3 reasons why big government tech projects can fail hard

Anyone who’s ever tackled a big online project knows just how much capacity there is for things to go spectacularly wrong. It’s bad enough when you’re targeting a specific, well-defined audience but when you have to pretty much serve the population of an entire country, then the potential for catastrophe is that much bigger.

Perhaps the most prominent example in recent months was the numerous problems faced by the US’ Obamacare site.

It’s not only websites that have problems though. The British Child Support Agency, for instance, an 85% error rate in calculating payments but, seven years after it was introduced, there were so many complex rules involved that the system was completely undeliverable.

In Australia meanwhile, it took the tragic death of an 11-year-old boy to highlight the massive failure of the Victoria Police LINK crime-reporting project. As technology research house Gartner notes, a report by the Victorian Government Ombudsman described the project as “fatally hampered by a poorly constructed business case that grossly underestimated the cost and complexity of the problem”. Worse, it took the project team four years to identify the project was US$80-million under-funded.

There are countless other examples of such failures, some with much deeper consequences than others. But why do they happen? Yes, these projects are complex but surely with the resources of an entire government behind you, it shouldn’t be that difficult to build something workable, should it?

According to Gartner research director Darryl Carlton, there are three primary reasons why big government tech projects fail.

1. Business process complexity

Interestingly, Carlton reckons that one of the main reasons these projects fail is that they try to take on too much and become unnecessarily complex. “Projects are too big, too complex, too ambitious,” he says.

The solution, it seems, lies in making a project, and the technology behind it, as simple as possible. That’s not always easy when other sections and even other government departments start seeing opportunities to tack on the stuff they haven’t got round to doing, but it’s clearly something that needs to be done.

2. Portfolio management

For 30 years, Carlton points out, IT has been telling businesses there is no such thing as an IT project; that it’s a business project and the business, as a whole, needs to take ownership; that the most important IT person in the enterprise is the CEO.

Well, it seems business listened and took control, meaning that IT leaders are now trying to reign in so-called ‘shadow IT’ (people making tech decisions on their behalf) that has become so rampant it now apparently represents 36% of all public sector IT spend.

Essentially what’s happened is that higher-ups in business have taken it upon themselves to make complex IT decisions, often dismissing those actually tasked with doing the tech as being too technical when they raise concerns. Far from being in a space where the whole business actually takes responsibility for doing tech in a controlled and well thought out manner, IT spend is out of control, and IT success is as elusive as ever.

3. Governance and risk management

In most of the failed government projects, it seems, a large part of the problem comes from the fact that no one really seemed to know exactly who was supposed to be doing what. Senior officers, reports Gartner, are often reluctant to make critical decisions and project steering committees didn’t have the requisite expertise.

The trouble is, when you don’t know who’s supposed to be doing what, it’s very easy to lose sight of what’s actually supposed to be happening.

Perhaps the most important step in removing these issues in a government project is to make sure that everyone remembers that it’s designed to serve people rather than any one interest from within and outside the department. If everyone understands how their role fits into making that happen, then you’re much less likely to see issues with big government tech project.

Image: Ricky Romero via Flickr.