IT projects biggest budget overruns

A think tank with connections to the Conservative party has tallied the UK government's project management track record, and has found that IT projects count among its worst failures, states Information Age.

Of all government projects currently ongoing or completed in the last two years, it is claimed, the biggest budgetary overrun has been the NHS's ill-fated IT refresh. According to the latest estimates, the National Programme for IT has overrun in cost by 450% to £10.4 billion (R128 billion).

Other notable failures include the Libra courts management system, which has overrun by 237% to £341 million (R4.2 billion), and the C-NOMIS offender management IT system, which has overrun by 119% to £279 million (R3.4 billion).

Wildflower International, a provider of IT to the US federal government, has selected and successfully implemented the SaaS project portfolio management software VPMi version 4.5, according to PR-USA.net.

"We evaluated everything in the SaaS and enterprise project management software market before deciding on VPMi,” said Wildflower CEO, Kimberly DeCastro.

“The VPMi stood out for its attractive pricing, ability to configure it exactly to our process, but most importantly the personal support we receive every day."

A team of researchers has implemented support for 'trusted computing' (TC) in a commercially available version of the open source operating system Linux, says The Gov Monitor.

This breaks new ground in the global drive toward more secure computing environments. The latest release of openSUSE, a Linux version sponsored by software maker Novell, comes packaged with software that allows users to set up a TC environment on their computer.

This enhances security beyond the anti-virus programs and firewalls that frequently prove inadequate at keeping bugs, viruses and spyware at bay.