€150 million down the HSE black hole.

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Purple

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The HSE and department of health have spent €150’000’000 on a pay roll IT system that doesn’t work. How many people will loose their jobs because of this?
If a private company or PLC did this heads would roll and this is worse because it’s public money.
It could have been spent on building a hospital or upgrading nearly every school in the country. The only source of solace for me is that it would probably have been wasted on public sector pay increases or propping up another semi-state pension fund.
 
Purple said:
If a private company or PLC did this heads would roll .
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I'm not so sure. I've seen some examples of similar projects albeit on a smaller order of magnitude (i.e. millions wasted, not hundreds of millions) in the private sector where the leaders either got promoted or moved sideways to avoid blame.

Though I'm not condoning the waste in this case - I'd love to see a breakdown of where the money was spent - development? consultancy? training? implementation? Having spent some time on the consultancy side of the fence, there were some scenarios where the client dumped what should have been their internal work on the consultants.
 
Maybe I'm naive but I'm aghast at this one. I just don't get how that much money could be allowed to be spent on a computer system. If this is the attitude towards spending, sure it's no wonder that they are throwing money at the health service and seeing very little improvement. What other black holes are out there?

I don't really care about heads rolling because none ever do but I'd really like to see what kind of a "system" allows these kinds of mess-ups on the one hand and on the other can't seem to find any money in the budget for the basics. And this morning it was announced that FG found a memo from the Dept. of Finanace to Dept of Health looking for claification of the spending dating back only four months!! Aren't the Dept. of Finance as much to blame for taking so long to question it. Does anyone running the country have even the slightest clue about what they are doing?

Rebecca
 
MissRibena said:
What other black holes are out there?
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This point actually struck me this morning on the way to work.

Given the track record of this government, in the words of Michael Martin, they may well be "taking the hit on this one" (as well as e-voting), on the basis that it may well distract from other more serious wastes of money.

How big is the wasting of money by this Government that we don't know about?
 
I really cannot understand how 150m can be spent on a computer system.

I think I heard it was a 6 year project or something but where are the costs going. Over 6 years it would cost 30m to have a team of 50 IT consultants on 100k each. Thats a high estimate I think.

Are they using gold plated servers or something?
 
I was listening to George Hook's radio programme on the way home last night. He had on someone, described as an IT consultantm who actually made some sense around the hyperbole and feigned outrage on this topic.

11 health boards were merged into one and they're using SAP to streamline the diverse business processes. As far as I know the best way to implement SAP is to modify your business processes to suit the 'solution'.

In my modest experience of trying to automate a payroll process (and SAP is being used in the HSE for far more than payroll) it's a nightmare. Where there should be a a common set of roles and reward schemes, there were so many exceptions to the 'rule' that it became a juggernaut and management pulled it. It wasn't using SAP. Added to which the political issues made the IT and procedural issues look like a piece of pi$$.

From the descriptions of the implementation of the HSE, it seems to be much much much worse.

That said, the professional fees spent on the partial rollout of the system seem, without any knowledge of what has been done, excessive.
 
I think taxpayers money means nothing to those in charge of health finances nowadays. They regard the national coffers as a bottomless pit to which they have untethered and seemingly unaccountable access. My son is a third yr computer science student and worked in technical system support in a major hospital for the Summer, and even with his young and inexperienced eyes he could see waste and unnecessary expenditure in the IT area. I was a student nurse here in the seventies and my God! when I think of the inadequacies and lack of equipment and materials both we as nurses and patients had to endure it just makes me really mad. These were the days when student nurses had to ask permission of the ward sister to get the keys so she could have access to ........ wait for it........ cotton wool balls!
I've had to take a lot of deep breaths in the last few days!!
 
Before jumping to conclusions about the overspend you would need to hear the reasons behind the overspend to see if they were legitimate or not. Often an IT project is costed with an original specification but afterwards a lot of changes can be requested by the clients which change the budget requirement.
I was involved in installing a new payroll system years ago in my current firm and the original specification bore no resemblance to the finished product and therefore to the cost.
More detail is required as to where the overspend occurred and for what reasons before jumping to conclusions.
 
On Dunphy this morning they were talking about how thousands of health service workers were overpaid thanks to this spanking new IT payroll system. Apparently, the HSE are having 'difficulty' recovering these funds from the staff concerned.

Refusal to repay money paid to you in error is theft, pure and simple. These people would be outraged if they were underpaid and the HSE refused to pay them what they were owed. And yet, I bet (say, €150million!), we, the taxpayer, can whistle if we think we'll ever get this overpayment back - the unions will find some cock and bull way of justifying their staff keeping their ill gotten gains.

Once again, refusing to pay back an overpayment of salary is theft, and the staff concerned should return the money immediately, or have their salary docked by a similar amount gong forward.
 
