I HAVE now read the MyGov report, which was published this morning.
There will be more in it than any single article captures, and more consequences will follow as people work through what it actually says. I would caution against settling too quickly on any one finding as the defining one. The full picture is more complex than any headline.
I met with Policy & Resources last week. The committee is fully supportive of the chief executive and the need for change. They are not a blocker.
The impediment is the scale of what needs to change, and the internal capability required to see it through.
What the report establishes goes well beyond the failure of one programme. It describes an organisation that, over a sustained period, was not structured or led in a way that made success likely.
That is a shared failure, regardless of any deliberate concealment of problems. It is shared by politicians across successive terms who did not ask hard enough questions, and accepted assurances without demanding evidence.
The report is careful to note, though, that deputies could not reasonably have been expected to fully challenge or penetrate what was presented to them, given reporting that was polished and projected confidence.
That finding strengthens the structural argument – the system itself failed the scrutiny function. The failure is also shared by senior officials who allowed programmes to continue past the point at which an honest assessment would have stopped them. And it is shared by a deliberate structural choice made year after year – the decision not to hire the kind of senior technical leadership that would never have let these programmes reach that point.
What matters is being honest about the nature of the failure, because without that honesty, it will not be fixed. At its core, this was an organisation that outsourced not just the doing but the thinking, and in doing so became a passive customer without the internal expertise to know what it was buying or whether it was working.
The fundamental problem dates to the Agilisys contract, when the States did not retain or introduce roles capable of making it a smart client, rather than a passive one. Had those roles existed, the warning signs that went unheeded for years would have been visible to someone with the standing and the expertise to act on them.
The reliance on external expertise has to end
This government has depended on external consultants and project managers for too long. Contracting out the thinking as well as the doing is a way of avoiding the hard work of building real internal capability, and the cost only becomes fully visible when things go badly. The people brought in to run these programmes learned the organisation on the public’s money. When they left, they took that knowledge with them. What remained was a series of part-built systems, incomplete documentation, and an internal workforce that had been managed around rather than developed.
The report confirms what many suspected. A total of £21.6m. was spent, of which £16.2m. went to Agilisys alone. The programme projected annual recurring savings of £7.4m. by 2021. The actual reported figure was £1.3m., and even that is questioned – the report finds limited evidence that the savings were directly attributable to the programme. At the same time, governance structures ballooned to include over 20 boards, groups and teams below programme board level, a proliferation the report finds diluted rather than strengthened accountability.
One finding deserves particular attention. Agilisys held seats on the programme board itself, effectively marking its own performance while shaping how that performance was reported.
The report states this plainly – it created a conflict in which supplier-led interpretation of progress went largely unchallenged at precisely the point where scrutiny was most needed. That is a loss of institutional control.
The report also confirms that the normal business case process was not just weak. It was bypassed. Material was produced retrospectively in increasing volumes in the hope that eventually enough would exist to secure approval.
That approach did not improve decision-making. It made it harder. Separately, the report finds that organisational changes were implemented before the supporting technology was in place, leaving staff to deliver with reduced resource and without the tools required. The consequences of that sequencing are still felt.
The States had no senior subject matter experts on its payroll. Not in technology, not in programme delivery, not in the specialist disciplines that complex public sector transformation actually requires. When nobody internally has the depth to scrutinise what a vendor is telling you, you are not a client managing a contract. You are a bystander.
The report recommends establishing a genuine internal delivery function, and that recommendation is right. But what it means in practice matters enormously. It cannot be a rebranded project office. It needs to be a real centre of expertise, staffed by people who have actually delivered complex programmes, who carry professional depth, and who have the standing to challenge as well as support. That means a chief project delivery officer at C-suite level.
Alongside that, Guernsey needs what most well-run organisations of any scale now treat as standard, a chief technology officer and a chief information security officer at executive level, sitting at the top table rather than embedded in or subordinate to any delivery team, complementing our CDIO.
A CTO worth the title has genuine technical authority across the organisation’s technology strategy, sets direction on how public systems are built and integrated, and brings professional judgment that no project office can substitute for. A CISO treats the security of public systems as a personal professional responsibility rather than a compliance checklist, and has the seniority to insist on proper standards even when that is inconvenient. In organisations that get technology right, these are not supporting roles.
The report does not propose these roles. Its recommendation on the change function is notably modest: a properly resourced function, clear accountability for delivery, change management recognised as a core capability. That is a start, not a destination.
I have been lobbying for a CTO and CISO since June 2025. A chief project delivery officer, a chief technology officer, and a chief information security officer are the minimum leadership structure for an organisation committing hundreds of millions of pounds to technology over the next decade.
I believe the chief executive is moving in that direction. Belief though, is not the same as confirmation in the report.
