Public menace: why things aren't jolly in the land of giant PFIs

The trouble with working in the public sector is that word 'public'. The stresses and strains and the day-to-day duties may be the same as those endured by colleagues in banking or retail, but there is one vital difference - when things go wrong everybody knows about it.

So when Liberal Democrat MP, Simon Hughes, tabled a question in the House of Commons seeking to identify the shortcomings in the Home Office, no one was greatly surprised to discover that IT projects were late and over budget. There may, however, have been some surprise at the extent of the problem: a total of 125 months late and £50m over budget (see' Home Office admits three-quarters of its IT projects are late and over budget' http://www.silicon.com/a33954 ).

Something would have to go seriously wrong for that to happen in the business world. But before anyone mentions the London Stock Exchange, it is true to say that the Home Office - in common with other major government departments - suffers from two major failings.

Firstly, it has sought to automate existing processes without always asking if those processes worked in the first place. Witness for example, the Passport Agency fiasco this summer (see 'UK government to compensate holidaymakers' http://www.silicon.com/a31197 ). According to Perri 6, senior fellow at the University of Strathclyde, this was down to repeating mistakes of the past in the shape of a complex piece of back-office integration.

Instead, as Perri 6 told Behind the Headlines viewers, the Home Office should have looked to technology to come up with new and more efficient ways to renew passports (watch http://www.silicon.com/a34158 for his full comments). His solution is an electronic passport downloadable to a smart card residing on an individual's mobile phone.

The second failing is that the projects are often too large. Today, the three to five year plan is asking for trouble. Both the problem and the solution are likely to change in that period.

Perri 6 is in no doubt about the reason for this big project syndrome. "There is a certain ministerial machismo which says, 'I won this huge PFI, I got permission from the Treasury'; and secondly 'I can show that I have delivered some really huge project in my short period before I'm reshuffled'. You can't take politics out of politics."

These are largely public sector problems, but not exclusively. So if the mention of mega-projects and automating creaking processes rings an alarm bell or two, it's probably time to alter your business practices before your boss starts tabling questions.