The cabinet has agreed to establish a "peer review system" for major public IT projects, which will involve experts from across the public service assessing projects to prevent cost overruns and the development of systems that cannot be used.
The announcement comes only days after it was revealed that the government had spent nearly EUR150 million on a payroll system for the Department of Health, which was subsequently suspended because of major concerns about its quality and effectiveness. The department's new financial management system is also be suspended after EUR30 million had been spent on its development. Consultancy firm Deloitte, was paid EUR60 million for its services on the two systems, known as PPARS and FISP respectively. The Tanaiste and Health Minister, Mary Harney, told the Dail that there had been no fixed-price contracts for Deloitte and no incentive for them to deliver on time.
"It's not just a cost over-run, it is many multiples of an over-run," said Brendan Carney, managing director of Strandum, an Irish company that develops HR and payroll systems. "A HR system isn't that complicated, not compared to something like a manufacturing system."
Carney said that in his 25 years of industry experience he had never seen a comparable situation. He said that although cost overruns commonly occur, they typically amount to a fraction of the total cost of the system and are often borne by the consultants implementing the system.
The government came under further pressure on Tueday, when opposition parties raised the issue of EUR3 million that had been spent on a website, which was designed to establish a single point of contact for the public, through which they could access health services throughout the State. The project was shelved in February of this year and the Department of Health is now considering replacing it with a less ambitious website at a cost of less than EUR250,000.
The political pressure has been kept up on Wednesday, with Fine Gael claiming that a new automated system for issuing passports will cost the exchequer double its initial budget. The cost was initially estimated at EUR13.5 million in 2000, but is now expected to cost EUR27.7 million, according to the party's foreign affairs spokesman, Bernard Allen TD. Only EUR4 million of that overrun is attributable to enhanced security requirements introduced since 2001.
Autor: Ciaran Buckley
Quelle: ElectricNews, 17.10.2005
