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National Audit Office Value for Money Report: Executive Summary

Delivering successful IT-enabled business change

Executive summary

1. The successful delivery of IT-enabled business change is essential for improving major public services, but experience in the public sector in Britain also shows that achieving such change is particularly complex and challenging in terms of the scale of the changes required, the cross-government co-ordination needed, and the technical issues around joining new and old systems.
    
2. The Committee of Public Accounts and the National Audit Office have examined many failures, identified what has gone wrong and made recommendations on how to avoid similar mistakes in the future. But, in addition to identifying mistakes and their causes, it is important to recognise that there have been many successful central government IT-enabled programmes and projects that are delivering real and lasting benefits to citizens, whether by increasing access to services or reducing the cost to the taxpayer. The purpose of this report is to demonstrate, drawing on a range of case studies from central government and elsewhere, how such successes have been achieved and to enable lessons from what has gone well to be transferred to new and existing programmes and projects in government.
    
3. In this report, we therefore identify 24 examples of successful programmes and projects; one third of them are drawn from British central government departments and agencies, and the rest from elsewhere in the public and private sectors in the United Kingdom, and from the public sector overseas (Figure 1). The diversity of the case studies (which appear in Volume 2 of this report) demonstrates that success is achievable in both public and private sectors. The report draws out the activities and behaviours that have helped deliver this. Our report also draws on widespread contact with the IT industry and central government departments in Britain and our consultations in the United States.
    

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Figure 1: 24 examples of successful IT-enabled business change

Central government

Department for Work and Pensions: The Payment Modernisation Programme has transformed the payment of benefits and pensions by paying entitlements directly into recipients’ bank accounts.
Programme/project costs*: £824 million

Department of Trade and Industry: Consumer Direct provides consumers with a single access number to free advice when problems arise when dealing with traders.
Programme/project costs*: £34 million

Department of Trade and Industry — Small Business Service: Businesslink.gov.uk is a website providing support, advice and services to businesses in the UK.
Programme/project costs*: c.£17 million

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – Eaga Partnership: For citizens at risk of fuel poverty, the Warm Front Scheme provides a package of energy efficiency and heating measures to install or upgrade insulation and heating systems in their homes.
Programme/project costs*: c.£1 million

The Pension Service: Pension Credit was a new entitlement that had less rigorous means testing and replaced the Minimum Income Guarantee.
Programme/project costs*: £297 million

Vehicle and Operator Services Agency: Operator Self Service has modernised the approach to issuing Heavy Goods Vehicle Licences by redesigning the business process and IT support for the vehicle licensing business, enabling operators to carry out most licence transactions online at any time.
Programme/project costs*: £9 million

OGCbuying.solutions: eSourcing provides secure collaborative tools used by procurement professionals and suppliers to conduct strategic procurement activities online, including tendering, negotiation, contract award and management, to deliver value for money procurement solutions to the public sector.
Programme/project costs*: £2 million

Environment Agency: The Fishing Rod Licences project transformed a fixed-hours Post Office based service for 1.2 million transactions a year to a self-service system enabling customers to purchase fishing licences online at any time.
Programme/project costs*: £200,000

Other public sector

Transport for London: The congestion charge was introduced to reduce traffic congestion in Central London by levying a flat rate fee upon drivers entering the congestion zone during the Monday–Friday working day.
Programme/project costs*: £234 million

Northern Ireland Criminal Justice Directorate: The Causeway Programme links the case management systems of the six main Northern Irish criminal justice agencies.
Programme/project costs*: £48 million

Transport for London: The Oyster® card is an electronic smartcard, introduced in 2003, as part of the Prestige Project, a private finance initiative to renew, operate and maintain all the Transport Authority’s ticketing infrastructure.
Programme/project costs*: £40 million capital cost

Scottish Water: “Promise to resolution” – an integrated customer management and field service programme – introduced a new customer service contact centre and work scheduling system to improve both efficiency and performance.
Programme/project costs*: £14 million

UK Transplant: The National Transplant Database provides a fast and accurate matching system to enable organs to reach patients as soon as organs become available for transplant.
Programme/project costs*: Running costs part of annual budget of c.£14 million (2005-06)

Cambridgeshire County Council: The Council transformed its governance structures following the introduction of portfolio management.
Programme/project costs*: £90,000 provided by the ODPM (now the Department for Communities and Local Government), plus internal staff and senior management time

