The Southdock

Is it just me, or can there really be a sense of Groundhog day when reading commentaries about IT spending in the public service?

Take this, albeit old, report from the concise http://www.siliconrepublic.com/.

Obviously given the whole PPARS debacle in the HSE the speaker was onto a winner with a talk that posed the question "Why do IT projects fail in the health sector?". According to Silicon Republic, Archie Galbraith (who is head of Accenture's healthcare division) said it was down to vendors over-commiting, underachievement of project goals and lack of value for money.

The remedy apparently is to "Know exactly what you want, agree outcomes, start with the end vision and work backwards. And always think about context and the larger system".

Great.

What exacltly is unique about this in the context of the health service, or even the public service generally is beyond me. If you want to manage projects, you should know a bit about project management.

A few months later, the same topic is still being discussed by another consultant in another Silicon Republic article.

It strikes me that if all people working in IT could be forced to read the "Mythical Man Month" by Brooks the IT world would be a better place. Amazingly hardly any undergraduate software engineering course I know of has this on the curriculum.

PPARS was a mess, but not because it was an IT project that ran out of control - it was a *project* that ran out of control - and the problems that caused it are endemic issues in the public service. So public servants are to blame? Well partly. The public service is a culture apart, where people joining from private enterprise have a steep learning curve. Most of all it is a culture where risk taking, and taking responsibility can be career threating acts.

As a public we can't have it both ways - we can't demand that we have complete transparency so that when a mistake is made a public servant can have their name quoted in the press as has been the case in the past, while at the same time expecting an efficient adminstration where ass-covering and risk aversion don't remain the norm. Forget about reforming the health service as a major challenge for Ireland - the real challenge is reforming the entire public service.