In my modest experience of trying to automate a payroll process (and SAP is being used in the HSE for far more than payroll) it's a nightmare. Where there should be a a common set of roles and reward schemes, there were so many exceptions to the 'rule' that it became a juggernaut and management pulled it. It wasn't using SAP. Added to which the political issues made the IT and procedural issues look like a piece of pi$$.
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TarfHead gets to the nub of the problem in the quoted paragraph.

Attempting to overlay SAP onto diverse, complicated and undocumented business processes was an accident waiting to happen.

aj

PS Sherman, recovering overpayments from employees has been discussed here before. If I can find the link Ill post it here
aj
 
But why did it take 150 million and 6 years for "experts" to figure out what two AAM posters could have told them in 100 words or less?

Rebecca
 
I had to work with SAP once and found it extremely clunky and unmalleable. It has its place, but the health sector is not it.

While the figures are grossly disproportionate, the media have seem to latched on to the lowest figure and the highest figure mentioned and are using those. but its just not that simple. Pat Kenny was ranting yesterday about 8mill and 200 mill. Its just not right to be doing that.


As for the well known consultantancy firm who are in there, knowing who they are, Im not surprised its cost so much. These guys will charge you by the minute if they could get away with it. And they most certainly have. If you dont have a strong managerial structure when dealing with them, they'll eat you for breakfast, and then have their own breakfast afterwards. And then bill you for it.
 
Interesting Car, I have a friend who said exactly the same thing as you about SAP - he said the problem with state/semi-state entities is you have the IT managers who want all the most whizz bang systems, little budget oversight, and senior management who don't have a clue. This all leads to these ludicrously over-equipped and over-priced IT systems being installed.
 
Re: €150 million down the HSE black hole.

What I'm really enjoying here is Ministers and people in charge are now telling tales rather than take the blame..

Harney hung Martin out to dry over the nursing home charges. Martin had inherited the problem (from another FF Minister). Now Drumm, the new head of the HSE, has made public the cost overruns of the computer system, rather than having it blamed on him in the future.

If, after the next election, we have a change of Government, or even a change of Ministers, where the new Minister is from a different party, it will be in his interest to place all the blame with the previous Minister rather than have it become his mistake.

I nearly feel sorry for Martin Cullen. He inherited the electronic voting from Dempsey, who moved on to a new Department where he will no doubt wreck havoc, which we won't find out about for years, until he is replaced by a Minister, either from a different party, or who is determined that they won't be blamed for Dempseys mistakes, and the whole issue will come out in the public domain.

I suspect that at this stage, whoever follows Dempsey, or any other Minister for that matter, will likely do an immediate trawl of the Department for future "Angolan landmines". Collective responsibility for mistakes I didn't make. No way.


Murt
 
How many professionally qualified accountants were involved in the PPARS project? I might be wrong but I suspect that few if any were involved.

aj
 
Let's not assume that SAP was the wrong solution. While it does have the reputation of being cumbersome and unwieldy, the devil is in the detail. The complexity and breadth of the functional requirements for this system should certainly have come as no surprise. The real question is how was SAP selected, and what alternatives were considered. My past experience with payroll systems would have steered me towards local solutions which were already operating in the Irish marketplace and therefore proven to operate under Irish tax law, rather than an International solution. Is SAP payroll running anywhere else in Ireland?

Murt - Don't lose too much sleep worrying about poor Martin Cullen (the Minister who came out bottom of the list of public perceptions of the job Ministers were doing in the last poll). He had numerous opportunities to act on the information provided to him by the opposition, by academics and by the dogs on the street. But he ploughed ahead regardless, signing the contracts in Dec 03 on the day after serious doubts were express at the Oireachtas all-party committee. He's the man who signed the approval for the bulk of the €62 million spend.

Ajapale - I've no direct experience of this project, but from my experience with Big 6 consultancies, I'd bet a fiver that there was a fair smattering of qualified accountants on any such project team.
 
Rainyday,

I should have been more explicit. I was referring to the number of qualified accountants on the client side (ie the department of Health or the HEA).

ubi,
PPars is supposed to be more than merely a (gross to net) payroll system, it is supposed to deliver HR and other related funcionality as well. The health service is a tangle of interrelated payscales and payment systems.

In hindsight they would have been better off it they mapped out and simplified their payment systems first and then specified the IT system to support this.

Incidently we have heard about the shortcomings of the payroll part of the project do we know how well the HR side of the project is performing?

aj
 
The bigger consultancy companies employ accountants to review projects over a certain figure.
They, Deloitte & Touche (or Delight and touche as they were called today), HP, accenture, fujitsu, ernst & young, IBM et al are pushing the figure up every year for projects that they'll even bid for, ie, if a project for a new customer isnt worth say 150-200k plus, theyre not even interested.
It would be remiss of the employing body not to use accountants for projects involving such figures but it does on the face of look as though if the HSE did use them, they werent doing their job properly.
Rainy, the company I work for used SAP for payroll until very recently.
 
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