City of Edinburgh Council: As part of its “Smart City Programme” to modernise the Council’s back office systems and processes, the Council undertook a modernisation of its services of Planning and Building Standards to enable individuals, construction firms, architects and solicitors to submit applications electronically and to find planning related information online.
Programme/project costs*: Part of wider “Smart City Programme” to modernise the Council’s back office systems and processes

International public sector

United States Department of Defense: The Identity Management Programme provides military personnel with a Common Access Card to improve identity assurance and reduce fraud.
Programme/project costs*: n/a

New York City Mayor’s Office: The New York City 3-1-1 Citizen Service Center provides access to all government information and non-emergency services in the New York City area through a single telephone number. NYC 3-1-1 is available 24 hours a day, with operators providing services in over 170 languages.
Programme/project costs*: US$25 million

City of Anaheim: The Enterprise Virtual Operations Center brings together real time data from the City of Anaheim’s emergency services and makes the data securely accessible via the Internet, enabling city officials to see what is happening on all the City’s critical response fronts.
Programme/project costs*: US$1.2 million

Office of the Revenue Commissioners: The Republic of Ireland’s Revenue On-Line Service (ROS) enables customers to both pay their taxes and file their returns online. The ROS Customer Information Service allows customers and their agents to view details of their Revenue Account.
Programme/project costs*: €40 million

British Columbia: Network BC is a dedicated project office within the Ministry of Labour and Citizen Services that works with British Columbia’s remote communities and the private sector to improve citizens’ access to the Internet.
Programme/project costs*: Leveraged existing government telecommunications spending of Canadian $245 million (over 4 years)

Private sector

APACS: The UK payments trade association's chip and PIN programme is a new, more secure way to pay with credit or debit cards.
Programme/project costs*: £1.1 billion

Britannia Building Society: The “Really Big Programme” involved replacing the Society’s complete IT infrastructure to create a “single view” of each of its customers and their savings and investment accounts, mortgages, loans and other financial products.
Programme/project costs*: £60 million

Prudential UK: The “Single View” customer service transformation programme was introduced to improve customer marketing and account administration by providing staff with an integrated view of all the products and services each customer has purchased from Prudential UK.
Programme/project costs*: £37 million

Norwich Union: ‘Pay As You Drive’™ insurance uses Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology to calculate monthly insurance premiums based on how often, when and where people drive.
Programme/project costs*: n/a

*Costs are those incurred by the programme/project in its life time, as provided by the case study body. They are not the subject of National Audit Office audits.

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4. Analysis of our case studies identified three key and recurring themes in successful programmes and projects:
   • the level of engagement by senior decision makers of the organisations concerned;
   • organisations’ understanding of what they needed to do to be an “intelligent client”; and
   • their understanding of the importance of determining at the outset what benefits they were aiming to achieve and, importantly, how programmes and projects could be actively managed to ensure these benefits were optimised.
   
    
5. In the light of these three themes, we make a Recommendation to departments in the form of Key Questions they should ask themselves before embarking on IT-enabled change. Based on analysis of our case studies and other fieldwork, we also make Recommendations to central departments about what more can be done across government to support departments. In doing so, we hope this report will assist government departments and other public bodies to improve their capacity to bring about successful IT-enabled business change.
    
6. Many of our Recommendations focus on the need for greater stewardship and accountability within individual government departments and across Whitehall more generally. Beyond this, the Committee of Public Accounts has emphasised frequently the need for greater public transparency and accountability in departments’ performance in managing their programmes and projects and, in particular, that the results of OGC Gateway Reviews™ should be published. At the time of publication of this report, recent decisions by the Information Commissioner in support of disclosure were the subject of legal appeals by the Office of Government Commerce. While there are arguments in favour of and against disclosure – which will be ultimately for the Courts to decide – Gateway Review reports form only one means to achieve greater departmental accountability for the management of major IT-enabled programmes and projects. The introduction of the Annual Report of the e-Government Unit in November 2006 offers a new and significant opportunity for greater accountability and to make public for the first time information on departments’ aggregate expenditure on IT programmes and projects, and achievement against plans. Already in Defence, each year the cost, progress and performance of 20 of the largest defence projects are the subject of a Major Projects Report audited by the National Audit Office.[Footnote 3] The provision of comparable information about the performance of civil IT-enabled programmes and projects would be in line with the more general thrust towards transparency in the management of departments through developments such as the publication of departmental capability reviews.
    

