The Institute for Government did in fact praise the government for setting the right goals in its ICT strategy. But outside of the ICT profession, senior civil servants were found to have ignored the plans designed to get Whitehall ICT on track.
Adopting agile ways of working was a key requirement set out in last year's Government ICT Strategy, with a target set for 50 per cent of projects to use agile techniques by April 2013.
This would allow projects to be broken down into "manageable chunks", the institute said, allowing for elements of projects to be easily scrapped if needed, without incurring major cost to the taxpayer.
But the institute found the bulk of government ICT projects had failed to adopt this agile approach. Civil servants told the institute agile was "far from becoming the default" and the report warned it would now be "extremely difficult" for the 50 per cent target to be met, unless change was embraced.
Sir Ian Magee a senior fellow at the IfG said the government was "only slowly" changing the way it ran ICT.
"Big bang projects which try to define what's needed upfront and unveil solutions years later end up costing more and too often produce results that are outdated by the time they are delivered," he said.
If the government was to "truly embrace" agile, then new ways of working needed to be adopted by more than just the ICT profession. "Government procurement, policy and operational managers" needed to change, Sir Ian said.
The report found a number of other problems. Government still lacked comparable data needed to judge whether ICT was improving. And chief information officers expressed uncertainty as to whether the necessary skills and resources existed in government to deliver the strategy.
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Quelle/Source: Public Service, 25.06.2012
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