Risk factors" in National Library and National Library Archive feature article by Julienne Molineaux From the New Zealand Herald

Interesting piece on the "Risk factors" in National Library and National Library Archive feature article by Julienne Molineaux From the New Zealand Herald. In it she points to some real risks involved with the merging of The National Library, Archives New Zealand and Department of Internal Affairs.
Julienne Molineaux: ‘Dangerous enthusiasm’ dooms project to fail
Government agencies are often restructured in the belief that the change will lead to better performance.
But whether it is organisational design or information technology projects, bigger scale doesn’t always mean better results. In fact, larger scale brings with it many problems.
Yet the Government and the State Services Commission are proposing a merger between Archives New Zealand, the National Library and the Department of Internal Affairs, with economies of scale in IT as the driver of the change.
The New Zealand state sector has a history of IT project failures, the $100 million-plus police INCIS endeavour being the most infamous.
The bigger the IT project, the bigger the concentration of risk.
The more complex the project, the more likely it is to flounder, go over-budget, go over-time, fail to deliver on its promises and be difficult for users to operate.
In proposing the merger between the archives, the library and Internal Affairs, State Services Minister Tony Ryall has admitted there are no burning problems that need solving. Rather, the rationale is the desire to develop an overarching platform from which New Zealanders can access civic information.
The merger is being promoted as providing a single decision-making centre in public technology services “to determine a whole of government approach to managing information”.
While the current fragmentation does indeed make accessing information more difficult for the public, a serious question has to be raised. Just how feasible is the Government’s dream of a unified civic information “super” platform?
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