Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 4
4
The Department has struggled to deliver the core technical components of the Digital Services at...
Recommendation
The Department has struggled to deliver the core technical components of the Digital Services at the Border programme. The Department has faced repeated problems with the technical aspects of delivery which means it has continued to depend on existing suppliers and extending contracts, with further cost implications. It struggled for several years to find a workable technical solution for storing secret data following the change of data security classification. The Department was also slow to respond to the consequences of EU exit and changes to intelligence requirements. The Department had to suspend its Border Crossing pilot system in March 2020 because it was not stable enough and was only available to frontline staff included in the pilot for 54% of the days it was in operation. The Department has struggled to retain people with the technical skills it requires but tells us it now has a balance between technical and frontline skills with relevant people better able to manage different aspects of the programme. Recommendation: The Department should set out what it has done to resolve the problems it has had with the technical components of the programme and what it will do if these components are not working as intended to the timescales it has planned.
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government
Acknowledged
4.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Recommendation implemented 4.2 The department has implemented agile working methodologies and has access to a specialist technical resource framework to acquire the right people for the right piece of work. The department has also ensured that: • the Border Crossing product has been migrated to a new more robust platform and refactored scalability to provide High availability; • the “secret data” (S*) side of the solution has been refactored and then re-imagined to overcome the technical issues of the first iteration; • logging and monitoring is deployed as standard on every service, to provide effective feedback; • Site Reliability Engineering is part of the engineering ethos which has been applied to provide consistent patterns and designs to support a highly available and resilient service; • all requirements are defined, tracked and monitored; and • performance testing is a key part of every release cycle.