Was RTÉ’s bungled ERP project a sign of digital transformation for its own sake?
The past few years have not been kind to RTÉ. Already faced with an existential threat in how media is consumed, the public broadcaster has been forced to fight plenty of other fires, from funding uncertainty to proposed redundancies, not to mention the scandal that enveloped Ryan Tubridy in 2023.
The latest criticism RTÉ is facing follows the revelation that €3.6 million was spent on an IT modernisation plan that went wrong.
On 30 April, RTÉ told arts and media minister Patrick O’Donovan that it was forced to write down the sum following an incomplete implementation of an upgrade to its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Key parts of the ERP, a type of finance system of record, were implemented, but the human resources (HR) portion was not.
In a statement, RTÉ said: “The majority of the impairment relates to the effort to deliver the HR part of the project, amounting to €2.3m. The remaining €1.3m related to the delay and effort in delivering the finance element of the project”.
According to the broadcaster, the write-down was noted in the 2020 to 2023 accounts. It seems that the fresh interest follows O’Donovan enquiring about large projects and capital expenditure by agencies under his remit. Presumably O’Donovan was, at least in part, motivated by news in February that the Arts Council endured a botched project in which €7 million was spent on a bespoke grant application management system that was not implemented.
The chief complaint seems to be that the broadcaster should have flagged the failure more clearly. Alan Kelly, chair of the Dáil’s Arts & Culture Committee, was quick to note that RTÉ had the opportunity to flag the failure during the 2023 round of committee meetings.
“What about RTÉ’s commitments on openness and transparency with the public,” he said in a statement.
It’s a fair point, but the reporting of blunders in the accounts is likely more common across business than we imagine. As a result, while it would be easy to slam RTÉ, perhaps we should step back for a moment and ask if the IT industry more broadly is getting things wrong.
Project failure
Like cyberattacks, failure to deliver on IT projects is an embarrassment to organisations, so they have a tendency to be swept under the carpet – if it is at all possible to do so.
The truth is, though, IT projects have a long and inglorious history. Picking a few at random, the implementation of an Oracle system at Birmingham City Council is a slow motion car crash; Britain’s Post Office Horizon scandal is so bad that it is almost beyond description; supermarket Lidl lost half a billion in an attempt to implement internal systems based on SAP, and the list goes on.
Naturally, government departments and state and semi-state bodies tend to be subject to greater scrutiny – not to mention freedom of information legislation – so who knows what bodies are buried in private organisations, or even deep on page 68 of the filings of PLCs.
We do hear about the successes of course, in press releases and on corporate websites. We just don’t care about them as ‘such-and-such-a-company installs software’ is not the kind of story that sets our hearts aflutter.
A serious problem today, however, is that so-called ‘digital transformation’ has become a cargo cult.
All too frequently, organisations adopt digital tools and processes without a clear understanding of how they will actually help, driven by a nightmarish admixture of fear and clever marketing. The problem is, not only will buzzword compliance be no substitute for strategic planning, no IT system, no matter how good, can solve problems that are human in nature. Nor, indeed, should the carrot of ‘efficiencies’ be allowed to cloud the fact that, thanks to ‘digital’ gubbins, it is becoming ever more difficult for customers to interact with businesses if even the smallest parameter is off.
Frankly, even the obsession with ‘data-driven decision making’ has the air of a ritual invocation: perfect markets will spontaneously emerge if we abandon human judgement and just batter any number we can find into a jumped-up spreadsheet. Going through the motions because of press and PR hype and expecting businesses to somehow be positively ‘transformed’ is nothing short of magical thinking.
In this scheme of things, while the RTÉ write-down should not be ignored, as far as can be told at the moment at any rate, it is very much on the ‘regrettable’ side of the see-saw. IT projects routinely fail. We just don’t hear about it. Worse still, in our rush to promise whizz-bang results from inherently complex systems, we risk creating more problems than we solve, generating waste that goes far beyond financial losses to include wasted time, damaged trust, and missed opportunities for genuine improvement.
It is true that IT systems have a natural lifespan, and we have all come across ones so old and inflexible that they should not be booted so much as booted out the door. However, when it comes to massive, sweeping changes, effort should be made to discern between genuine strategic initiatives and those driven by imitation and hype.
What organisations need isn’t either more or less technology, but better thinking about it. This means maintaining healthy skepticism when it comes to the promises of vendors, systems integrators, implementers and all the rest. In addition, even when a concrete goal can be defined, we need to remember that technology serves people, not the other way around.
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