Writing off the project and starting from scratch was now a ‘very possible’ outcome, according to Policy & Resources’ new IT adviser Marc Laine.
He also expected more botched projects to be uncovered in the near future, in addition to the failure at the Revenue Service and another fiasco recently announced by P&R in which £18m. was wasted on the MyGov customer services platform, and he alerted taxpayers to the unavoidably high cost of dealing with them.
‘My fear is that there are waves of further risks and issues that will follow on behind, and to a large extent they arise because of cultural and structural issues within management and the governance applied by the senior leadership team and politicians,’ he said.
Listen to the full interview with Deputy Marc Laine on the latest Guernsey Press Politics Podcast
‘We’ve had 30 years of neglect and 30 years of under-qualified executive management around technology.
‘That’s why we’re here today. The reason we had that is there was not the governance above it.
‘The States will have to spend many millions more in the coming 18 months than it anticipated, and that will be to address technical deficits, whether on projects or neglected areas.’
In a wide-ranging interview on the latest edition of the Guernsey Press Politics Podcast, Deputy Laine provided the most frank assessment yet of the vast difficulties the States is facing dealing with technology, how it could start to overcome them, and the limitations of his new role leading an IT advisory panel.
‘We’ve had 30 years of neglect and 30 years of under-qualified executive management around technology.’
He believed that P&R was ‘still slightly shocked’ by the problems it had inherited and spoke about teething problems working with the senior committee in his new role.
Deputy Laine, who built successful businesses in IT and other sectors in between three separate spells as a States member, also revealed that there were widespread concerns in industry about the Revenue Service project even before it started.
‘I certainly know one of the big four involved in the initial bidding who pulled out because they didn’t think it could possibly be achieved by the technology which was specified,’ he said.
‘Even if they get it working as designed, it already appears that there are lots of operational issues with it. For example, there is no facility for bulk uploads.’
Deputy Laine said that maintaining the system and adapting it to cloud-only technology, which the manufacturer has said would be necessary by 2029, would be expensive and cause ‘all sorts of issues’ given the existing ‘incredibly brittle’ state of the project.
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