Nobody could have been surprised when the National Audit Office (NAO) published a scathing criticism of the FireControl project last week - it was widely known that the programme to replace 46 local control centres with nine centres had hit the rocks - but the report makes for depressing reading all the same.
It's not just the fact that the programme failed so badly, but that it did so for reasons that have been attributed to plenty of previous IT programmes. Among the NAO's criticisms are that Communities and Local Government under-estimated the complexity of the project, and made a poor job of managing the consultants; but even more notable was that it was unable to make local fire and rescue services use the equipment or follow the standards that were necessary to make a success of FireControl.
This is reminiscent of one of the major problems identified in England's NHS National Programme for IT, in which the roll out of the two clinical information systems at its core has been painfully slow, largely because there is such a diversity of approaches in hospital trusts and they have had the right to sign off implementations on their sites.
It highlights a broader problem that faces government. Efforts to make a service more efficient often rely on a strict standardisation of processes and a centralisation of control; but many public authorites enjoy a large degree of autonomy in how they run their business, something which they fiercely protect, and which politicians on the national stage promote as a virtue. Governing parties even tend to sing the praises of devolving power downwards as they are working on schemes to achieve efficiencies through greater standardisation. There is an extent to which they can provide a lead for others to follow, but experience shows that it often needs a degree of mandation, especially when there's a need to get value for money from a multi-million pound investment such as FireControl.
It's a tension that has to be resolved before there's any chance of consigning failures such as this to history; but this won't happen until the problem is publicly acknowledged, and if there are any voices in Westminister willing to do so they are not making themselves widely heard.
Mark Say is editor of Guardian Government Computing
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