Policy and Resources' Bob Murray says too few skilled States IT staff led to a lack of oversight in the early years of the IT contract with Agilisys.

The Scrutiny report into the first three years of the £200M, 10 year contract between the States and IT firm Agilisys found that it was inadequately managed and exposed a lack of leadership and investment.

Deputy Mark Helyar, the former Treasury lead, used social media to express his concern at the issues uncovered by Scrutiny and suggested the financial implications could run into millions. Deputy Bob Murray, for P&R, says that is about right:

"That would be true. You're talking about a contract that from the outset was £200M. A million pounds here or there, it's not small money, but it's not significant in the grand scheme of things."

"But we've got some benefit from it, it's not lost money."

Scrutiny identified a lack of staff with sufficient IT experience to manage the Agilisys contract. Deputy Murray agrees:

"Frankly, it's resources. I think everybody thinks the civil service is bloated. That is not the case. I think that was primarily because of this concern, that we mustn't add more bodies."

 "We stopped expenditure in certain areas very quickly. We've analysed work in progress and we've spoken extensively to Agilisys about reformatting and re-approaching things." 

Deputy Bob Murray and Gé Drossaert, the States' Chief Digital and Information Officer.

Policy and Resources says the bulk of the recommendations made by Scrutiny have been implemented, including the appointment of an IT lead, Gé Drossaert, who has years of global experience managing IT projects for the banking sector:

"My slogan is 'inspect not expect', so we are on top of the delivery. But we are also looking at 'did we receive what we asked for?', and that is value for money. That is what I would like to bring to the organisation."

"It is a complex environment and there are areas that need a lot of attention, but it doesn't happen overnight.

But the resilience will improve, the performance in our applications that we use and the services we want to bring electronically to the public will get a large boost."