Recommendation for departments embarking on major IT-enabled business change

7. At the earliest point of any IT-enabled business change, the department should be able to demonstrate that it has considered and addressed the nine Key Questions set out in Figure 2. The issues raised by the questions are fundamental to successful delivery and, before undertaking contractual or other major commitments, departments should be able to demonstrate that they have put in place the capacity to successfully tackle the challenges posed.

8. The Key Questions are set out under the three key success criteria identified in our case studies. They are addressed to those individuals within departments and agencies who have a pivotal role to play in bringing about successful IT–enabled business change. These are primarily Accounting Officers and their executive boards, and “Senior Responsible Owners” who, for major programmes would themselves be board members and who, as their title implies, have a personal responsibility for ensuring that each of the programmes and projects under their charge achieves its objectives and delivers the projected benefits. There are also questions (in particular Questions 6-8) for Programme Managers who perform a vital role in support of Senior Responsible Owners, handling the day to day management of the programmes in question, including providing oversight of the various individual projects that often form discrete but essential parts of the wider business change.
    
9. Responsibility for IT-enabled business change rests with individual departments and the nine Key Questions below are designed to assist Accounting Officers and their boards to put in place the appropriate capability and capacity to deliver programmes and projects successfully. We also draw the attention of Accounting Officers to implications for their departments of the Recommendations for central departments (Figure 3 on pages 20 to 23); in particular Recommendation 7 – that the Recommendations of this report form part of the basis of an “annual stock take” being developed by central departments, drawing on the Leadership and Delivery strands of departmental capability reviews, and Recommendation 8, which emphasises Accounting Officer responsibilities, which would include for example the mandatory nature of Gateway Reviews.
    

Nine Key Questions for departments embarking on IT-enabled business change

Ensuring senior level engagement

Q1 Is the board able to make informed judgements about the department’s capacity to manage change?

• Our case studies (for example Prudential UK, Cambridgeshire County Council) highlight the importance to organisations in managing their portfolio of programmes and projects of establishing a clear overview of the range of business change activities planned or underway at any one time and assessing their capacity to handle the change. For departments and agencies, this will be aided by adopting the common approach to portfolio management being developed by the Chief Information Officer Council along the lines of their American counterparts who exercise critical oversight over Federal Government Agencies’ IT-enabled programmes and projects through a process of annual review.
• Key success factor in our case studies: mechanisms to prioritise the programme and project portfolio in line with business objectives.

Q2 Does the department have in place a decision making structure that will ensure strong and effective leadership of the IT-enabled business change?

• Successful delivery requires an accurate assessment of risk, the scale of the change proposed and whether it involves a new business process or upgrading of existing systems, the degree of innovation involved in the change itself and the supporting IT, and the likely effect on those having to operate the system and upon customers and clients. As our case studies illustrate, these issues need to be addressed at board level with direction and support provided by the board for those charged with delivery, underpinned by clear governance arrangements and internal and external scrutiny and challenge.
• Key success factor in our case studies: a clear decision making structure with agreed lines of accountability so that the right decisions are made swiftly and in line with business strategy.
• In departments and agencies, the Senior Responsible Owner holds prime responsibility for the successful delivery of IT-enabled programmes and projects. For those Senior Responsible Owners in charge of programmes, our survey showed that while 76 per cent discussed progress with their Accounting Officer at least once a month, only 52 per cent did so with their Minister at least once a quarter.
• It is essential that senior management invest sufficient time and priority to ensure effective oversight of the change. While our case studies demonstrate clearly the benefits of strong leadership and direction exercised by experienced and skilled individuals, the results of our survey of Senior Responsible Owners across government show that half are in their first ”SRO” role and around half spend less than 20 per cent of their time on the role. This lack of experience and focus is compounded by the limited amount of support given to Senior Responsible Owners, with a striking 38 per cent of Senior Responsible Owners having no involvement with a Centre of Excellence and 20 per cent rating their support as poor.
• There is particular risk where a business change involves several organisations coming together to join up activities, requiring additional governance arrangements to promote a common sense of purpose and a culture of joint responsibility. Here a cross-departmental board is needed, as happened in the case of the Department of Trade and Industry’s Businesslink.gov.uk initiative, with sufficient seniority to demonstrate the commitment of the partner bodies, clear and up-front terms of reference, and a capacity to take collective decisions for the benefit of the programme as a whole rather than for the individual interests. A cross-department project board will also be needed. For its initiative to improve citizens’ access to the Internet, British Columbia’s Ministry of Labour and Citizen Services set up a dedicated project office – Network BC – to bring together the government ministries, health authorities and other public bodies and to manage the upgrade programme.
• To ensure that risks are well-managed, Boards and Audit Committees will need to satisfy themselves that the department’s programmes and projects are proceeding in a timely manner through external and internal assurance processes. In particular, in accordance with earlier guidance[Footnote 4] , they will need to take steps to assure themselves that IT governance is sufficiently robust to deliver key services by requiring regular advice and reports from internal auditors where large changes and upgrades to IT infrastructure are planned or in progress; that business cases are robust, projected benefits are measurable, and financial and other controls are sufficient to track benefits; and that programmes and projects are making timely progress through Gateway Reviews, the outcomes of which are communicated to the Audit Committee. Forty-two per cent of Audit Committees were never briefed on the results of Gateway Reviews; only 26 per cent received quarterly briefing; and only 42 per cent of internal audit and assurance departments received copies of all Gateway Reviews.

