Out-Law News 2 min. read
12 Sep 2013, 12:36 pm
The National Audit Office (NAO) said that poor handling of legacy ICT could end up costing taxpayers money and negatively affect the way public services are delivered.
In a new report entitled ‘Managing the risks of legacy ICT to public service delivery' (48-page / 391KB PDF), the NAO detailed the results of audits it conducted on four Government bodies over their management of legacy ICT systems. Whilst it said it had identified some good practices, the NAO warned that the overall strategies Government bodies have adopted for managing legacy technology are unsuited for delivering the most from the planned digitising of public services.
The NAO audited the Department for Work & Pensions’ (DWP) systems used for assessing entitlement to state pension, pension credit and winter fuel allowance, and HM Revenue & Customs' (HMRC's) VAT collection service. It also scrutinised the NHS Business Services Authority’s (NHSBSA's) prescription payment service and the Office of Fair Trading's (OFT's) consumer credit licensing service.
"We estimate that at least £480 billion of central government revenue and at least £210 billion of non-staff expenditure in 2011-12 is reliant on legacy ICT," the NAO said in its report. "Legacy ICT could present a very significant risk to public service delivery and value for money if handled poorly."
"We found examples where government has understood and managed the short-term risks of legacy ICT well. Specifically, for VAT collection, state pensions and prescription payments, legacy ICT has delivered satisfactory levels of performance. Government bodies have developed strategies to deliver incremental business change and service improvement from their legacy ICT. These strategies have inevitably, in times of austerity, become more focused on short-term decision-making, seeking to minimise both investment need and the risk to service delivery," it said.
"However, government is changing the way it commissions public services, to make them digital, cheaper and more adaptable to user needs. The strategies that government bodies have been applying to legacy ICT are unlikely to be sufficient to deliver the level of transformation envisaged by the government’s digital strategy. The lack of a full end-to-end view of the service, gaps in cost and performance information and the siloed working of ICT and business functions also restrict decision-making," the watchdog added.
The NAO said that Government bodies hoping to rely on legacy ICT systems to transform public services should analyse "the cost, performance, and risks of their services over time" and assess what impact legacy systems have. The business case for involving legacy systems in transformational projects should be "robust from many perspectives: user; operational efficiency; commercial; financial; and technical", it added. Government bodies should seek out the potential for "ongoing efficiencies" associated with running legacy ICT systems.
The NAO also called on public bodies to learn from the experience of others when seeking to transform services, and said individuals responsible for managing services should know the risks posed to those services by relying on legacy ICT.
"Public bodies should draw more on cross-government comparisons and examples of best practice of managing legacy ICT while transforming to digital," the NAO said. "There is good experience in government and teams are becoming more open to sharing."
"Public bodies should ensure that service managers are fully aware of the risks to their services, posed by legacy ICT. The requirement for every public service to have a service manager taking responsibility for the whole life cycle and performance of the service, as identified in the Government Digital Strategy, is a good opportunity to develop this more holistic view," it said.