The previous Policy & Resources Committee recently announced that the States’ contract with Agilisys would terminate by 31 July at the latest and backed a new model involving multiple IT suppliers. After confirming that the change would take place ‘in the next week or two’, chief executive Boley Smillie has warned that services may initially decline even further.
‘It’s a huge change and it’s not one that is going to come without challenge. It may well get worse before it gets better,’ he said.
‘That is indicative of the circumstances we’re in. We need to make these really tough decisions in order to move forward.
‘Technology is such an important part of delivering efficient value for money in public services and we simply must do better in our deployment of projects.’
A Scrutiny report published earlier this year, at about the same time Mr Smillie started as the island’s top civil servant, blamed historic incompetence and complacency from the States as the major cause of serious failures in the £200m. contract with Agilisys.
It said the demands on the States were not fully understood from the outset of the deal, there was inadequate expertise in the public sector to manage the contract, and mounting problems during the first few years of the relationship were frequently not dealt with effectively.
Meanwhile, IT failures have been a major cause of a series of crises at the Revenue Service, and are now causing months-long delays to the island’s electronic census and other key statistics reports. At the same time, Health & Social Care’s new electronic system for patients’ records, which was meant to launch last year, remains indefinitely delayed and is expected to run at least £5m. over budget.
Speaking at an event hosted by the local think tank Gpeg, Mr Smillie said that if the States received a school report it would invariably say ‘must do better’ about its use of technology.
‘When we look across the change portfolio of the public service, I want to say there is a golden thread but it’s anything but golden, but it is a thread on matters that relate to technology,’ he said.
‘As I have travelled around and spoken to people on the front line, a common theme keeps coming up – systems and processes and technology are rarely fit for purpose. The people at the front line end up having to make the best of the situation they’ve got.
‘With the best of intentions, the solutions have not delivered the results that were intended.’
When the States announced in May that it was terminating its contract with Agilisys, it said that a new multi-supplier model would in time increase the accountability of suppliers, provide easier access to specialised expertise and reduce the risk of disruption to services.
It has since announced a number of IT partnerships with various providers, most with a value of a few million pounds over a set period.
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