A United Kingdom Cabinet Office report has found that the Public Service spends £2.3 billion ($A4.3 billion) each year solely on patching up old IT systems, some of which date back 30 years or more.
In a statement accompanying the report, the Cabinet Office said it was taking action to reduce the reliance on outdated technology.
In its report, Organising for Digital Deliver, the Office warned that the Government could end up spending between £13 billion and £22 billion ($A24.5 billion and $A41.4 billion) over the next five years on obsolete systems.
Some digital services “fail to meet even the minimum cyber-security standards,” the Office said, and data could not be properly extracted from them, making them “one of the greatest barriers” to Public Service innovation.
It found the Home Office spent more than any other Department on IT but still relied on 12 so-called legacy systems, despite repeated efforts to retire them.
“The Government has made a big push to use data to improve public services, but despite significant sums being spent on data storage, Departments are making little use of this data to influence action or decision-making,” the Office said.
It also said the Government was not carrying out any kind of monitoring of the performance of computer systems, as was common in leading private sector organisations.
A performance management system was put in place in 2012, but had since fallen into disuse — even the technology that monitored its performance was now obsolete and vulnerable to a cyber-attack.
The Office also highlighted digital success stories, such as the rapid launch of the National Health Service COVID-19 testing service.
It also sighted the Home Office’s European Union Settlement Scheme as an example of a rapid rollout.
The Office said Departments that needed a new digital service should launch a “minimum loveable product”.
This meant, for example, not worrying about making the website look nice and having lots of features, but to focus on the absolute bare essentials required for launching a service to the public.
London, 7 August 2021
