I feel that ‘a foundation of sand’ is an appropriate summary of the governments C-NOMIS, programme. The National Audit Office (ANO) has just published its report ‘National Offender Information System’ dated 12th March 2009, NAO Report, and the Times used a headline of ‘Spectacular IT failure costs taxpayer millions‘ for it’s article of 12th March, Artical. The paper goes on to quote the report by explaining that the project costs have more than doubled, to £513 million.
I have spent nearly 15 years explaining to clients that if you adopt a commercial off the shelf (COTS) software then:
- Your business users need to adopt the business practices implicit in the solution and
- You must not modify the package.
In its report, the ANO heavily criticised the project for ignoring the first point above. Apparently, no effort was made to harmonise business practices across the various user communities. A raft of change requests followed as the various stakeholders attempted to get their own practices embedded in the functionality.
Interestingly, the technical report in Appendix 2 of the report was silent on the basic concept of taking a package and modifying it. I have sat in many client strategy workshops and explained the dangers of COTS modification. I am happy with modest functional enhancements using a vendor defined API and no changes to the application itself. The API may change with a new release of the application - a modest risk.
Taking on the source code and writing functional enhancements that use internal system calls and data structures of a major COTS package is not advisable. Fundamentally, you create a bespoke variant of the package and you are responsible for its maintenance and enhancement.
Lets assume that we are going to modify a COTS package that has £500M of development effort in it, the license fee is £1M a year and we are going to add £100M of modifications. Maintenance of software, excluding enhancement, costs around 10% per year of the total development effort. The annual costs of the modified package will not be 10% of £100M plus £1M license fee but 10% of £600M plus £1M i.e. £61M per year.
I once had to explain to a Chief of Police that, even if the vendor gave them the software, the Police could not afford to maintain it. The runaway development costs, swallowed by the vendor as part of a fixed price contract, had overrun by a factor of ten. The annual maintenance costs were going to be greater than the original development costs.
Based on my experience I feel the C-NOMIS programme was flawed from inception – its foundation of sand was COTS modification and lack of adoption of a COTS mindset with the users.
Ian Richmond
Email: ‘About’ and ‘Email Me’ link.