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Encouraging good behaviour

Friday 21st November 2008 at 15:20

Given its dependence on close relationships with commercial partners, the national ID card project cannot afford to be lax about its code of conduct, explains the Identity and Passport Service’s Bill Crothers

With the government set to issue the first identity cards to foreign nationals from next month, the £4.6bn National Identity Scheme (NIS) is gathering momentum.

While few projects have been as hotly debated, there is no doubt about the scale – and complexity – of what we in the Identity and Passport Services (IPS) and our private sector partners are attempting to deliver.

Operating constantly in the public spotlight, we have to build, at pace, a secure way of storing the identity data of everyone who lives and works in the UK. This data has to be captured, transmitted and retrieved securely. In addition, we have to build on a legacy of existing systems that, for instance, are used every day to issue and renew passports, and develop a way to issue biometric visas and identity documents.

At the heart of the NIS is the National Identity Register, a database of biometric data. Initially this will contain millions of fingerprints and facial images. No-one, anywhere, has ever built a database this big before, and with this in mind it’s perhaps unsurprising that we have many stakeholders. As well as the general public, the NIS has important stakeholders right across government and in the devolved administrations, the ICT industry (as actual and potential suppliers) and the wider economy. Integral to the success of the project will be our work with these partners.

I’ve only been a civil servant for 16 months. Before that, for more than 20 years, I held a number of senior positions in a major international consultancy and outsourcing company.

This gives me something of a privileged position – poacher turned gamekeeper, perhaps? It certainly allows me to have a perspective from both sides of the relationship, and this has reinforced my strong conviction that it is relationships that make or break programmes.
If you want relationships that work –especially in the testing, stressed environment of a major programme – then you have to be prepared to do real, concrete things.

Relationships work on multiple levels – personal, professional and corporate. That means socialising is important, so you understand your partners as people. Working together is important, so you appreciate the professional skills and insights of your partners. But at a corporate level what matters is economics, so we need a partnering relationship with a commercial bite.

How have we done that?

We set the tone. From the very beginning of the programme, we’ve said that relationships are critical. We sat down with suppliers and jointly documented the behaviours that all parties want. We also made it clear that we will select people to work with on the basis that they can exhibit these behaviours. It is as important an evaluation criterion as solution or price.

We encourage the right behaviours. We set the commercial framework so that people are encouraged to work together to find solutions, rather than just defend commercial positions. We monitor what’s happening. We gather 360-degree feedback on all parties, share that feedback, and take steps to make sure that messages are understood and acted on.

Nor have we been afraid to innovate where we thought this would address problems of the kind that have broken other big programmes. In particular, we have agreed some novel commercial arrangements by moving away from using fixed-price contracts for development work, as we are convinced that these drive the wrong behaviours.

Most of our development work is contracted on a target price basis, a model often used in defence procurement but not so often in civil ICT agreements.

If relationships break down, generally that is evidenced by poor behaviours. But we’ve defined what good behaviour looks like, so we can monitor whether it is in evidence. In the most extreme cases, when we decide that we can no longer work with a given supplier, we have sanctions that allow us to end a contract. And where we have to integrate deliverables from multiple suppliers, we create an ‘incentive pool’ to cover the expense of integration. If there is money left over at the end of integration, it is shared between all the suppliers involved and IPS.

When I started work as executive on this job in April last year, a large team of people had been working on the NIS for nearly four years. They had done some very good work, but our pace is now quickening. Within 14 months we have:

Completed a framework procurement, linking five of the largest industry suppliers to the NIS;

Completed the procurement of the first component of the NIS, the systems that will provide an ID card for ‘critical’ workers;

Launched about £1.5bn of additional procurements for the strategic systems that will form the core of the NIS; and

Reinforced the political vision for the programme through a set of clear public statements.

All programmes need competent, professional management – good planning, proper risk management, good controls – but in my view that is never enough. In the worst case what you can end up with is a beautifully documented disaster.

People make programmes; and those people have to work together through both good times and bad. While we have a long way to go before we can claim success, I’m proud of the work that I and my colleagues have done so far, and I’m confident that we’ve laid the foundations for building a key public asset that will benefit everyone in the UK.

Bill Crothers is executive director commercial and chief information officer at the Identity and Passport Service

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