Policy & Resources’ new IT adviser, Marc Laine, told the latest Guernsey Press Politics Podcast that it was the obvious explanation behind the expenditure of £18m. on a failed customer services platform known as MyGov.
States chief executive Boley Smillie, who has launched an investigation into what went wrong, said recently that he was unable to rule out malfeasance among a lengthy list of possible explanations.
‘It would be an easy way out to say that there’s been dishonesty or whatever else, because it gets away from what I see as the real heart of it, which is corporate incompetence. That is so much of what we have,’ said Deputy Laine.
Listen to the full interview with Deputy Marc Laine on the latest Guernsey Press Politics Podcast
A successor project to MyGov has been launched. Deputy Laine believed that any success it achieved would be down to Ge Drossaert, who was appointed last year to lead IT, in the face of underlying weaknesses which remained largely unresolved. Those weaknesses included the limited skills of many of the same officials who were involved in the original MyGov project and other IT initiatives which had gone or were going badly wrong.
‘We are still relying on those people. Essentially, the management team hasn’t changed for 10 years or so, which is probably not healthy in its own right,’ said Deputy Laine.
‘It’s easy to bash these guys, but they are incredibly stretched and below them is very little resource. If we think of projects, there is no one in the senior management team who has any experience of bringing in projects of this size. You can have all the project managers you want, but the people at the top also need to be able to interpret, ask the right questions and make decisions. We don’t have that skill set.’
P&R recently announced that a total of at least £42m. had been wasted on MyGov and an IT platform at the Revenue Service and admitted the problems which caused them may also have led to the failure of as yet unidentified non-IT projects.
Deputy Laine said the States had ‘a people problem manifesting as technical issues’.
He also questioned the wisdom of a decision made by a previous chief executive to remove committees’ chief officers and other dedicated posts. P&R is understood to be considering reinstating the roles, but no official announcement has been made.
Having previously agreed to be P&R’s IT adviser, Deputy Laine recently undertook to lead an advisory panel, which is expected to include people with public and private sector experience.
‘There is no doubt that from the P&R president, the whole of P&R and the chief executive there is massive commitment to move forward and address this,’ he said.
‘Their starting position is not great and they’re not well equipped actually to deal with it. They have commitment and intention and everything else, but they find themselves in a perfect storm and there needs to be more resource. This advisory panel can to some extent make up the deficit of knowledge within P&R, but we have burning fires about our feet that need to be dealt with and that is not the role of the panel.’
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