Without question there was a legacy issue to be fixed, at the time I was part of the DWP IT division and appreciate the issues that arose and the 1000's of man years of work to be Y2K compliant...however, a problem known for decades was left to the very last moment to be resolved and rather than training up more designers, programmers and testers to met the additional work, they went to the contractor market at huge expense to the taxpayer to create the additional resource in a short lead time. Then creating a DWP nerve centre focused on problems arising across the world starting with NZ as the Millennium crossed over the time zones across the globe. Replicating similar other Departmental nerve centres doing exactly the same thing at immense cost to the tax payer. The cost was horrendous, all due to lack of planning of changes to software systems for Y2K compliance for benefit payment systems that were being continuously changed to reflect various government's benefit policy. Other simple things like date of birth (DOB) although collected by most benefit/taxation systems the only reliable subject to scrutiny DOB was the pension system. Ever wondered why Government forms eg UB40 ask you what other benefit you receive, it quite simple because the payment engines were built in silo's and didn't talk to one another. so if you claimed unemployment benefit the DWP wouldn't necessarily know you were claiming benefits anywhere else. It has improved but it cost billions to re-platform from ICL to IBM .
Dont get me going on the Euro planning, were it was proposed to change the 2 digit decimal point field to a seven digit decimal point field to allow greater accuracy in converting sterling balances to Euro balances at cut over that ran in 1000's of man years work, for an issue that could have been dealt with in primary legislation dealing with the adoption of the Euro.
Last edited by JohnHarris; 14/02/22 02:46 PM.
