Harley: universal credit IT 'off to great start'

The programme to deliver the single Universal Credit is "off to a great start", Joe Harley, the chief information officer for the Department for Work and Pensions and the government, told a committee of MPs. At a hearing of Parliament's public administration committee on the use of IT in government, Harley said that Universal Credit, which aims to simplify the benefit system, has had strong governance, including IT and policy steering groups to oversee the delivery of components, along with a ministerial oversight committee. Harley also said that an 'agile' methodology had been adopted for the programme, which involves reusing existing components. "One of the things we are trying to do with Universal Credit which is different is to reuse as much of the IT assets that exist, rather than developing everything from scratch," he said. Asked about how government could learn from the failures of past IT problems, Harley said his department has a comprehensive "lessons learned database", which it shares with IT professionals and uses in conjunction with new projects. The DWP now routinely uses off-the-shelf software and divides projects into manageable components. "Whilst there have been mistakes in the past, I really think we are starting to get a track record of delivery," he said. Phil Pavitt, director general and chief information officer at HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), pointed out to the committee that there have been IT failures in both the private and public sectors. He said the important point was how organisations learned from those failures and made a transition to success. HMRC's pensions reform programme had been delivered successfully, he said, but had not received the level of media coverage given to the less successful schemes. He described HMRC's online self-assessment project, which uses open source software, as "a tremendous success story". It is one of the busiest websites and biggest transactions processes in the world, he told the committee, with more than 7m users this year. On the real time information system which will underpin the Universal Credit by ensuring a flow of information between the two departments, Pavitt said that the business re-design had been carried out at the same time as the IT development, to ensure the two systems are interoperable. This article is published by Guardian Professional. For updates on public sector IT, join the Government Computing Network here.