States of Guernsey

01/27/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 01/27/2025 02:05

Scrutiny Management Committee - Agilisys Review Report

Monday 27 January 2025

Today the Scrutiny Management Committee (SMC) is publishing its report into the States of Guernsey's Future Digital Services contract with Agilisys.

In 2019 the States of Guernsey signed a £200m 10-year contact with Agilisys (Guernsey) Limited for the management and on-going development of most of the States of Guernsey's IT Estate.

The SMC decided to review of the effectiveness of the Agilisys contract and commenced a review in 2022. The main body of work for this complex review was undertaken between mid-2022 and mid-2024.

The report initially examines the background to the decision-making process that led to the signing of the contact. Due to the significant scope of the contract, the SMC chose to focus on four main areas, namely the major system outages which occurred in late 2022 and early 2023, the implementation of the IT elements of the Revenue Service transformation programme, the implementation of the IT elements of the MyGov transformation programme, and the provision of day-to-day IT support.

The report sets out the findings of the Review Panel (the Panel) in detail. The principal findings were that the implications of entering the 10-year partnership with Agilisys were not fully understood. The scale of the work required by the States of Guernsey was underestimated and, most crucially, the level and volume of retained technical expertise within the public sector needed to effectively manage and oversee the contract with Agilisys was totally inadequate.

This meant that effective oversight and monitoring of the Agilisys contract was not in place from the beginning and throughout at least the first three years of the contract's operation. This lack of monitoring of the contract led to significant problems and to programme implementation delays and money being wasted.

During the latter stages of the review, from early 2024, the SMC engaged with the Policy & Resources Committee (P&RC) to inform them of the draft recommendations. This was done to ensure that the ongoing work being undertaken by the P&RC to address IT issues had the opportunity to benefit from the findings of the review process.

By necessity, the review concentrates on certain areas within the contract and the SMC acknowledges that there has been work undertaken by Agilisys which the Panel has not reviewed and therefore cannot comment upon.

The report makes five key recommendations which are summarised here:

Recommendation 1 - Leadership

The SMC believes it is essential that a credible, qualified, and empowered Chief Information Officer (CIO) or equivalent is put in place to guide and execute major strategic IT decisions. The suitability, experience and technical expertise of this postholder is essential if the contract is to deliver on the improvements that were anticipated when it was signed in 2019.

Recommendation 2 - Strategy

The States must put in place a clear technology strategy for future action. Unless this step is accomplished, the Panel believes it is likely that sub-optimal decisions will continue to be made leading to sub-optimal outcomes.

Recommendation 3 - Investment

The SMC believes it is then essential to ensure appropriate investment is available to deliver the target operating model, without significant investment progress cannot be made.

Recommendation 4 - Expert advice

The SMC recommends the establishment of an IT Advisory Board populated with both IT industry and business expertise primarily to assist political decision making in setting the correct IT strategy moving forward. In the future the government should have access to high level business & technology advice when negotiating major contracts or appointing senior technical staff.

Recommendation 5 - Management

The final recommendation of the SMC is that supplier management needs improvement and specialist IT contract management needs to be improved to oversee an outsourced contract of this nature.

If you would like to read the full report it is available at www.gov.gg/scrutiny.

Deputy Yvonne Burford, President of the Scrutiny Management Committee said:

"I am pleased to be able to publish the full Scrutiny review into the States contract with Agilisys. This has been a complex piece of work and I would like to thank in particular the four members of our community with significant IT experience who
assisted the Committee as members of the Review Panel, as well as all those who contributed to the Call for Evidence".