BT problems impact Department for Work and Pensions services

They just need someone to reboot their home hub.

Sometimes having the tightest SLA in the world won't help resolve some problems. Single points of failure/very technical issues will always take longer, having a supplier who can't respond to faults though.. that's a different matter all together (not saying that this is the case here).

How will more companies make it any better

Doubt having more companies will make government IT any better, will just become more expensive and drawn out with companies blaming each other and nothing actually getting done.

Bad enough at it is with the large companies involved, cant imagine what it will be like when having to deal with loads of companies, bureaucratic nightmare.

What about their IT?

I recently took CMS to Tribunal and won as they were incorrectly disallowing my work-place pension (and have done for over a year).

It's now nearly two months since they received notification from the court that I had won, but they've only been able to issue updated paperwork demanding I make higher payments :-(

When I queried it, I was told they "have to put numbers in and see what happens" as there is no way to apply a correction to the deemed income. They went on "if we can't get the numbers right we have to refer the case to an external supplier to make alterations". Anyone know who that is? Sounds like the system isn't fit for purpose. Mind you, that applies to the CMS in general...

Not just the DWP looking to break large contracts into smaller ones, large parts of Government see it as a way to save cash, also sticking as much of their crap in the cloud as possible is seen as a positive move.

They no longer have the in house skills to manage their IT, having long ago decided they are not IT shops and IT is better managed by IT companies with SLA's that upper management can hold to account.

Its a bit like the NHS and its key targets and stats that just skew the delivery of care to try and satisfy the numbers rather than deliver real patient care.

Government PM's and managers are no match for the sales bods in the giant outsources who promise the earth and deliver little, charging more in consultancy and products to deliver on the promise the agencies thought they where gaining, often at the expense of working solutions.

Companies often earn more out of failures to deliver than they do when they deliver on time and on budget.

I bet the system has 'Smart' somewhere in the blurb sent to the users to say how awesome it is, probably got 'Resilient' too.