Q3 What incentives exist to drive performance?

• In the commercial sector, IT-enabled business change is often the prime factor in whether a business succeeds or falters. As our case studies demonstrate (for example Britannia Building Society’s “Really Big Programme” to replace its complete IT infrastructure to create a “single view” of each customer’s savings and investment accounts, mortgages, loans and other financial products) these are essential building blocks for competitive advantage. Reflective of that risk, incentive and performance regimes exist in the private sector to make sure that those charged with delivery are motivated to succeed and that they drive through the benefits.
• Key success factor in our case studies: senior management who demonstrate commitment to the change.
• In departments and agencies, while there is a clear commitment to public service, there are few material incentives. The Review Body on Senior Salaries[Footnote 5] has recommended that Government should consider the payment of non-consolidated market allowances and “golden hellos” to attract high level specialists to the Senior Civil Service. This is helpful for recruiting those with the skills and expertise needed to manage large programmes of IT-enabled business change. But not all government departments have yet created a “risk culture” that rewards well managed risk taking.[Footnote 6] Beyond basic salary levels lies the important issue of financial incentives and career planning to help motivate senior management to undertake the well-managed risk taking entailed in delivering successful IT-enabled business change.
• A lack of longer-term commitment to realisation of benefits in departments and agencies is also demonstrated across government in that currently (April 2004–June 2006) only five per cent of all Gateway Reviews are Gate 5 Benefits Evaluation Reviews, a percentage that has increased little since 2002-2004 (Appendix 2, Figure 11).The Department for Work and Pensions’ Payment Modernisation Programme, which has been through a successful Gate 5 Gateway Review, has developed a benefits realisation plan assigning responsibility for promoting and securing benefits to named individuals – benefits owners – over the medium-term of the first few years’ following implementation.

Acting as an intelligent client

Q4 Does the department have the necessary programme management skills?

• Key to the success of our case studies was a recognition of the need to build the capability and capacity to deliver major programmes and projects and, within this, the key role played by the programme manager. While there have been previous initiatives to build a cadre of such managers within government, some of whom are now running major programmes and projects, these initiatives have not been completely successful. Numbers in the programme and project management specialism have doubled since 2004, but remain low at 2,300 across the civil service. In recognition of the need to strengthen this aspect of delivery capacity, one of the current main initiatives of the e-Government Unit is to broaden and deepen professional skills in managing IT-enabled programmes. This includes adopting the competency and skills framework of Skills for the Information Age.[Footnote 7]
• Key success factor in our case studies: building capacity and capability.
• Where third party consultancies are used, mechanisms are needed to build in-house capability and to provide a return on consultancy spend by requiring knowledge to be transferred from consultants to programme and project staff within the department. The Vehicle and Operator Services Agency, for example, agreed at the outset of the Operator Self Service project that its consultants would facilitate transfer of knowledge and skills throughout the business change.

