The directors of national railway operator Irish Rail were not happy, the official minutes indicate.
It was November 21st last year and the board of the State-owned rail company had just been told about delays to a new computer system designed to regulate train traffic across the network.
The initiative formed part of a wider National Train Control Centre that would also accommodate the Garda Síochána Dublin Metropolitan Region control centre.
The traffic-management element, integrating key systems such as signalling, has been described by the Minister for Transport as the “the brain of the railway network”.
RM Block
The contract was awarded in June 2020 with a planned commissioning date in summer 2024. However, the project was lagging behind schedule, largely due to software development problems. Irish Rail directors wanted management to carry out a lessons-learned exercise. They also proposed this should review “the perils of the selection of the cheapest bidder”.
Several months later the State’s financial watchdog set out the scale of the train project’s delays.
In his audit of the National Transport Authority dated June 30th, the Comptroller and Auditor General said the software elements were going to be years late. To address the delays, said Comptroller Seamus McCarthy, Iarnród Éireann had agreed a revised delivery strategy. With a new phased delivery plan, the final stage of the project was forecast to be delayed by two years to May 2028, he said.
The revised estimated cost of the project was €189 million, €41 million over budget.
Other State agencies were also facing serious issues regarding overspending on IT projects.
[ New national train control centre facing potential €40m cost overrunOpens in new window ]
In February, the new Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport, Patrick O’Donovan, told the Cabinet about a failed computer project in the Arts Council that led to a loss of at least €5.3 million.
Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers described the abandoned IT system as “a massive waste of money”.
The project aimed to bring together five existing systems, including those dealing with grants. It was to be developed over 2½ years with a budget of just under €3 million. By the time the Arts Council scrapped the initiative following a review last year, €6.5 million had been spent.
Separately, at Beaumont Hospital a newly appointed head of finance discovered problems with its new €1.9 million IT system for dealing with payroll and human resources. Previous management at the hospital had determined the project did not have to go out to tender. The new director of finance, Francis Hanlon, disagreed. The project was also significantly over budget, with a final bill at €4.8 million.
Labour Party TD Eoghan Kenny questioned Beaumont management at a Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC) hearing earlier this month.
Asked about a €2.8 million cost overrun, Hanlon said the project’s complexity was “underestimated”.
The PAC was already concerned about overruns on IT projects and had recently sent questions to all Government departments.
“The committee has embarked on a piece of work looking essentially at what amounts to mismanagement, poor oversight, poor due diligence and lack of processes, specifically on IT projects,” said PAC chairman John Brady of Sinn Féin said.
“We do not seem to have a hold on these IT systems. I don’t understand why. Is it a lack of knowledge? Is it a lack of financial awareness?” Kenny asked.
Paul Davis, who lectures on public procurement at Dublin City University, says IT systems fail to deliver and cost more than anticipated across the world, not just in Ireland. It happens in the public and private sectors, but in the latter such controversies tend to be kept under wraps, he says.
“IT systems can fail. In the UK in the 1990s it was estimated that 90 per cent of IT systems put in failed to deliver the expected results. Large-scale enterprise resource planning systems [complex software platforms designed to manage a company’s core business processes] have failed to deliver continuously,” he says.
While the private sector generally does not speak publicly about IT system problems, the issues are “endemic”, says Davis.
“The private sector is never going to admit it overspent by €25 million or €30 million or €1 billion on these sorts of systems.”
Unique to the public sector is the high-profile questioning of how such overruns happen, he says.
Part of the answer lies in the complexities of the systems and a phenomenon known as “scope creep”, which describes the desire for growing features within these systems. Most service organisations want an IT package covering payroll and HR, which has broadened beyond personnel records and become “more complex”, he says.
The costs “keep going up” as systems that were initially going to be relatively simple increase in complexity, requiring additional coding, he says.
“If you buy a standard system off the shelf, it is going to be fairly cheap ... As soon as they start modifying them, you are paying for those exceptions.”
The Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO), which forms part of the Department of Public Expenditure, is the strategic adviser to the Government on digital matters. The Department of Public Expenditure says that, while engaging the OGCIO is not mandatory, the office is “available to any public service body to discuss their plans and projects at any stage”. Still, the department says, public service bodies remain responsible for their projects from initiation to completion.
Digital and IT projects above €2 million are subject to a peer review process. For projects with an estimated cost of more than €5 million, the OGCIO establishes and manages the peer review group.
