I'm on the pavement thinking about the government

Once again today there is another story about the failure of public sector innovation.  This time it is the national offender management information system which was set up to provide 'end-to-end offender management'.  This aimed to share information between prisons and the probation service, replacing separate stand-alone systems.  At its inception in 2004, the estimated lifetime cost of the system was estimated to be £234M.  By 2008 the expected total cost had more than doubled.

The National Audit Office review, published today, highlights the following failures in this project

1.  Senior service management did not monitor the project sufficiently.

2.  There was no clear governance structure in place.  Roles and responsibilities were blurred.

3.  Poor programme management - the lack of an overall project plan;  poor change control and inadequate financial control

4. The need to perceive major projects as IT-enabled business change rather than technical IT projects.  The 42 probation services all had individual ways of working.  Trying to accommodate these led to requirements drift.  Processes should have been standardised and simplified.

5.  Poor supplier management.  This is an outsourced development, but it was not tendered for.  The development progressed on a time and materials basis, racking up the costs as requirements grew.  

A beacon to us all - is innovation always good for us?

Today Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, apologised for the mistakes the company had made during the build and implementation of its social advertising system called Beacon.

He explained that the company had set out to build something that was easy to use : "our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends."

In his blog, Zuckerman stressed that Beacon is a product which helps Facebook users to share additional information with others. It is interesting that he omits to mention its intended use for raising adverting revenue!

How does Beacon work? It tracks Facebook users' purchases online at sites registered with the system and then advertises these purchases to members of their social network. Follow this link to read how one Facebook user found out about purchases made by her husband from her PC.

Most commentators have picked up on the privacy issue related to this story. Our interest, in this blog, is to note its lessons for students of innovation.

These include:

1. Organisations should make sure that their investment appraisal evalaution techniques extend beyond a consideration of technical issues and a cost benefit analysis. This company might have incuded some appraisal of the likely impact on its users and the consequent reputational damage it might suffer.

2. Innovation does not always benefit all stakeholders or wider society. It might affect people in society who are not even directly users of the innovative product or service.

This leaves us considering the question: "At what point does an innovation, that turns into a disaster from the shareholder perspective, become known as a bad idea rather than an innovation at all?

photo: courtesey of Scott Beale / Laughing Squid