New approach urged for government IT

A new report into government IT failures has warned that previous inquiries may have embedded problems by focusing on inappropriate ‘best practice’ instead of looking for alternative approaches.

The report, from the Institute for Government, says “existing ‘best practice’ project models do not deal with the fundamental issues at the heart of government IT.”

It also argues that: “By implementing these same, flawed project techniques in an increasingly rigid fashion, these traditional solutions can act to exacerbate the problems further.”

Instead, it calls for a new that focuses on using government’s huge buying power to get better deals for what it calls ‘platform' technologies – such as server capacity and PCs – while encouraging departments to adopt ‘agile’ methodologies to deliver systems to meet the particular challenges they face.

Within this set up, the report says that the Government CIO should take charge of the overall IT strategy for government and decide on the right balance between platform and agile approaches.