Published on the 21/08/2017 | Written by Jonathan Cotton

Can another inquiry into govt’s multiple digital debacles actually fix anything?…

Following demands last week from the Labor Party – and with things clearly amiss – an inquiry into the many failures and spiraling costs of the government’s digital transformation agenda will be held.

Winning crossbench support on Wednesday, the review will examine the multiple digital service embarrassments that have hounded the coalition government – including the Centrelink ‘robo-debt’ debacle, the IBM-led Census failure, the NAPLAN online failure, Sale of Medicare information on the internet, the massive myGov budget overruns, and chronic instability of the ATO website.

“During its time in government, the Coalition has doubled its digital spend to $10 billion but witnessed digital project after digital project run into trouble,” said Labor Senator Jenny McAllister last week, relishing the opportunity to beat a drum few could disagree with.

“The Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee should examine why so many projects have failed, been cancelled or crashed and what can be done to put the vital work of digital transformation at the centre of government.”

Such an examination will now go forward with the Finance and Public Administration Committee now accepting submissions to its “Digital delivery of government services” inquiry, with a report due on 4 December.

Predictably, Assistant Minister for Digital Transformation Angus Taylor is on the defensive (for what it’s worth), calling the inquiry “a waste of taxpayers’ money”, and saying that “the government has established unprecedented visibility and oversight of its $6.5 billion annual IT spend.”

Some would argue that that oversight – whatever it may be – isn’t working. A 2011 report by the Victorian Ombudsman looked into several high-profile IT projects which had failed, including the $360 million HealthSMART modernisation and the bungled $1.5 billion Myki public transport ticketing system, along with eight others.

“The consensus is that these projects are often poorly managed and failures are common,” that report read.

“We have tabled in Parliament a number of reports relating to ICT-enabled projects. These reports have identified significant shortcomings in the public sector’s management of such projects and have included numerous recommendations about how such management can be improved.”

“Despite these reports, we see little sign of lessons learnt in the public sector. The evidence to date is that the public sector is not managing ICT-enabled projects effectively, as demonstrated by the current difficulties that Victoria is facing in this area and the increasingly adverse public comment about major ICT-enabled projects.”

More recently, the Australian Taxation Office’s $880 million technological upgrade ran late and was over budget, and the $1.2 billion Queensland Health payroll debacle led directly to updated standards for IT governance by the Standards Australia Technical Committee.

The public sector’s proneness to expensive, public digital failure is now common knowledge. In March a poll commissioned by the Australian Information Industry Association found only 16 percent of Australians thought the government was doing a good job of providing digital services.

Sure, IT failure is hardly a government-exclusive problem. As we’ve reported several times before, around half of all IT projects fail to deliver on expectations. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re still stuck with a system seemingly unable to successfully pull off digital transformation projects. Spiraling costs, outrageous failure rates, and systems unable to deliver are par for the course, and the only plan currently being proposed to get us out of this mess is to further boost IT spending to $10 billion, a $3 billion increase on last year.

Hopefully the commission will provide some sort of insight into the federal government’s inability to get this stuff right. Whether the resulting recommendations actually offer workable solutions – and, if so, whether the government has the nous to act on them – remains to be seen.