Convener, the report looks at the progress that the Scottish Government and central Government bodies have made against the recommendations in my August 2012 report, “Managing ICT contracts”. Information technology provides the opportunity to transform public services, and the right skills and support are essential in ensuring that such investment delivers real benefits for users and is made in a cost-effective way. After all, failure to successfully manage IT programmes will affect the public directly and indirectly.
We know that managing IT programmes is complex and continues to be a challenge for the Scottish Government and central Government bodies. In our 2012 report, which highlighted problems that Registers of Scotland, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service and Disclosure Scotland encountered when managing their ICT contracts, we made a number of recommendations to the Scottish Government to help strengthen the strategic oversight of IT programmes and to improve central Government bodies’ access to skills.
The report reviews progress against our recommendations and uses information provided by local auditors in 12 central Government bodies to explore the problems that they encountered in managing ICT programmes and how they resolved them. It highlights that, although the Scottish Government has made some progress in improving its strategic oversight and access to the necessary skills, the approach has not been fully effective and significant progress is still needed.
I will highlight briefly three key themes from the report, the first of which is oversight. Following our previous report, the Scottish Government introduced new assurance and oversight arrangements and developed an assurance framework for information and communications technology programmes to support central Government bodies and gather information for Scottish Government oversight. As part of that, the information systems investment board was given the responsibility of ensuring that bodies followed the framework.
However, we have found that those arrangements have not been effective. The framework was not clear enough, which might have resulted in fewer ICT projects being reported to the board, and the board did not have sufficient staff and information to perform its oversight role. The Scottish Government has recently updated its oversight arrangements and, in February 2015, it created the office of the chief information officer to support the board, but the roles and responsibilities of the board and the office of the chief information officer are still being finalised.
On the report’s second key theme of access to skills, we found, as we did in our 2012 report, that the lack of key skills is a significant problem. Public bodies compete with the private sector for people who have skills that are scarce right across the economy, and some use short-term contractors to fill their skills gaps, which might be costly and requires effective knowledge transfer. In 2012, we recommended that the Scottish Government undertake a skills gap assessment, but that was not done until August 2014. The Government is now developing a new approach of pooling and sharing resources in a digital transformation service. That is an ambitious initiative, and again the detailed arrangements are still being put in place.
On the third key theme of the progress of central Government bodies, we have used case studies to identify and share what has or has not worked around the public sector. It is clear that, although some progress has been made, areas such as defining benefits and managing contractors and suppliers need to be improved. We found that bodies are using appropriate project management techniques and that more bodies are using Agile, but some lack the skills and experience that are needed for such an approach.
The report also provides an update on the three bodies that were the subject of my earlier report. In relation to Disclosure Scotland, we are at the moment unable to comment further on the procurement of the new contract that was awarded in May 2014 because of continuing discussions between Disclosure Scotland and Atos about non-completion of the contract. I will, of course, update the committee in due course as appropriate.
As always, convener, we are happy to answer the committee’s questions.