‘I was not made aware of scale or extent of problem’
GAVIN ST PIER – who was Policy & Resources president when the States signed a £200m. IT contract with Agilisys in 2019 – has claimed he was ‘not aware of the scale and extent of problems’ which built up in States IT systems over years until a meltdown last winter.
Following publication yesterday of a damning independent report which revealed a catalogue of errors stretching back to 2016, Deputy St Pier described the States’ IT difficulties as a ‘series of unknown unknowns’.
He questioned why he did not receive briefings about the problems as they were accumulating.
‘Political committees can only really deal with those issues which we recently know about,’ he said.
‘It raises questions as to why, if these incidents have been going on for a period of time, that information wasn’t made available at that time, in order for them to be addressed.’
He said the purpose of the deal with Agilisys was to deal with weaknesses in States’ IT infrastructure. And he praised his successors on P&R for reacting to last winter’s meltdown by setting up an independent review.
‘I think the challenge is not so much the event, and it’s not so much the crisis, but how they now respond to the crisis,’ he said.
‘The next step is probably the most important one. They have the report, they have this information, so what are they going to do about it?
‘I think that’s the real test of the current P&R – how they respond now they’ve got all the information.’
The States said yesterday that PwC’s report into the crisis had cost £90,000.
Scrutiny president Yvonne Burford, whose committee is still carrying out its own review into States’ IT failings, said she was ‘disappointed but not surprised’ by the findings of the PwC report.
She said Scrutiny’s review would be finished by the end of the year and would take into account the work carried out by PwC.
Deputy Aidan Matthews, who has had a 25-year career in software development, claimed the States’ contract with Agilisys was partly responsible for repeated IT failures.
‘The way the outsourcing has been done with Agilisys has not helped. I wouldn’t have outsourced it all in one go. There is now a lot of work ahead,’ he said.
Lester Queripel said deputies, as well as States staff and customers, had suffered from IT outages.
‘We spend a lot of time online doing research and responding to emails. I don’t know whose fault it is, but it never should have got to this point,’ he said. ‘I have faith that it will be rectified. It’s got to be solved to enable us to be better.’
Deputy Queripel said he had called Agilisys engineers to his house several times to help sort out work-related IT problems.
