Cash stutter hits free law for all

By ADAM GIFFORD

The Government's law drafter and IT services firm Unisys are arguing over whether an $8 million project to make legislation available free on the internet is suffering "scope creep" and whether the bill should go up.

According to a justice and electoral select committee report on the estimates for the Parliamentary Counsel's Office (PCO), the Public Access to Legislation (PAL) project is still not complete and Unisys is arguing it has had to do significant extra work beyond the original specifications. Unisys refused to comment on the report.

"They allege scope creep. We say there is not," said chief parliamentary counsel George Tanner.

"There have been change requests, but they have been handled under the ordinary change request procedures in the contract."

Tanner said the main issues were around the customisation of the Epic authoring tool and its integration with the Documentum contract management system.

"There are also issues round the electronic file transfer to the contracted printer, and there are still problems with the website to be addressed," he said.

While the website is the selling point, the bulk of the project is about automating much of the work of the office.

Tanner said that before deciding whether it would pay Unisys more to complete what was supposed to be a fixed-price job, the Government had asked for a technical review.

Wellington consulting firm HeXaD will help the PCO choose from the seven Australian and American firms that responded to a tender to run the review.

"The review will look at the extent of the customisation we asked for, how it has been done, the extent it will be able to accommodate future changes in technology, and also to assess the technical quality of the integration between the authoring and content management systems," Tanner said.

The select committee report said National and United Future members believed failures of Government sector IT projects "generally stem from the over-sale of the product by contractors and the reluctance of the public sector to accept standard software product, preferring instead to embark on pioneering pathways".

Act, National and United Future members "consider the project's difficulties should encourage the Government to reconsider trying to be its own publisher in a dynamic industry".

The committee recommended the PCO go for standard systems for things like fonts and revision tracking, "rather than holding out for uniquely designed software that copes with the status quo".

Tanner said select committee members over-simplified the issues, and the system was designed to cope with lawmakers' wishes to see all proposed changes within a single electronic document.

He said how long the technical review would take would not be known until the consultants were chosen.

An arrangement with Legislation Direct to provide pre-publication services had been extended to March 2004, for $210,000 a month. This was to have ended in January, the original go-live date for PAL.

The office was also paying Australian consulting firm Carson Group $22,500 a month to manage the PAL project on its behalf.