Photo: 123RF
A host of shortcomings have been pinpointed in an IT overhaul at Archives NZ that hugely disrupted public access to more than six million public records.
The agency's new $4 million search tool has been slow and suffered a series of complete shutdowns and breaches throughout 2022, holding up court cases that relied on historical information, and infuriating lawyers and historians trying to use the Collections system.
The review into what went wrong reads like a mini-version of other government IT debacles such as the police's $100m Incis saga two decades ago, and Novopay for teachers more recently.
Missing from Archives' project were proper risk management, due diligence as well as governance - and a lot of the holes were obvious, said the newly released external review completed last year.
It found:
- The risk of external stakeholders' dissatisfaction was there to see in plain sight
- The project team ...were fatigued and relationships were strained
- Project personnel were not available when the significant issues began to occur and the operational ... team was under-prepared for what hit them
- A disconnect between the workers and leadership - project board members did not universally understand their roles
What it has cost the taxpayer to fix the system, versus what has been borne by Swedish supplier Axiell, was not clear.
Chief archivist Anahera Morehu apologised today "for the experience users have had since the project went live in February 2022".
In a statement to RNZ, she said the review's findings and recommendations "will be invaluable" to agencies undertaking big projects.
"Archives NZ had limited experience of major change programmes. Given the length of the project there was turnover in staff, the Covid-19 pandemic significantly impacted the project's progression, and vendor resourcing during this period was impacted as a consequence," she said.
The agency "acknowledged, and share, the frustrations users have experienced".
Archives knew in 2015 its "nationally important" core platform was old and putting operations "at risk" but funding ran out to do anything about it, the review showed.
When it resuscitated this four years later, Archives chose a vendor, Axiell, after making reference checks in Europe. It did not check with New South Wales state archives - and only found out later about the "challenges" it had had.
Key users of the system it chose were not asked for input.
The public search tool was not available to install until very close to going live and "in reality did not meet ... requirements".
Still, the green button was pushed in February 2022 - and a whole host of new problems began, this time noticed by the public.
"Ongoing issues with poor functionality, bugs, and unplanned disruptions in service caused increasing levels of dissatisfaction from users and government agencies," Archives said in an online update.
In an echo of other public projects, such as building mental health facilities, Archives was beset by "overly optimistic project status reports" and "under-assessment of risk" that encouraged it to go live too soon. It was also worried funds would run short if it dallied.
The agency said it was putting the review out so other agencies could learn from it. It will sit alongside previous reviews into IT ructions, such as into Novopay.
Archives said the Collections search tool for the public, and internally, was mostly fixed now.
"Updates to Collections in January 2023 have resolved most of these issues and significantly improved the search function."