Select a region
The islands’ biggest business body wants the government to quickly get on with improving IT resilience after multiple failings and delays were identified by independent scrutineers.
A PwC report found the States and its IT partner Agilisys had mismanaged the maintenance of ageing public computer systems, and that there was confusion over which party was responsible for elements of critical digital infrastructure.
Yesterday, Justin Bellinger, a Chamber of Commerce board member and the former Chief Executive of Sure Guernsey, said it’s “absolutely critical that we get to get these 22 priority one action points nailed before the end of the year.
“I think it's important to draw a line under what's happened, clearly demonstrate what we're doing to fix it, with milestones, and frequently report back on how we're doing.
“The other thing is transparency, so be very clear. Yes, this has gone wrong. Yes, we had a report and that we acknowledge all of these actions that need to happen. This is what we're doing to fix it, and here’s a timescale and frequent updates to industry."
Doing so would help to “rebuild the trust”, he added.
Mr Bellinger said he was told in 2019 that 70% of the States’ old systems had been migrated into the modernised environment by senior States leaders. However, PwC’s report revealed that around half of that work is yet to be done.
“So that was back then, and I wonder what happened in the period between quarter one 2019 and quarter four 2022,” Mr Bellinger said.
International standards already exist for aspects like business continuity and incident management, so the States needn’t “reinvent the wheel”, Mr Bellinger said. “Just get that work done."
Pictured: The States are committing additional cash to beef up IT transformation.
In a statement, the organisation said: “The Chamber of Commerce urges the government to prioritise the implementation of the report’s recommendations. Timely and effective actions will restore confidence in the government’s IT systems, ensuring a stable environment for businesses to operate and residents to access essential services.”
It added that the report shed light on “significant operational and strategic failings”.
Chamber penned a highly critical letter days after the first IT outage questioning how the island would fare in a “genuine security crisis” and bemoaned the “real world disruption to business” and charities, as well as the “loss of productive time in the public sector”.
Pictured: High priority strategic actions recommended to the States by PwC.
When asked if he could think of any similar examples in the private sector, Mr Bellinger said it always “it comes back to the rigor, the governance, the service level agreement".
“In the private sector all our businesses will have a contract with their customers that will have service level agreements with, typically, penalties attached to them. If not penalties break out clauses."
These are not always features of contracts in the public sector, he said.
“We're in it, but we need to see again the standards, the service level agreement, what we should expect as businesses from government. Our faith and trust can be rebuilt once we see this action plan and as we see this action plan put into effect."
Progress should be demonstrated on critical action points made by PwC by the end of the year, a realistic target according to Mr Bellinger.
“The real estate is in place. The data centres are there, the new data centres are there. It's a case of understanding, preserving, and then migrating the data to the new estates
“Forget the historic technical failings and stuff going pop that hadn’t been maintained, it's this classification of understanding of the data, the users, the customers - whether they're internal or external - and that will come from the strategic action points.”
Pictured (top): Justin Bellinger.
Failure to maintain ageing States IT contributed to catastrophe
Civil service boss promises greater accountability after IT woes
Comments
Comments on this story express the views of the commentator only, not Bailiwick Publishing. We are unable to guarantee the accuracy of any of those comments.