UK GOVERNMENT IT FAILURES

UK Government IT Failures



UK Government IT Failures

Introduction

Information technology (IT) project failure (close to 71%) has become the norm despite adopting heterogeneous IT methodologies; this failure rate is concerning to IT program and project managers The paper discusses the IT project failures in UK and for that purpose the selected article is Not Fit for Purpose. The purpose is to identify the issues that the IT sector is facing in terms of the innermost enterprising. The paper also highlights and examines some of the projects failure as discussed in the case.

Background

Recent IT failures at financial institutions reflect a lack of investment in technical infrastructure throughout the financial services industry, says Bradley Wood, partner at capital markets consultancy GreySpark Partners. Lloyds TSB announced at the start of the year that as many as 200,000 customers on New Year's Eve in the UK might have paid twice in transactions using chip and pin units supplied by the bank. In November last year, National Australia Bank announced that payments through its systems were being delayed due to failures in its systems, meaning many customers were left waiting for wages to be paid into their accounts. Similarly, last summer Santander admitted customers it gained from its acquisition of Alliance & Leicester were unable to access their accounts online after issues arose in the migration of customer data to Santander's different systems (Humphrey,2004,2-7).

For Wood, these persistent incidents might reflect the fact that banks have been diverting funds that would be used to maintain back-office systems to more profitable areas of the bank, largely as a result of the economic crisis. “In bad times, or bearish times, there is cost cutting, clearly, and the obvious place to cut costs is the back office, and ironically, this is where payment systems are placed,” he says. “IT investment tends to move to the front office in times where the banks are not making as much money because they want to put the investment at the money-making end of the business.” However, by neglecting those back-office systems, Wood says, banks “create an increased risk”. Wood also argues that in times of greater financial strain, institutions are likely to migrate their IT infrastructure support to cheaper regions in attempts to cut costs. He says transitions like this can be managed, but when time and money are not resources banks are willing to spend on such a process, difficulties can occur (Humphrey, 2004,2-7).

“If it's done in a rushed and pressured way, things are going to break,” he says. By spending too little time on the process of off shoring, institutions can create skills gaps that are not easily crossed. “That is where errors like those we've seen in the market recently can occur,” says Wood. Nonetheless, Wood is confident these trends are not irreversible, and predicts greater IT investment will return as “the market cycle pendulum swings back the other way over a three- to the five-year period”. Spending will return to infrastructure and back office support, ...