BIS And DECC Respond To IT Concerns

The Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) have claimed recently reported IT problems are not as large as they are said to be.

The news follows a report in the Financial Times (FT) that the two Departments were encountering problems while migrating to new systems.

The publication claimed that the issues were a result of the poor performance of SMEs providing the Departments’ with IT services.

Liberal Democrat Ministers Ed Davey and Vince Cable are said to be behind the complaints, branding coalition IT policies as “shambolic” and claiming technology in their organisations had been brought to a “virtual standstill” in recent weeks.

However, speaking to a UK public sector IT publication, DECC claimed that the systems migration had taken place over a five-week period and had only encountered “teething problems.”

“We have just moved to a new IT system following the end of our previous contract. Like any major IT change, there were some teething problems but they were dealt with,” the Department claimed.

“Full plans are back in effect and there was no significant disruption to DECC’s work. We have a number of smaller suppliers now rather than one large supplier,” it added.

BIS and DECC recently chose to work together to implement a tower model as a shared service.

IT Transition Problems Not Restricted To Whitehall

Earlier this month, local government too was hit with “teething problems” after an ICT transition – Croydon Council experienced services outages after its systems moved from one supplier to another.

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