The SAP programme shows what is still missing
Consider what is currently moving through the project pipeline this week. The States is progressing a migration of its SAP systems from on-site servers to cloud infrastructure. SAP runs large parts of the government’s financial and administrative operations. Moving it is technically complex and financially significant. It has moved forward with limited information presented to decision-makers and the true complexity largely unacknowledged in the supporting documentation. This is not a historical failure. It is happening now, with the MyGov report fresh in everyone’s hands.
The chief executive and P&R are aware of my concerns and are committed to a better outcome. What is particularly encouraging is that the chief executive, the CDIO, and I arrived at broadly the same concerns about the SAP migration independently of one another. That convergence is a good sign. It also illustrates exactly what a CTO and CISO in post would have identified as a matter of course, long before a programme reached transitional status in the proposed pipeline. We now need to bring in that perspective retrospectively on this and other projects.
There will be an improved project governance process, and that improvement is right. But better processes for approving and monitoring projects do not conjure the technical judgement needed to understand what those projects actually involve. You can have the most rigorous project office in the world and still approve programmes you do not properly understand, sign contracts that transfer risk in the wrong direction, and find yourself dependent on a supplier’s account managers for your understanding of your own systems. Better oversight of projects you cannot independently assess is not the same thing as capability.
Fixing the structure is necessary but not sufficient
This is the part of the conversation that tends to get lost when a report of this kind is published. Structural recommendations get debated. Governance changes get agreed. A new function gets established. And gradually, quietly, the organisation settles back into familiar patterns, because the deeper question has not been seriously addressed – how this place actually works, how it feels to work in it, what is expected of people, and what happens when they fall short.
Several of the best-performing public services in the world have faced similar moments and used them as genuine turning points. The ones that succeeded did not simply implement structural recommendations and call the job done. They worked simultaneously on direction, behaviour, capability and visible leadership. The ones that failed produced a new organisational chart, agreed some governance changes, and waited for the culture to catch up on its own. It never did.
For Guernsey, that wider effort starts with a sense of direction that people can actually feel. Civil servants need to understand in plain terms what this government is committed to achieving, how progress will be measured, and how their own work connects to something that matters. When that connection is clear and honestly reported, people work differently. When it is not, they default to process compliance, and process compliance is the enemy of delivery.
Accountability needs to become personal and specific. Every significant commitment should have a named individual behind it, someone with the authority to act and the responsibility to answer for the outcome. Not a steering group. A person.
Spreading accountability so widely that nobody is clearly answerable has been one of the defining weaknesses of how this organisation has operated. The report confirms this directly – it finds no evidence that programme failure was reflected in individual performance reviews, and identifies the complete absence of a formal disciplinary or capability framework for the most senior leaders.
That is a material gap, and it requires a direct answer.
Performance conversations need to become normal at every level, not occasional and ceremonial. The gap between what managers know about how their people are doing and what gets said in formal reviews exists in most large organisations, but it becomes genuinely costly in public services under fiscal pressure. Good feedback cultures are built deliberately, trained for, and role-modelled from the top.
The knowledge held by frontline staff needs to actually reach the people making decisions. The people doing the work know where the systems are broken, where the processes add no value, and where a different approach would serve the public better. That knowledge is largely untapped.
None of this happens without senior leaders visibly behaving in ways that make the culture they say they want real to the people around them. The research on this is consistent across decades – the single most powerful determinant of what culture an organisation actually has is what people observe their leaders doing in ordinary situations. Not the set-piece speeches. The Tuesday afternoon meeting. The moment when someone raises a concern. The decision about whether to ask a harder question or accept a comfortable answer. These unremarkable moments are what people below observe, and what they observe is what they replicate.
The chief executive and P&R inherited this situation. The failures the report documents, the culture that allowed them, and the structural dependency on external expertise that left the organisation unable to see what was happening in its own programmes, are not of their making.
Boley Smillie has handled the investigation with integrity and spoken about what he found honestly, and at times uncomfortably so. It is also worth saying that the sheer personal effort he had to put into researching and producing this report speaks volumes about the lack of professional support available at the top.
A chief executive needs to run the organisation and have a team around him that he can reliably delegate to. That team does not yet exist in the way it should.
The investigation and the report are not the achievement. They are the prerequisite.
The achievement, if it comes, will be visible in two or three years in whether this organisation feels and functions differently – whether the people working in it trust that honesty is safe and expertise is valued, and whether the public can see a government that delivers on what it commits to.
Any structural recommendations in the report deserve full implementation without dilution. A properly-resourced internal delivery function with genuine professional authority is a foundation, not a nicety. But a foundation is only as good as what is built on it, and what needs to be built here is harder than reorganising a project office. It is a sustained, deliberate effort to change what this organisation actually is – how it thinks about accountability, how it grows and keeps expertise, how its leaders behave on an ordinary Wednesday, and whether the people working in it believe that doing the right thing is safe.
The talent to build something genuinely better is already here, in many cases waiting for conditions that make their best work possible. The report creates those conditions.
It would be a considerable waste to squander them.