Novopay the latest in a long string of 'predictable' disasters

The Pirate Party of NZ is calling for an independent evaluation into the management and performance of the Ministry of Education during the Novopay failure and also an enquiry into the tender process which led to Talent2 developing Novopay. 

Pirate Party Secretary Camille Cowley "We're very concerned and wish to see this matter dealt with as quickly as possible. We're very supportive of the The Principals' Federation call for an urgent review to take place sooner than the Ministry of Education one scheduled for April. The Party also sees the need for transparency surrounding Talent2's acquisition of the contract, including the fact they are an offshore company when many NZ companies certainly have the capacity and expertise to complete a project of this scale and importance. Given the outcomes of these enquiries,  accountability can be fairly judged whether it is a failure of the provider or of the government department managing the project."

Pirate Party President Daniel Bertinshaw "There are very clear failures apparent in the Novopay debacle and expecting the schools to pay out of their own budgets with no offer of reimbursement is one of the worst. Not looking at a staged introduction and instead rolling it out across the entire country as some sort of faulty nationwide beta is another. Assuming that a project will be delivered and work is mistake #1 in IT software requisitioning" 

While the new issues with Novopay that have continued into 2013 are giving schools more headaches and costs to deal with, failure of Government IT projects is nothing new to NZ's Parliament and many saw this day coming. With a large focus recently on the series of blunders and breaches under the National Government, the ACC and Corrections leaks and the WINZ kiosks brought to light by Keith Ng, experts and laymen alike are calling information infrastructure at a national government level extremely poor. 

After the cavalcade of IT disasters New Zealanders have witnessed under this administration, The Pirate Party of NZ is calling into question the competency of the NZ Government in dealing with any IT project, industry regulation and IT legislation and is heralding a call to arms for a party that understands the technical needs and social implications of the Internet and IT.

With some views being espoused that Novopay's errors are within acceptable error rates (industry wide) making this a non-issue, the government needs to be told that this is not only widelyunacceptable, it is a catastrophe. They are also misleading the public around acceptable error rates in a very damaging way. The Ministry of Education has also admitted recently that it isn't aware of all the new problems schools are having, leaving the parents, teachers and the public to wonder what sort of oversight they have over their Ministry and its functions at all.

ENDS

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