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DeliciousSoaring costs force C-Nomis cut backs
Wednesday, January 09, 2008An offender management system has been scaled back as costs for it have nearly doubled.
The C-Nomis system was designed to provide management of offenders from arrest through to sentence, which would have been accessible across the probation service and in up to 130 prisons across England and Wales. Its original budget was £234m, but it has now been revealed that it has soared to £512m.
After a review of the system and its budget, the prisons minister David Hanson told MPs in a written statement that the project will now be scaled back and only introduced in prisons. The project was suspended last summer by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) after it was discovered there was insufficient government funding for the programme to continue as specified in a contract drawn up with Electronic Data Systems in 2004.
The revised plan for C-Nomis will mean the probation service will be using an existing separate system, pending the replacement of obsolete software and hardware.
In the written statement, Hanson said, following a review of the IT project, the government's intention remained that of enabling "more efficient and effective" operational management of offenders.
"This has been a successful review, delivering a reformed programme which is now set to provide real operational improvements for practitioners in managing offenders alongside other reforms across the criminal justice system," he said.
The Conservatives' shadow justice secretary, Nick Herbert, said this "blew a hole" in the government's promise to deliver end-to-end offender management.
"Ministers were explicit that C-Nomis was 'central' to that goal, with prisons and probation staff sharing constantly updated information, but now the IT system will not be available to the probation service," he said.
"With typical government incompetence there has been a total failure to manage the costs of the project, which have exploded, and to deliver it as promised."
Herbert said this was a "serious setback" to the aim of reducing re-offending and making communities safe.
Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, said: "The government's central aim of providing end-to-end offender management is in tatters."
The annual cost of offender managment is huge. A big chunk of that cost is in the collection and use by multiple people of information. As with most organisations that information cost will crrently be around 20 per cent of revenue p.a.. Therefore the busines case to save say five per cent of that 20 per cent (by c_nomis) would look superb. Even at a cost of £1bn we would see a handsome return over say 5-8 years. A system like C-Nomis (that should last 5-8 years,) would make a big dent in that cost.
All we hear is that a budget was set at £234m. Why won't NOMS show the original business case produced to justify that expenditure. I guess the original decison was taken without basic business principles being followed. If they had we wouldn't have the current fiasco of running out of budget.
Failure of government departmentt to follow basic IT project mngt/set up should be dealt with severely. Lack of Exec Mngt/control is as always the central isssue.
The current plan for probation services to replace existing legacy systems with new ones (from an area that is working) is to say the least short sighted. All they are doing is placing a piece of sticking plaster over the problem and doubling the toal cost of eventually replacing those legacy systems (cost of training/re-training, continued inefficiency of managing offenders etc..).
A simple way of moving forward would be to acquire a piece of case management software and give it to the probation areas and let them develop their own work processes/flows within the framework already layed down for offender management. Give them a standard data base system e.g. Oracle. That way we would get practical systems developed within a standard environment. Thus compatibilty and integration would not be a problem. Moreover we would not have the dead hand of central government trying to second guess the real world.
The Probation Service/offender management will now have to continue for many years with its low productivity levels. More pressure on staff and difficulty in meeting public aspirations.
Charles William - Warwickshire UK