£550 Million

550 Million

Just think about the difference you could make with 550 million pounds of tax payers cash. So if I were to tell you that you paid 550 million for 3 poor implementations of IT systems for little return on your investment would you be that surprised. The two organisations were EDS and Accenture. If their lawyers are reading this you can’t sue me for libel because all the info in this article is taken from reports available under the Freedom of Information Act.

House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs Committee The Rural Payments Agency and the implementation of the
Single Payment Scheme Third Report of Session 2006–07 Volume I

‘57. Accenture had received payments of a total of £42.7m from the RPA by the end of the 2005–06 Financial Year: £14.1 m in 2003–04, £10.2 m in 2004–05, and £18.4 m in 2005– 06.’

The irrationality of Accenture is such that given their performance they still want to do business with a customer they clearly had difficulty with in terms of managing expectations. The cynic in me thinks that firms like Accenture see the public sector as an easy touch and taking the hit on the reputation front is worth the return.

‘61. Accenture witnesses appeared to have been well schooled in not venturing comment on matters which they deemed were beyond their contractual observations. This attitude denied the Committee an important perspective on the way the SPS project was being run from the standpoint of a company at the heart of the venture. We regard this as an unacceptable attitude from a company of international repute and which may still aspire to work with UK government in other areas.’

Did you know that Accenture preaches Corporate Responsibility at a global level? They participate in the United Nations Global Compact, World Economic Forum and The Global Health Initiative. Why don’t they practise what they preach and give the money back they charged for their work with the Rural Payments Agency? Click http://www.accenture.com/Global/About_Accenture/Company_Overview/Corporate_Citizenship/Fostering_High_Performance/default.htm

By Accenture’s own admission - ‘Accenture continues to earn recognition for its efforts. For example, Accenture was named to Corporate Responsibility Officer's 100 Best Corporate Citizens for 2009. Accenture also has been included in the Dow Jones Sustainability North America Index for four years (2005-08) and received a 100 out of 100, a perfect score, on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index in 2007 and 2008. Read more about Accenture’s awards and recognition.’

100/100 on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index is beyond belief. One of Accenture’s clients is Shell. Do Accenture care about who they do business with given the relationship between human rights and oil in Nigeria? http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1999/nigeria/index.htm Shell recently settled out of court over unproven allegations that it was complicit in the execution of a well-known Nigerian environmental activist and author Ken Saro-Wiwa. Shell paid out 9.7 million quid. Click
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article6363058.ece


EDS were behind the failed system development for the Child Support Agency (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/leader/0,1000002982,39175379,00.htm­). It cost us 450 million quid.
EDS has a poor history of engagements with the UK government. Yet the British Government never learned the lesson and awarded them the contract to develop the National Offender Management System(NOMS). Guess what it went pear shaped. http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/0809/national_offender_management.aspx
In November 2001, a £300 million PFI (Private Finance Initiative) project to supply the UK's Ministry of Defence with a payroll system encountered serious problems which threatened to stop the pay of over 30,000 personnel. EDS could not deliver the system and was allegedly rescued by a government bailout.[13]
In December 2003, EDS lost a 10-year £3 billion contract to run the UK Inland Revenue IT services after a series of serious delays in the payment of tax credits, the contract instead being awarded to the company Cap Gemini. EDS had operated systems for the Inland Revenue since 1994 but the performance of its system had been low, causing late arrival of tax credit payments for hundreds of thousands of people.[14][15]
In 2004, EDS was criticised by the UK's National Audit Office for its work on IT systems for the UK's CSA (Child Support Agency) which ran seriously over budget causing problems which led to the resignation of the CSA's head, Doug Smith on 2004-11-27. The system's rollout had been two years late and following its introduction in March 2003 the CSA was obliged to write off £1 billion in claims, while £750 million in child support payments from absent parents remained uncollected. An internal EDS memo was leaked that admitted that the CSA's system was "badly designed, badly tested and badly implemented". UK MPs described it as an "appalling waste of public money" and called for it to be scrapped.[16]
In 2006, EDS' Joint Personnel Administration (JPA) system for the RAF led to thousands of personnel not receiving correct pay due to "processing errors". EDS and MoD staff were reported to have "no definitive explanations for the errors".[17][18]
In September 2007 EDS paid $500,000 to settle an action by the US Securities and Exchange Commission regarding charges related to overstatement of its contract revenues in 2001–2003. At the time these caused a fall in share prices in 2002 which led to legal action against EDS from US shareholder groups.[19][20]
On 2007-10-16, British TV company BSkyB claimed £709m compensation from EDS, claiming that EDS' failure to meet its agreed service standards resulted not just from incompetence, but from fraud and deceit in the way it pitched for the contract.[20]
On 2008-02-04, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs is still waiting for compensation from EDS after settlement on failed delivery of IT services.[21]
On 2008-10-10 it was reported that a Ministry of Defence hard drive potentially containing the details of 100,000 Armed Forces personnel could not be located by EDS.[22]
What I cannot get my ahead around is that both EDS and Accenture would be the first to extol the virtues of good programme management, common sense project management, pragmatic change management and robust requirements management. They even have the nerve to sell this advice to their clients. If you are ever ‘fortunate’ enough to get a job interview as a management consultant with these guys the technical questioning is along the lines of proving you can avoid the pitfalls of programme failure by just doing the basics well. Yet why on earth did both these firms fail to follow their own advice? Maybe it’s just not profitable to practise what you preach. For any civil servants or MP reading this when dealing with the usual suspects always use outcome based agreements and never reward failure.

Finally, the 100 million went on a single payments system to pay farmers for growing too much and on an information system for keeping records on ex-convicts on probation. The money the farmers get is part of the 40 million we pay to the EU everyday. The money wasted on the probation service's new computer system is of little comfort to the families of the students murdered in New Cross by psychopaths who should have been in a secure facility.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZhy_VaYisU&feature=related&pos=0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNaY4xBiQp8&feature=related&pos=0