Arts Council’s IT debacle proves the value of in-house expertise
News broke yesterday that the government had ordered an external review of governance and culture at the Arts Council, following a finding by the Comptroller and Auditor General that almost €7 million was spent on a bespoke grant application management system that was never implemented.
This is hardly the first failed tech investment made by a state. Anyone in the IT sector remembers the words “NHS computer” and “Post Office Horizon” with a shudder. There have been others, including one remarkable insider tale from France.
It is easy to criticise government spending on IT systems, but a few things need to be remembered. First of all the definition of an IT system, or even of a ‘computer’, varies widely, from off-the-shelf software that runs on servers or even desktop PCs, through custom applications that run on-premise or in the cloud, to even hugely complex mainframes (yes, they still exist).
None of these things is as simple as clicking on the big ‘W’ icon to start typing on a computer at home.
Wasted spending on IT systems is also rife in the private sector, with the whizz-bang promises of the gurus of Silicon Valley often adding up to, at best, incremental improvements with a large, and recurring, price tag attached.
None of this is to let the Arts Council off the hook. €6.5 million would fund a lot of art, after all.
Indeed, the official report [PDF] into the Business Transformation Programme makes for depressing reading.
The plan calling for a “one-year development to upgrade and integrate five separate systems” and the introduction of “new and automated business processes as part of the development” was described as “extremely challenging and possibly unrealistic”. In addition, chaotic changes to the plan mid-stream, such as moving from ‘low-code’ to custom development, as well as the lowering of expectations for deliverables (de-scoping), do not speak to a project that was ever going to deliver.
Indeed, the report notes the Arts Council didn’t have a “dedicated full-time senior manager in place to direct and control the project” or put its internal IT resources in place for the project.
This is a standard-issue cautionary tale of a failed IT system implementation. The only difference between this and what so-often happens in business is that private enterprises bury their corpses by moonlight.
However, there is something worth thinking about beyond Liveline-grade complaints about public spending and breathless calls for an Irish-style Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) audit.
Governments relying on external actors not only creates ample opportunity for rent-seeking businesses, it also speaks to a hollowing-out of professional expertise in the public sector.
True, external consultants – from management consultants to charities – are often used simply as mudguards, taking the flak when something goes wrong, but they are also providing expertise, whether in housing, the arts, IT, or anything else, much of which the state should be able to drum-up internally.
In the scheme of state spending, €6.5 million is a drop in the ocean. It’s not even much for a major IT project. Nevertheless, it is worrying in this case because arts spending is low.
Numbers published by Eurostat show Ireland trailing the pack when it comes to spending on culture. This isn’t particularly surprising given that, despite our meticulously cultivated self-image as a literary nation, much of our actual cultural output, not to mention consumption, is relentlessly middlebrow.
The ins and outs of this particular failure will, no doubt, continue to play out in the days and weeks to come, but one thing that we might consider doing is to stop expecting computers to solve complex organisational, and thus fundamentally human, problems. Indeed, that is something that taking culture seriously might teach us, even if only because much art is inherently unresolved.
In fact, it is hard to escape the sense that the act of buying into the twin fantasies of instrumental value and smooth ‘datafication’ itself results in our inability to argue for the necessity of art.
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