Chamber of Commerce invested 15.5 million euros in an ICT modernization project without results

The Chamber of Commerce has already invested more than 15.5 million euros in a modernization project of the Trade Register, while this has not yet led to a useful result. The project threatens to end in a flop.

This is stated by the ICT-Toetsing Bureau in a report commissioned by Minister Wiebes of Economic Affairs. The BIT looked at the progress of the modernization project and drew firm conclusions about its costs, but also about the working method and the unclear results.

The BIT looked specifically at a program called Kern Gezond at the Chamber of Commerce. This was intended to bring two large systems together: the old National Mutation Programme, or NMP, and the new Trade Register Domain, HRD for short. The latter system was started in 2010 and had to be a replacement of the old one from 1990. Instead of NMP being phased out, the two systems continued to exist side by side and many duplications occurred. At the beginning of 2017, the Chamber of Commerce started Kern Gezond, which aimed to phase out NMP after all. The project would initially take three years and cost 34.7 million euros. When the BIT started assessing the project in October 2018, it had stretched to four years and 39 million euros.

According to the research agency, it is unclear what exactly the program was supposed to achieve. “The documentation is unclear, project documents contradict each other about the goals of Kern Gezond”, the BIT writes in its report. “It is unclear when the program will be ready because results are formulated ‘high over’.” The BIT writes that it took a lot of time ‘to understand what actually happens in the program.’ “We are quite shocked by Kern Gezond”, the report states.

One of the problems is that Kern Gezond is not only phasing out NMP, but is also further modernizing HRD. This gives the new system a lot of new functionality, but ‘that is a doubling of the existing functionalities.’ The new system also creates all kinds of subsystems and new products, which, according to the investigation committee, are again given priority over the transfer of existing products.

There is also a lot to criticize about the program in terms of project, says the BIT. The Chamber of Commerce does not have a clear picture of the progress of the programme. Monthly development costs 800,000 euros and a total of 15.5 million euros has already been spent on the program. “Kern Gezond has produced barely accepted software for this amount that contributes to the main goals of the program.” From an organizational point of view, Kern Gezond is not efficient. Five teams of software developers are working on the system with about fifty external employees. Two of those teams are working on HRD, but they do not consult with users or clients in the organization about what needs to be done. Nor has it looked at requirements regarding privacy, security, and performance. Therefore, parts of the work have to be redone. “The promised improvements in data quality and privacy are also not visibly being worked on,” the BIT writes.

The Bureau advises the Chamber of Commerce to stop the program altogether. Instead, the agency should focus entirely on getting all the data into the newer HRD correctly, all the while pulling the plug on NMP altogether. The internal approach of the project must also be streamlined better with a single client and the advice is not to develop additional activities in the systems.