Gov departments still splashing BILLIONS on big-ticket IT projects

Big Whitehall departments got the green light to splash more than a billion pounds on IT projects last year, data analysis by The Register can reveal. A total of £1.4bn was handed out to the six largest government departments according to their spend exemption data, which is made available as part of the government's …

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that all?

"In the last 12 months the government wasted more than £100m on failed or cancelled IT projects, according to the Tax Payers' Alliance last month."

That's less than I thought. They will never get it right. A perfect storm of civil servants who don't care, their political 'masters' who care about only one thing, re-election, and the same big companies (we all know who they are) who are fully aware they are the only thing on the menu. They continue to serve up hot, fresh shit, and the government continue to have to eat it. I see no prospect of change. Just print some more money, that'll solve everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Is that all?

Although I think you're right, on a slightly more optimistic (maybe?) note maybe they believe that like a room full of monkeys typing that they'll hit on something that works, eventually.

[Calleb III]

Re: Is that all?

I would guess that the £100m are only the complete write offs and cancellations and don't include the other couple of £100s of millions wasted on projects that are ticked off as "successful" but are not delivering value for money

[A Non e-mouse]

Percentages, not absolute values

*IF* (and that is a very big if) the government has lost/wasted £100 million on IT, then looking at the overall annual spend of £2.4 billion, that £100 million is around 4% of total IT spend.

Now, to the person on the Clapham Omnibus, £100 million sounds like a lot of money. But in the grand scheme of public spending, it's not *that* much.

(Sure, we'd all like waste to be zero, but we don't live in a perfect world)

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Clinton to define "waste"?

The price points for these projects say it all! These are New-Age legacy programs...they may even run on mainframes!

Rather than using databases and GUI tools, these developments rely on tons of coded logic. They are unwieldy and difficult to change, a problem exacerbated by the 1930's procurement mentality employed by the agencies. That's a reason for the over-runs.

Sadly, it looks like the politicians lost interest in supporting GCloud once the lobbyists visited.