Q5 What is the natural division of duties between the Programme and Project Management Centre of Excellence and the Chief Information Officer?

• The Office of Government Commerce’s Embedding Centres of Excellence Programme, introduced in 2003, measured departments’ progress in setting up Programme and Project Management Centres of Excellence against established standards. Since completion of the centrally-run programme in 2005, the role of Centres of Excellence has developed at different rates and in different ways across government. In some departments, Centres of Excellence have the requisite authority to influence procurement and recruitment strategies, while in others their role is restricted to that of information management. In our survey, only half of Senior Responsible Owners considered their Centre of Excellence a hub for the dissemination of good practice or lessons learned; while only 38 per cent rated their contribution as very or fairly good.
• The Programme and Project Management (PPM) Specialism supports staff in government who wish to follow a career in programmes and projects rather than line-oriented career paths. It brings together all PPM specialists in central government and agencies, concentrating on helping, advising and supporting those individuals who are experienced or qualified programme and project staff, to develop their skills and careers.
• Key success factor in our case studies: building capacity and capability.
• In part because they are the creation of two different parts of central government – the e-Government Unit and the Office of Government Commerce, as yet the relationship between Chief Information Officers and Programme and Project Management Centres of Excellence is not fully clear. While there are examples of where both are working well, there is a danger that the two will duplicate the actions of one another, with vague responsibilities and confused reporting lines.

Q6 How will the department establish and promote an open and constructive relationship with suppliers?

• Our case studies indicate repeatedly the importance of establishing from the outset strong, constructive relationships between clients and suppliers, typified by shared governance arrangements, joint teams and establishing an environment in which each side is comfortable challenging the other. Sometimes these involve simple devices such as the Republic of Ireland’s Revenue On-Line Service where the suppliers and Revenue staff were co-located in an open plan office away from existing offices, or in the case of the Britannia Building Society where all team members wore Britannia’s badge. Open relationships between clients and suppliers also bore fruit in the case of Pension Credit where the joint team was able to offer constructive challenge to some 50 requests for requirement changes.
• Key success factor in our case studies: creating constructive relationships with suppliers.

Q7 How clear is the department about the business process that it is seeking to change or develop?

• Before embarking on change, a department must have a complete understanding of its current business processes and how its stakeholders interact both with the business and between themselves and a clear understanding of what it wants the new business process to achieve. These need to be coupled with good appreciation of the likely impact of the business process change on service levels, productivity and different stakeholders. Our case studies (for example the Northern Ireland Criminal Justice Directorate’s Causeway Programme) show the commitment and amount of time taken by those embarking on complex transformations to get the business process clear to start with. This knowledge is crucial if an organisation is to engage with the IT industry as an intelligent client, providing a clear specification to potential suppliers to enable them to determine the most cost-effective system for achieving the department’s goal and to design proposals to implement the business change. Uncertainty over possible impacts should be probed and tested by organisations piloting new business processes, building prototypes to demonstrate practicalities, and canvassing opinions from those who will actually have to change their behaviours to engage with the business change.
• Key success factor in our case studies: designing and managing the business the change.

Q8 Does the technology exist to deliver the change?

• Our report Improving Procurement[Footnote 8] recommended more proactive management of suppliers and earlier engagement before and during the earliest stages of procurements. For IT-enabled business change, departments should consult at an early stage with the industry to take market soundings and to test the viability of proposed IT-enabled changes and the robustness of the procurement strategy to deliver these; for example, by making use of mechanisms such as Intellect’s Concept Viability Service.
• Key success factor in our case studies: managing the risks of the IT solution.
• Within this, there needs to be robust and well-evidenced discussion about why and where the business change cannot make use of off-the-shelf systems and software and how the change will address issues of connection between the department’s new and existing systems. For example, for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ ”Warm Front” Scheme Manager, Eaga Partnership was confident that its in-house IT staff had the skills and capacity to develop the secure web-based portals needed; whereas for Scottish Water’s new integrated customer management and field service programme, to keep down costs the business lead of the project made an early decision to adopt off the shelf technology, despite significant pressure from the IT department that a bespoke system was needed.

Realising the benefits of change

Q9 Beyond immediate technical success, how will wider benefits be secured?

