States underestimated scale of IT overhaul

Bob Murray, who leads P&R on providing political insight for corporate services, was addressing a long-awaited report by the Scrutiny Management Committee, which blamed incompetence and complacency from the States as the major cause of serious failures under the terms of the contract signed in 2019.

Deputy Murray admitted the States had not done its own due diligence in relation to the amount of work that was required on its legacy IT estate – which he said had stopped receiving investment in 2016 – and so Agilisys underestimated the scale of what needed to be done.

‘When we signed the contract with Agilisys, they made it very plain they wouldn’t take on direct responsibility for the legacy estate because, unfortunately, it wasn’t sufficiently documented – they wouldn’t have known necessarily the extent of what they were taking on,’ he said.

‘It was the legacy estate that let us down when the outages in 2022 occurred, but that at that time, when we started to peel back the layers on that, we recognised that there was insufficient management of the relationship, simply because there was insufficient resources.’

When asked whether the States was expecting ‘miracles’ to happen on the basis of what Agilisys knew when it signed the contract, Deputy Murray said there was ‘some truth in that’.

‘I think that came out of our lack of understanding of the state of play we were already in when we entered into the contract.

‘Agilisys made very clear they wouldn’t take on immediate responsibility for the estate, because we couldn’t demonstrate where its extent was, and that really is just an historic way in which IT services were developed in the States.’

One of Scrutiny’s principal findings in its report was that a team of six staff retained by the States’ own IT department, once all other staff had been transferred to Agilisys, lacked sufficient expertise. It could have been four times larger.

Deputy Murray said there were two reasons for why the team had got so small.

‘One of them is probably political, in terms of this assumption that we as a civil service are a bloated provision, which is completely untrue,’ he said.

‘I think the other issue was that, as a consequence of the pressure of trying to save money, they [the staff] tried to struggle on the best they could with what they’d been given.

‘But having said that, we’re talking about such a major transformational change that we should have probably recognised much earlier that we couldn’t do it with only six people.

‘They were actually getting overwhelmed with this.’

States chief digital and information officer Ge Drossaert, who was brought in 18 months ago to oversee changes in the way the partnership was governed, said the number of IT staff now totalled about 20 and operated under a new model, focusing on ownership.

‘The model we have now is “inspect, not expect”, and that is very important, because we need to start seeing that the projects are in good shape and become predictable, but also that we get the results that we intended to have.’

He added that some of Agilisys’ roles had been brought back in-house, and that the company was in the process of adapting to the new operating model.

As for further changes that have been made to ensure there was not a repeat of the failures detailed in the Scrutiny report, Mr Drossaert said a digital strategy was set to be published soon, while the States’ relationship with service vendors has been re-examined.

‘Any future relationship needs to fit us, and it needs to be proper and clean, and more business-like,’ he said.