Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
FOREIGN AND
COMMONWEALTH OFFICE
12 JANUARY 2006
Q40 Mr Bacon: Then in 2001 you purchased
Compass.
Mr Stagg: On the basis of the
experience of the Canadians who gave us a very good account of
their experience.
Q41 Mr Bacon: I am looking at paragraph
3.16 onwards. How is it then that members of your own staff have
not had this experience? In 3.17, it says "There is not yet
a consistent understanding between posts of the purpose, potential
benefits and use of the system"? How can that be?
Mr Sizeland: When we were rolling
out COMPASS, the training could have been better. We did a lot
of telephone training and although we have quite a high success
rate on evaluation, that could have been better.
Q42 Mr Bacon: When you say "a
high success rate on evaluation", referring to the training
it says " . . . and widely regarded by users to have been
difficult to follow and the outcomes poor". How can that
be consistent with a high rating?
Mr Sizeland: The training got
a high rating of 70% on the telephone training. Where we have
had difficulty—
Q43 Mr Bacon: That is not what it
says. It says the opposite. " . . . training on the system
has usually been given by telephone rather than on site and is
widely regarded by users to have been difficult to follow and
the outcomes poor". This is paragraph 3.17, bottom of page
39, last paragraph before figure 24.
Mr Sizeland: I have some other
information here which may possibly contradict but which may come
later, and I shall happily go into that. We have been conscious
that we have not got COMPASS right; we have not sold COMPASS as
a useful tool.
Q44 Mr Bacon: May I ask you about
cutting and pasting? The next page, page 40, says "Some Posts
do not find the system to be user-friendly. Key problems include
an inability to freely cut and paste". Obviously I shall
not hold you responsible for the split infinitive, but can you
explain why the Canadians did not find the inability to freely
cut and paste to be a problem?
Mr Sizeland: There are two issues.
One, we are trying to do some things which others, for example
the Canadians, are not doing and there is the question of the
number of cases and so on. We have identified this as a problem,
which is why we have now upgraded COMPASS and we are piloting
it now.
Q45 Mr Bacon: What evaluation went
on before you bought it? Frankly, to cut and paste is pretty basic,
is it not? What evaluation went on in 2001? Was any of this subject
to the OGC Gateway Review? Was that available at that point?
Sir Michael Jay: It preceded it.
Q46 Mr Bacon: What evaluation did
go on? Any?
Mr Sizeland: On the original decision?
Q47 Mr Bacon: Yes, on the decision
to buy Compass.
Sir Michael Jay: The short answer
is that we agree with the Report and what it says about this.
The introduction of COMPASS did not go as well as it should have
done, training was not brilliant and clearly there were aspects
of the system which were not sufficiently piloted or tried or
whatever. I have no quarrel at all with the analysis or the recommendations
in the Report. We are all very conscious, because there have been
problems in IT systems other than this, of how much more professional
. . .
Q48 Mr Bacon: You did not want to
be out of line with the rest of government? May I invite you to
write to the Committee with a detailed note on COMPASS and in
particular the total expenditure, I mean everything, since you
first started talking to the Canadians on COMPASS, including the
costs each year since 2001, if that is possible?
Sir Michael Jay: Yes.[3]
Q49 Mr Bacon: May I move on to paragraph
2.8 on Firecrest? Firecrest is a Hewlett Packard package which
you have agreed with them over seven years. The Report states
that it has a value of £180 million, but towards the end
of that paragraph it says "The total cost of introducing
Future Firecrest is budgeted to be £320 million". What
is the £140 million extra going on and to whom?
Mr Stagg: There are two costs
really: one is the contract with Hewlett Packard which is £180
million; the rest is the internal cost, because quite a large
amount of the support is being covered by our own staff. We have
our own internal service business which is going to be covering
quite a large chunk of these costs, so we try to make sure that
all the costs of the whole programme, over the time, are visible.
Q50 Mr Bacon: You do not know that
you are making my blood run cold, but that is exactly what happened
with Libra; there were huge internal costs which shot up. It was
supposed to be £10 million and it ended up being more like
£80 million. You are saying now that it is £140 million?
Mr Stagg: I can go into some detail,
but we are going to have to build a new server farm to house the
new servers for this which is going to cost between £25 and
£30 million.
Q51 Mr Bacon: Who is building that?
Are you saying that is being done internally, not by Hewlett Packard?
That is separate from the £180 million, is it?
Mr Stagg: Yes.
Q52 Mr Bacon: Are you doing that?
Mr Stagg: We are contracting somebody
to do it.
Q53 Mr Bacon: Who?
Mr Stagg: The contract is out
for tender at the moment.
Q54 Mr Bacon: So it is just a guess
that it will be roughly £140 million in total.
Mr Stagg: We have obviously made
calculations of what we expect it to be and on the case of the
building, for example, that is between £25 and £30 million.
Clearly, if these costs turn out to be—
Q55 Mr Bacon: That still leaves another
£110 million before you get to £320 million. What is
the £110 million going on?
Mr Stagg: Well it involves the
network of system administrators around the world who keep up
the system. It involves the help desk. It involves the staff maintaining
the system around the clock.
Q56 Mr Bacon: Is it possible you
could send a note with the breakdown of your anticipated costs?
That would be very, very helpful.
Mr Stagg: Absolutely.[4]
Q57 Mr Bacon: Could you say how much
GenIE and Omnibase cost in total?
Mr Sizeland: The GenIE costs were
£4.5 million capital costs including the various upgrades.
We actually access Omnibase for free. I would have to find out
the detail of the arrangements, because it was actually owned
by UK Passport Service and we have a facility to access it. I
do not have the details immediately to hand.
Q58 Mr Bacon: If you could write
to the Committee I should be very grateful.
Mr Sizeland: Certainly.[5]
Q59 Mr Bacon: Over the page, paragraph
2.10 onwards, it relates to something Kitty Ussher was saying
earlier. How essential is it for consular operations to be able
to issue passports in many, many different places? As the Report
makes clear, you are printing passports at over 100 posts. Purely
from a security and anti-fraud point of view, that would seem
an extremely dangerous thing to be doing. If your staff have inconsistent
ideas of how you should use something like Compass in 104 different
locations, the idea that there will not be inconsistent application
of security and anti-fraud procedures in 100 different places
is unlikely. The Report refers to the fact, for example in paragraph
2.14, that certain posts the NAO visited " . . . where the
risks appeared lower but still at least as significant as in the
United Kingdom, tended to take such steps very rarely, if at all",
anti-fraud steps that is. Is it essential to issue passports in
100 different places?
Sir Michael Jay: It is not essential;
it is a matter of choice. It provides a better service for those
who want passports, if you can have them quite close by. As we
were saying earlier on in response to another question, the movement
towards biometrics is in any case going to mean that we should
be issuing passports overseas in fewer hub posts than we are now
and we shall also be considering the extent to which we can repatriate
some of that business to London. So the nature of the passport
issuing operation over the next few years will change.
3 Ev 18-19 Back
4
Ev 19-27 Back
5
Ev 27 Back
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