Re:Viewing 2006: The year in the public sector

In with a bang, out with a whimper...

Will the public sector ever learn? 2006 was ruled by two mega IT projects which both received opposition from their intended users. Steve Ranger looks at how a year that started off so well for the government turned so messy.

Two massive and highly controversial projects have dominated public sector technology news in the last year - ID cards and the NHS IT.

In both cases, despite a strong start the year, with the government insisting it has learned the lessons of previous tech disasters, it appears those old habits die hard.

Back in the spring the government may have thought the war over ID cards was won when the ID Card Act became law. But as the year went on it became clear that getting the legislation passed was just one of the earliest skirmishes in a war that is far from over.

The government wasted no time in starting work on the controversial ID card scheme after the bill became law in March, setting up the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), which is in charge of managing the ID cards scheme.

The bill finally got approval following a deal between MPs and peers in the House of Lords, which allowed people to opt out of receiving an ID card when renewing their passport until 2010. But people who opt out would still have to pay for the ID card - and have their fingerprints and personal details taken and stored on the national identity register (NIR) when they got a new passport.

But since then there has been a steady stream of stories raising concerns about ID cards. It was revealed the public will be forced to fork out for a costly replacement if the biometric chip in their future passport or ID card breaks down. The passport and ID card combo is expected to cost around £93.

And even if they don't break, the cards might be copied. According to one fraud expert, the cards would be cloned within six months of their launch.

Concerns about the NIR - the heart of the project - have been growing throughout the year, with Liberal Democrats warning that it would be a juicy target for hackers looking to steal identities.

All of this has led some people to conclude they would be better off renewing their passports early, which they calculated would be enough to keep them beyond the reach of the identity card database until 2016.

It's not just the man on the street that was worried about the project either. Some senior Whitehall chiefs are worried about the NIR with one writing to another: "I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail."

Piling on the pressure was a damning report by MPs on the government's Science and Technology Committee, which said the Home Office's approach to the ID cards scheme has been "inconsistent". And a pledge from Conservative Party leader David Cameron to scrap the project if the Tories win the General Election did not help. On top of this came a warning from the London School of Economics that the cost estimates for the project were "worryingly vague".

So it was perhaps unsurprising that just before Christmas - the traditional time for burying bad news - the government revealed a major rethink of the project, scrapping the NIR mega-database and abandoning plans for iris biometrics in a bid to keep the giant project on track.

For the giant £12bn NHS IT project, it's been another mixed year. While there has been progress on an number of fronts - such as digital X-rays - probably the biggest news was Accenture which decided to pull out of two massive contracts.

Accenture was awarded the two contracts to be the local service provider (LSP) for the East and North East regions back in 2003 but will now hand over the work to CSC, which is already an LSP for the North West and West Midlands regions.

As part of the agreement Accenture will get to keep £110m of the £173m it has been paid by the NHS to date for its work on the CfH contracts, and is due to hand over its delivery obligations to CSC by 8 January 2007.

But NHS execs remained upbeat about the broader programme, pointing out that being able to replace Accenture so easily validated their procurement policy.

It's probably worth noting that the Accenture exec who was responsible for the company's £2bn contracts for the NHS IT programme is the same James Hall who is now head of the government's ID card project.

There has been a steady drip-drip of criticism of the project through out the year, including warnings from the British Computer Society for the need to move away from monolithic computer systems, while nurses complained they weren't getting enough training.

But few NHS IT projects have created as much controversy as the electronic patient record which will contain information such as patients' current medications, allergies and adverse reactions. Many patients - perhaps spooked by the public sector's track record on IT - have objected to this.

As a result, when the trials start of the project start in the spring patients will be allowed to opt out of data sharing if they want to.

So as the year draws to a close government IT projects, haunted by fears of past failures, seem to be going out with more of a whimper than a bang. But with big contracts including biometric borders and road pricing coming down the line, 2007 is likely to be just as eventful.