UK world leader in scrapping IT projects

Apparently Britain is a "world leader" in scrapping expensive public sector IT projects which fail.

Complex IT projects have a poor record everywhere in the world, in both the public and private sectors. An annual survey by Standish, a US consultancy, estimates that 70 per cent fail to meet their timetable or budget, or to come up to specification. Britain is thus not alone in finding computerising government difficult. The US has experienced a spate of problems at both state and federal level. In March, the FBI abandoned, after five years of work, a $170m attempt to create a "virtual case file" for tracking suspected terrorists. But the record cost-overrun in a civil IT project was probably the US internal revenue service's $30bn tax modernisation in the mid-1990s.

Such spectacular failings have encouraged the British government to suggest that it is no worse than other countries, though perhaps more transparent. This attitude is complacent. A study of seven countries to be published next year finds sharp variations in the proportion of government IT projects that are eventually scrapped. The study, led by Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE and Helen Margetts of Oxford, scores the performance of IT projects in Australia, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Britain and the US between 1990 and 2003. Britain emerges as a world leader in cancelling or producing non-functioning government IT systems. Japan and the Netherlands had fewest failures...

Assuming that British government projects are particularly prone to failure, why should this be so? Investigations and postmortems agree to a surprising extent on a number of common contributory factors which are peculiar to the British public sector. The most important are:
Scale. Big IT projects everywhere are far more likely to fail than small ones...
Lack of professional skills. This affects all large IT projects. According to the Royal Academy of Engineering: "The levels of professionalism observed in software engineering are generally lower than those in other branches of engineering." The academy points to a particular lack of expertise in project management, which is "not well understood."...
Procurement process. Public procurement law requires lengthy formal tendering processes that can take more than a year and sometimes several years. The industry and some senior officials are critical of processes that can lock public bodies into technology that is obsolete by the time the system goes live...
Multiple stakeholders. Complex IT projects often cut across many different agencies, making leadership difficult...
Vulnerability to policy swings and "mission creep." Several government IT programmes have run into trouble because of sudden new demands. A recent example was the introduction of tax credits—a new role for the inland revenue which was sprung on its IT contractor EDS with little notice...