States’ IT needed a bit more than a ‘tidy up’

So our chief minister thinks that there were ‘faults on a lot of sides’ [for States’ IT failures] and there should have been ‘a tidying up at the edges because there were things that fell between the cracks’. Has he no conception of just how damning the PwC report is?

A 10-year £200m. contract was signed – a significant amount of money in anyone’s book. This may or may not be a good contract, hopefully examination and review of it by the Scrutiny Committee will throw some light on that.

But what is glaringly obvious to any person on the street, IT-savvy or not, is that Agilisys has not invested sufficiently or speedily enough in infrastructure in the six years since it was signed and specifically no-one in the States has taken responsibility or oversight of this contract to ensure that equipment was replaced in a timely manner.

Now that is down to the people on very high salaries with responsibility for IT, going right up to the chief executive to ensure that this was the case and in that, they have singularly failed. Yet our chief minister believes that it has fallen through the cracks!

Isn’t it about time that those responsible were taken to task? There certainly is fault on a lot of sides and those sides need to take responsibility for their non-action and incompetence clearly illustrated by the disasters that befell the systems.

We, the tax-burdened public, want to see value for money in these essential systems and technologies so that Guernsey is in a position to be efficiently managed and run. We also need to have confidence that our data is in safe hands. The use of technology being to reduce costs and thus be less of a burden on the public purse. In order to move forward there needs to be in place a robust management of this contract going forward and without undue delay by vacillating politicians and companies taking profit before investment.

It would appear that our chief minister simply has no cognisance of just how serious this report is or he wishes to sweep it under the carpet. Let’s hope that the Scrutiny Committee doesn’t let that happen.

jonesmnr@gmail.com