David Goy claimed it was a well-known problem throughout the time he was working in IT for both the States and Agilisys.
He said the problem was behind the collapse of the States/Agilisys partnership earlier this year and the expensive failure of the Revenue Service and MyGov IT projects revealed yesterday.
‘I can say categorically as a fact that the biggest reason we have a £135m. IT debacle is because we have non-technical people in management roles making technical decisions,’ said Deputy Goy.
‘That has always been the case, before IT was privatised [with Agilisys] and after it was privatised.’
He wanted to see more engineers involved in the management of IT projects.
‘Anybody can claim to be an expert. They could be running a local business, but that doesn’t mean they are an expert. A real expert is an expert in the technical areas of IT and that person must be an IT engineer.’
Policy & Resources treasury lead Gavin St Pier said in response that he did not want to prejudge the findings of investigations into the project failures now being undertaken by States chief executive Boley Smillie.
Watch: Matt Fallaize spoke to States chief executive Boley Smillie
But he said that Deputy Marc Laine, who has been appointed to lead a new IT advisory panel to P&R, had already expressed concern about ‘the absence of good system architects’ in States projects to design, build and run IT systems.
The senior committee had earlier revealed that at least £42m. of taxpayers’ money spent in recent years at the Revenue Service and on the MyGov project had generated little improvement for customers or staff.
Deputy St Pier faced numerous questions from States members following his unscheduled statement to the Assembly about the project failures, but most of them failed to draw substantial replies or additional information.
In reply to Deputy Mark Helyar, he could not say at this stage whether some managers would need to be replaced. He was uncertain when problems at the Revenue Service would be fully resolved, or what the costs would be, despite being pressed by Deputy Adrian Gabriel. He declined to commit to an invitation from Deputy Sasha Kazantseva-Miller to carry out ‘a fundamental review’ of services which had been centralised under P&R.
Deputy St Pier did, however, agree that Deputy Sally Rochester’s suggestion to appoint an auditor-general ‘ought to be considered’.
And he accepted that trying to design unique IT systems rather than purchasing tried and tested systems ‘may well be one of the issues’ behind the repeated project failures, a point made by Deputy Andy Cameron.
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