Examples of failed public sector IT Projects?

DublinWriter

Apologies if I'm in the wrong forum for this.

Can anyone give me an example of a failed major public sector ICT project where the technology was brought in from another EU state? The only example I can come up with currently is eVoting.

seamus

PPARS. A literal smorgasbord of things that you shouldn't do when attempting to implement any new IT system.

Theses have been written about how badly it went.

My understanding is that it was based on SAP.

spaceCreated

seamus wrote: »

PPARS. A literal smorgasbord of things that you shouldn't do when attempting to implement any new IT system.

Theses have been written about how badly it went.

My understanding is that it was based on SAP.

Did they genuinely hire Deloitte to implement an IT system for them? Just reading some of it and it sounds insane, but this is the way costs balloon out in everything in public contracts, its just IT projects can't be mismanaged in the same way other public contract are maybe?

DublinWriter

seamus wrote: »

My understanding is that it was based on SAP.

Thanks for that Seamus, but SAP may be a bit too generic an example. AFAIK the problems with PPARS were in project governance and business ownership, rather than the technology itself.

Ziycon

Garda pulse system is another one.

Raging_Ninja

Ziycon wrote: »

Garda pulse system is another one.

In what way is it considered a failed IT project?

From a quick read up on it, the criticisms seem to be levelled at how it is being used and how data is being modified (reclassifying some crimes as less serious offences) to suit political goals.

The only criticisms levelled at pulse itself that I've seen are that it is showing it's age (17 years old at this stage).

DublinWriter

Ziycon wrote: »

Garda pulse system is another one.

AFAIK Pulse was initially developed by Anderson (now Accenture) specifically for the Irish market with a view to selling it to other jurisdictions, so I couldn't really class it as something brought in from another EU country.

What ever happened with Pulse, does it just not work?

youcancallmeal

My understanding of pulse is that it is not user friendly at all and quite unintuitive. Also when it was first introduced high speed internet was not very common, especially in country stations. So every time any kind of data intensive query was sent to the back end it would take a long time to get a response due to poor connection. From what I understand now the slowness isn't so much of an issue. As to usability I'm not sure

Graham

You don't tend to see (or hear of) many 'failed' public sector IT projects.

Most projects are covered by strict NDAs and/or the Official Secrets Act.
Projects generally don't 'fail' as such, they are more likely to have the agreed scope/deliverables amended

Del2005

Zaylee Fancy Hotel wrote: »

What ever happened with Pulse, does it just not work?

The fact that it couldn't tell that Prawo Jazdy was getting stopped several times a day for years would imply that it doesn't work.

Seth Brundle

Del2005 wrote: »

The fact that it couldn't tell that Prawo Jazdy was getting stopped several times a day for years would imply that it doesn't work.

Any system will only report on what it is asked. If you don't ask it to flag something then it won't flag it!
Doesn't mean it's not working!