WIREDGOV

PCS who have 16,000 members in the MoD welcomed yesterday's report by the Public Accounts Committee, which heavily criticises the MoD'S £7 billion Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) project.

The DII project aims to replace hundreds of existing IT systems with a single system covering the entire armed forces. The contract for DII was given to the ATLAS consortium led by EDS.

The report highlighted concerns previously identified by PCS that DII suffered from bad planning from the start and was now 18 months behind schedule with programme costs having already overrun by £182 million.

It also pointed out that ATLAS, led by EDS, had delivered less than half of the software designed to run on the new system and that MoD staff were dissatisfied with the new system.

The report also highlighted that the delays in implementing DII had increased the risks that one of the MoD’s legacy systems could fail and also pointed to concerns over the security aspects of DII and the MoD’s record on data loss.

Commenting on the report PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka said, “This report echoes many of the concerns we have raised since the beginning of DII. We warned the MoD that we did not believe that ATLAS could deliver what they they promised.

"The delays and increased costs to the programme now prove this to be the case and is yet another example of a major public sector IT privatisation going wrong.

“The report has highlighted the very real risks that the failures of DII could pose to current IT systems and data security in the MoD. But despite this the MoD plans to give ATLAS more DII work.

"Given these risks and the failure of ATLAS to deliver, we call on the MoD to halt giving any more work to ATLAS and to look at improving current IT systems by using in house capabilities, which we believe could deliver a lower cost and lower risk option.”