• Many of our case study organisations needed to engage in significant work with customers, users and wider stakeholders to ensure that the design of the change met their needs and that interested parties supported the change. To realise the benefits projected in the business case of a major IT-enabled change, departments will need to identify the key stakeholder groups at the earliest stage and to engage with them throughout the change to ensure that their needs are addressed and their support and commitment gained and maintained.
• Key success factors in our case studies: selling the benefits to users and winning the support of wider stakeholders.
• When embarking on an IT-enabled business change, our case studies, for example the Republic of Ireland’s Revenue On-Line Service, illustrate the importance of being clear from the outset about issues such as who will champion change amongst users, and how their energies and support can be put to best effect. Conversely, areas of potential resistance and doubt need to be identified, and steps taken to counter and convince; otherwise there is a danger that the change does not fulfil its potential, even where the technical solution is successful. Here, the use of market research (an approach taken for example by the Department for Work and Pensions’ Pension Credit) can assist departments in identifying how best to phase the roll out of the change to different key customer groups.
• To realise the benefits of change, departments need to ensure therefore that business cases are not used solely as mechanisms to secure funding, but set out how the business change will be achieved, what the benefits will be and, importantly, what machinery will be put in place to drive the achievement of those benefits. This requires assigning clear responsibility for promoting and securing benefits to named individuals (for example, the Department for Work and Pensions’ Payment Modernisation Programme benefits realisation plan).
• Key success factor in our case studies: optimising the benefits.
• Business cases and benefit plans need to be subject to robust internal scrutiny by the department’s Centre of Excellence, which should also be involved in regular reviews and revisions of the business case throughout the programme or project to ensure that in the light of policy changes and other changes to the external environment, the projected benefits remain realistic, relevant and realisable.
• The introduction of resource accounting, combined with the drive for increased efficiency means that, elsewhere in government, there is a clear incentive – and need – for departments to be in a position to know how well they are using their assets. Yet, historically, for IT-enabled change, this information has often been lacking, with few OGC Gateway Reviews at Gate 5 (Benefit Evaluation) having been carried out to assess for each programme and project whether the benefits hoped for have actually been secured. While the percentage of programmes and projects that reach Gate 4 (Readiness for Service) and go on to Gate 5 has improved (Appendix 2, Figure 12), more needs to be done. As a consequence, the Office of Government Commerce Supervisory Board has agreed that from 2006-07 all programmes and projects must undertake a Gate 5 Review within 12 months of completing a Gate 4 Review. Gateway Reviews are only one aspect, but with increasing cross-departmental programmes and projects, clear and firm arrangements will need to be put in place to ensure accountability and responsibility for realisation and optimisation of business benefits across the departments and agencies involved.
• Management of the department’s portfolio of programme and projects should include monitoring of benefit realisation plans to ensure that benefits are optimised, both in terms of financial savings and in improved services to citizens.

Eight recommendations for central departments

10. In order for departments undertaking IT-enabled change to have the maximum chance of success, there are actions that central departments can take to strengthen processes and structures within government (Figure 3).

 

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1.  [back] For example, National Audit Office (2005) Ministry of Defence: Major Projects Report 2005, Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, HC 595-I Session 2005-2006, 25 November 2005. London: The Stationery Office; National Audit Office (2005) Ministry of Defence: Major Projects Report 2005 Project Summary Sheets, Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, HC 595-II Session 2005-2006, 25 November 2005. London: The Stationery Office.
2.  [back] HM Treasury and Office of Government Commerce (2004) “Building a Cooperative Assurance Relationship between Internal Audit, Departmental Gateway Coordinators and Centres of Excellence”. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/8BA/50/ocg_audit_190105.pdf
3.  [back] Review Body on Senior Salaries (2006) Report No. 62, Twenty-Eighth Report on Senior Salaries, Cm 6727. London: The Stationery Office.
4.  [back] National Audit Office (2004) Managing Risks to Improve Public Services, Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, HC 1078-I Session 2003-2004, 22 October 2004. London: The Stationery Office.
5.  [back] http://www.cio.gov.uk/transformational_government/implplan/ p.24.
6.  [back] National Audit Office (2004) Improving Procurement: Progress by the Office of Government Commerce in improving departments’ capability to procure cost-effectively, Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, HC 361-1 Session 2003-2004, 12 March 2004. London: The Stationery Office.