The U.K. government has admitted that fresh delays have hit its scandal-hit Libra project to provide a case management computer system and infrastructure for magistrates courts.
It is the second recent blow to justice system IT projects, following the announcement earlier this week of a review of the C-Nomis offender management system, costs of which are reported to have soared from 240 million pounds (CAN$510 million) to 950 million pounds (CAN$2.1 billion).
Libra was first begun in 1998 and has seen repeated delays and cost hikes. Last June, the Commons Public Accounts Committee found that Libra was set to cost 442 million pounds plus 40 million a year in support costs for the eight-and-a-half year program – up from the original 146 million price tag for 10 years.
Figures issued by ministers earlier this year revealed that a total of 327.55 million had already been spent on Libra between 2000 and 2006.
Roll-out of Libra systems was halted at the end of February when just 23 of the 370 magistrates courts in England and Wales had installed the new systems, pending a review.
But further delays to Libra have been revealed in an annual report from the former Department for Constitutional Affairs (now the Ministry of Justice).
“The project has been subject to delays following a number of external factors, including supplier delay and a pause to deployment in order to re-write aspects of the resulting functionality,” said Alex Allan, former permanent secretary at Constitutional Affairs, in the report.
“This has created significant problems at some sites, causing backlogs of work and requiring an improvement to training provision and local deployment planning,” he added.
HMCS (Her Majesty’s Courts Service) had reduced the operational impact of the delays by continuing to use the legacy systems and work-arounds that Libra was expected to replace, he said.
The National Audit Office found in an investigation last year that the courts’ legacy systems made it difficult to search for information by offender’s surname on a national basis and hampered the compilation of performance data.
Allan said HM Court Service’s internal audit had reported improvements in the reliability and stability of Libra since its installation at court level, but there were “continuing issues” over accounting functionality and the impact of work-arounds on performance.
The report added: “The Management Information System (MIS) requirements have developed and changed during the lifetime of the project, and further work is being taken to ensure the new system adequately supports the business needs.”
National roll-out of Libra is now expected by the end of 2008 – a year later than Allan told the Public Accounts Committee it would take to be delivered when PAC inquired into fines collection last year.
In HM Court Service’s annual report, chief executive Sir Ronald De Witt added: “The current project is continuing to work on the application development to support case management and fine accounting, and to provide consistent and up-to-date management information.”
The project had delivered IT infrastructure into all magistrates’ courts, with common office products, secure e-mail, access to the Internet and provision of an internal intranet, De Witt added.
Libra has been procured through a range of contracts, with infrastructure supplied by Fujitsu Services under a 265 million-pound private finance initiative contract. This contract ended in March, when IT infrastructure contracts across DCA were consolidated into deals with Atos Origin and LogicaCMG in the department’s DISC program, which is set to be worth up to 500 million.
Supplier STL is contracted to provide Libra’s case management software – now based on Java and Oracle rather than Microsoft .Net – and a migration application to transfer data to the new system. The deal is expected to be worth 34.6 million, of which 9.5 million will be spent in 2007-08.
Accenture is to install and support the STL application software and to both develop and host the management information system software, under an 85.5 million-pound contract, of which 16.23 million will be spent in 2007-08.
The STL and Accenture elements of Libra are set to be wrapped into the DISC contract with DISC application services supplier LogicaCMG.
Related content:
New FBI management system is big bucks
FBI CIO: Case management efforts moving forward
Identifying the barriers to public sector management
Why public sector IT projects fail
Why big government IT projects fail
U.K. Tories caution against ‘costly white elephant’
