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Specialist IT staff will be brought back into the public sector and the contract with Agilisys reformed after a damning report highlighted the States’ lack of preparedness for IT outages.
Mark de Garis, Guernsey’s Head of the Public Service, faced media scrutiny yesterday alongside senior Deputies Peter Ferbrache and Bob Murrary to respond to PwC’s probing report into several weeks of public IT disruption late last year.
Mr de Garis reiterated that more resources are being plowed into “accelerating the transformation of the estate into the new data facilities”, but also into bringing IT specialists back onto the States’ own payroll.
“Really importantly… we're bringing more internal technical expertise rather than relying purely on the advice of external contractors on certain things. So we can assure what we've been told and have very clear lines of understanding and accountability.”
Deputy Murray said some improvements have already been completed, and additional work is underway to beef up IT resilience and accelerate the States’ digital transformation programme.
“We've spent quite a lot of money already and we'll probably have to spend quite a lot more, he said. “But at the moment, obviously, we have yet to determine the extent of that, but we are committed to doing what we need to do.
“We've already taken measures immediately, partly to augment the staff capability that we've got. We have appointed a very high-level technical individual for the transformation. But most importantly, the focus has been on ensuring that we get stability in the system.”
Pictured: PwC's key recommendations to the States of Guernsey.
Deputy Febrache said the failures happened for multiple reasons. Partly “human error” in November but also because of “errors of understanding in relation to the legal obligations” between The States and its IT partner, Agilisys.
“Back in 2019 when the Agilisys contract was signed, people thought they had a clear idea of responsibilities. It turned out that they didn't. There were things that Agilisys thought that we were doing, and we thought that they were doing. That needs to be addressed.
“There just isn’t a good reason for it.”
Reform of the multi-million pound contract was ordered “almost from day one” of the major outages occurring, he added.
Deputy Murray agreed that a “variety of procedures were not adopted or weren’t enforced.
“The granularity of some of the technical detail in the contracts wasn't perhaps sufficiently scrutinised on either side. Some assumptions may have been made and unfortunately that might have fallen through the cracks.
“What has happened and particularly in regard to say, for example, the contract for maintenance for some of the kit, that lapsed and was not picked up. But bearing in mind that at the same time Agilisys were taken on as partner, we transferred a very large proportion of the staff who maintained those data centres in the past.
“So the corporate knowledge went with them and in some cases that corporate knowledge was lost if they then left the employment, obviously just going forward."
The PwC report notes that “the transfer of resources from SoG to Agilisys is a key element of the outsourcing relationship; however, when combined with employee turnover in key roles this has led to ‘information asymmetry’ between the two parties. The established operating model limits the capability of [government officials] to provide appropriate challenge and oversight to the service delivery model".
Pictured: Deputy Peter Ferbrache said outsourcing of IT would be legally tightened.
Express queried whether there had been any internal personnel changes or disciplinary action following the four incidents, but Mr de Garis said he was unable to “discuss any individual circumstances".
“What we are doing is we're bringing greater accountability back into the States of Guernsey so we can hold ourselves, but also our contractors to better account.
“So actually, we're strengthening the teams, we're looking at the learning and those gaps that have been referred to in the contracts and all the rest of it. And we're making sure that the changes to the governance systems don't allow this to happen again.”
Deputy Murray said it was encouraging that none of the incidents resulted in a public data loss.
“Despite the catalog of problems here which are very concerning, throughout all of the outages we didn't lose any data and critical services remained alive right the way through.”
Nevertheless, he said the resilience provided by the new IT systems compared to the old is “chalk and cheese”.
Pictured: Deputy Bob Murray said quickly moving legacy systems into the new data environments is the top priority.
Mr de Garis praised all who had helped to resolve the situation: “Notwithstanding human errors here, seeing the team's - third party suppliers across all of the technical sectors, Agilisys themselves, and States of Guernsey personnel - respond to this incident was exceptionally impressive.
“It was a huge enterprise for them to turn around, but also for the forbearance of the teachers and other areas that had their services interrupted.”
While that “doesn't detract at all from ‘it should never have happened’ it was a good example of working towards a common goal", he added.
In a statement, Andrew Mindenhall, Agilisys Chief Executive, said: “We’ve fully engaged with the independent review, and we welcome the recommendations. Maintaining the confidence of islanders is extremely important to us all. We know outages like these are not what islanders expect and we’re committed to working with the States on delivering its plan to improve resilience and mitigate the risks."
Pictured (top): Mark de Garis.
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