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The UK Public Accounts Committee (PAC) yesterday released a report on Ministry of Defense's (MoD) controversial Defense Information Infrastructure (DII) program.The DII program is meant to replace hundreds of existing Ministry of Defense (MoD) computer systems with a single new system.

The EDS led ATLAS consortium won a contract in March 2005 to design, install and run the project.

MoD intends to have some 150,000 terminals supporting 300,000 users at more than 2,000 sites, with additional capability on deployed operations and Royal Navy ships. DII must be able to handle material classified as Restricted, Secret and Top Secret.

The program, if fully implemented, is estimated to cost will cost an estimated £7.1 billion by 2015. The original contract was for £4 billion.

The PAC reports, however, that, "The implementation of DII has suffered from major delays. Whereas 62,800 terminals should have been installed by the end of July 2007, only 45,600 were in place at the end of September 2008. The main causes of delay were the Programmeâ''s over-optimistic assumptions about the condition of the buildings into which DII would be fitted, and the consequent selection of an inappropriate and unresponsive methodology for installing terminals."

In addition, "The DII Programme also provides a range of core software such as word processing, email, internet access and security to run on the new system. This should all have been available in June 2006, but less than half of the requirement had been delivered two years later in June 2008."

The PAC reports says that the DII program is now 18 months late, and the problems encountered so far has caused the program costs to increase another estimated £182 million. The MoD has already spent £334 million of the £528 million risk funding with which it was provided even though the program is not close to being half done, PAC claims.

The DII program has been controversial from the beginning, not so much for its objectives, but for MoD awarding the contract to EDS. At the time EDS - now part of HP - had major IT program problems at the Inland Revenue (now HM Revenue and Customs) and the Department of Work and Pensions (in fact, settlement over the problems at Inland Revenue where it got fired were just resolved).

EDS was also having trouble delivering on its multi-billion US Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) contract, which was one of the references that the ATLAS consortium undoubtedly used to claim that it (now) knew how to manage and implement a program like DII correctly.

When the contract was awarded in 2005, an MoD spokesman reportedly said that due diligence had been done at the EDS-led ATLAS team reference sites at home and overseas and the department was confident past mistakes wouldn't be repeated.

Guess the MoD was wrong.