Once in a Lifetime: IT in Question Period

19 Feb 2013

Today in question period, the opposition NDP in British Columbia devoted five of their six questions to information technology issues! It’s pretty rare that the snooze-fest that is IT rises to the level of political notice, so I don’t expect a repeat display again in my lifetime.

Some of the questions:

A. Dix: My question is to the Minister of Citizens’ Services. An independent report on integrated case management across ministry computer systems, meant to improve services to vulnerable British Columbians, states that the system may never be fixed. A system that cost over $200 million may have to be thrown out because of mismanagement. The report says that in the bidding phases for this technology, the ministries in question were in chaos, going through so-called transformation with a revolving door of ministers. The children’s representative has said: “This report speaks to incompetent stewardship.” With such damning comments, and a lack of faith that the system can be fixed, can the minister explain what went wrong and when the government will take responsibility for this mess?

R. Austin: It’s not just in the child welfare system that this mismanagement has occurred but also in education. We know that this government spent almost $100 million on their electronic data system. What we don’t know is how much was also spent by school boards on training, implementation and licensing costs. Communities and taxpayers should not have to pay the costs of Liberal mismanagement on these colossal computer projects. Can the Minister of Education tell this House how much in total was spent by districts and the government on this failed computer program?

The systems in question, ICM and BCeSIS, cost the government respectively about $200M and $100M. That is, far beyond the outer edge of where we can intellectually grasp the amount of money involved, or where the effort goes.

Here’s one way of understanding what a $200M project budget means, look at what the budget means in terms of people.

Assume a $200K fully loaded staff cost (salary, overhead, benefits, everything). That’s a big number, but let’s assume experienced professionals being paid commensurately. That means $200M equates to 1000 person-years of effort. Or, over a 5-year project span, a 200 person staff. What could you deliver, in 5 years, with 200 highly trained professionals?

Here’s another way of looking at what $200M spent on IT means. Over the four year period from 2003 to 2007, Facebook grew from Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm project to a company with 50 million active users. In that time, during which Facebook had no revenue, investors put just under $40M into the company. So it cost $40M to build the 2007-era Facebook.

So, $200M to build a failed case management system that (poorly) serves a working population of a few thousand civil servants, against $40M to build an intricate social network that serves a population of 50 million.

There’s no way to get around it: enterprise IT is hopelessly broken, and much of the money we spend on systems development is wasted. We need a new way of doing business.