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Policy & Resources is encouraged by progress being made to right the States’ IT wrongs, but more work still needs to be done as the end of the year approaches.
A major incident last year first arose on November 25 2022 when an air-conditioning unit failed in the main server room at Frossard House, with the widespread disruption to the public sector it caused triggering an independent investigation into multiple failures.
PwC, the scrutineers, ultimately made 13 recommendations to the States regarding it's IT infrastructure, with varying levels of priority.
The big four firm also found that multiple failsafe systems didn’t function as expected, critical equipment in place wasn’t resilient enough, other equipment which should have been in place non-existent or broken, and monitoring of conditions in the data rooms located in government buildings was ineffective.
“The States has therefore undertaken 30 workstreams to address the recommendations and of these 15 are now fully complete. The remainder continue to make good progress with several very close to completion,” P&R said in response to questions from Express.
The top committee insisted it’s working quickly to implement the remaining improvements suggested, with the most urgent that will have the quickest impact on minimising outages and disruption focused on first.
It also confirmed that a tender process has begun for external companies to build the governments new website as current support arrangements for the site will expire imminently, which was last refreshed in 2013.
It said the “significant piece of work” would help to build resilience and improve the experience of service users outside of PwC’s recommendations.
It’s understood Agilisys – the States’ chosen IT transformation partner – will not be delivering this piece of work.
Pictured: Some of the key recommendations made by PwC.
P&R said a major project to migrate all functions from existing sites – Frossard House and Edward Wheadon House – has been completed ahead of schedule.
The location of the States’ modern data centres is confidential.
“This was a significant undertaking and while it had been part of the planned improvements to the States IT resilience, it was accelerated in light of the findings of the PWC report,” P&R added.
It added that “improvements to the 24/7 warning system, enhanced data storage maintenance, reviewing risk management and updating of the risk register, and clarifying ownership and responsibility for the ‘legacy estate’ to control maintenance and monitoring” have also been completed.
The latter was identified by PwC as a key issue between government and Agilisys which contributed to and hampered the emergency response to the prolonged issues last year.
The Chamber of Commerce, highly critical of the outages when they first occurred, called for the highest priority recommendations – called P1 – to be completed by the States by the end of this year.
It’s digital lead Justin Bellinger said confidence needed to be restored in the community, with a clear timeline set out for delivering improvements.
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