A £154m government IT project intended to manage EU subsidy payments to farmers has been abandoned due to problems with the system's online mapping tool and its lack of reliable integration with a number of disparate back-end systems.
Farmers are being asked to revert back to the old paper-based system, and have been given a one-month extension to apply for the European Union Basic Payment Scheme subsidy - pushing back the deadline from 15 May to 15 June.
Insiders say that a key part of the problem was government insistence that contracts for the IT project should be thrown open to the widest array of suppliers, selecting more than 40 different IT companies to work on the project, and putting too much emphasis on the front-end, and too little on the technical integration issues.
Mark Grimshaw, chief executive of Defra's Rural Payments Agency, which oversees farm subsidies, said that the decision was the result of listening to farmers' complaints "to ensure that everyone who wants to make a claim this year can do so".
Farmers claimed that the online system, far from simplifying and speeding up claims, actually took longer and was unreliable. "I usually leave it to the last minute with the paper forms because it only takes about three hours to do, but so far I have spent three days doing the online version and I am only halfway through it," Shropshire farmer Richard Cotham told the BBC.
He continued: "We don't have all the codes - we have to put down what you're growing in each field and a code for each crop. It is just lack of information really, there is just no information and the people on the switchboard when you ask the helpline are as much in the dark as we are."
The Rural Payments Agency is not the only organisation in Europe struggling to put farm-subsidy claims online. According to Farmers' Weekly, a number of EU member states have struggled to implement automated subsidy systems and yesterday EU farm commissioner Phil Hogan announced the extension - applicable not just to UK payments, but across the EU. "Member states can now take up this option, which should also help avoid penalties for late applications from recipients," said Hogan.
Michael Allen, a vice president at application performance management company Dynatrace, recently spun-out of Compuware, pointed out that it isn't the first IT disaster at Defra. An earlier failed project in 2005 ended up costing £350m. "You would have hoped they'd learned from past mistakes, but evidently not," he said.
He added: "Farmers have been struggling with the website for months and the digital 'mapping tool', which was used to measure farmland boundaries has been the most problematic element of the system, has now been scrapped all together to be replaced with paper maps and forms.
"This is why performance testing and optimisation needs to be baked into applications right from the start. Any organisation needs total visibility of the application delivery chain, so that they can identify the root cause of problems faster and troubleshoot.
"This is why we are seeing a shift towards a DevOps approach to application lifecycle management, because those developing applications need to be working hand in hand with those troubleshooting and managing those applications when they are live.
"Perhaps if there has been more communication and continuous testing then this fiasco could have been avoided," he concluded.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Graeme Burton
Quelle/Source: computing, 20.03.2015
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