management of the fiascoes as they happen, there are few if any signs that the British government is learning from its experiences, Heeks adds. (Coincidentally, the interview with Heeks took place May 5, the day that the British media was reveling in still another high-profile problem: the delays in the ballot count for London's first-ever elected mayor, as hundreds of electronic vote-counting machines, being used for the first time, broke down from ingesting dust coming from the green baize tables on which the ballot papers were stacked.)

But for many weary British taxpayers, the best government IT-related news in 1999 was that the civil service Central Information Technology Unit was launching a no-stone-unturned review of government IT practice, headed by an IT expert seconded from the Australian civil service, Anne Steward. In contrast to previous blame-pinning exercises, ran the hype, this analysis would actually try to formulate some best practices.

Well good news for everyone except the hapless outsourcing and contracting community, perhaps, whose trade organization, the London-based Computing Services and Software Association, promptly announced in December 1999 the launch of its own review of what went wrong—fearing, possibly, that its members would find themselves smeared with others' failures. "We're certainly concerned about the number of projects that don't go as well as they should," concedes the association's director in charge of the review, Charles Hughes. "When things go wrong, it causes problems for the client, the general public and of course the suppliers." In particular, he notes, problems absorb association members' management time as they try to correct them, add to costs and create bad publicity.

According to Hughes, the high-powered team that the association has gathered to investigate the causes of failure includes a general who headed up the Ministry of Defense's information systems (and who now works for defense contractor British Aerospace); a former computer expert from GCHQ, the government electronic spying bureau (who now heads the IT function at Clifford Chance, one of the world's largest law firms) and a professor who has worked within the Cabinet Office. Together, they are taking testimony submissions from contractors as diverse as Andersen Consulting, EDS, IBM and Sun Microsystems.