£10bn of IT projects a year are not successful

The government can not do IT projects.  Not a revelation to regular readers of Picking Losers, but even civil servants are now accepting the hard facts.  Joe Harley, chief information officer and the official in charge of IT at the Department for Work and Pensions has said that only 30% of Government IT projects are successful.  Given this incredibly low success rate, it is worrying to know that public sector IT costs £14bn a year, equivalent to 75 hospitals.  That is to say, we are wasting £10bn a year on public IT systems that do not meet the criteria to even be considered successful - regardless of whether we actually needed the damn project in the first place.  Yet, incredibly, Stephen Timms of the Treasury has described the £12bn NHS IT upgrade as "heroic" - the same scheme that the Commons public accounts committee warned that patients were "unlikely" to see any "significant clinical benefits" from.  In any other field of life 30% is a failure and the repercussions would be hard felt.  In the Government, 30% is somehow heroic.