Toomey says with highly effective corporate governance of IT comes clear lines of responsibility and people that are accountable for delivery of the results, plans that probably mesh, decisions to spend that are made on rational grounds, performance criteria established and monitored and managed, performance arrangements that ensure that everybody understands what the rules are and why the rules are there, and systems in place to make sure everyone sticks to the rules.

He says IT projects that have gone wrong over the last several years share a number of common characteristics that consistently link back to failures to meet the principles that are set out in the governance standards.

"There are problems with responsibility, there are problems with planning, there are problems with how the decision to spend was made, there are problems with keeping track that everything is performing as it is intended, there are problems with conformance, and there are significant problems frequently with human behavior. So you can analyze things that have gone wrong, as I did with Customs, as I've done with Australian Pharmaceutical Industries, and they keep coming back to those problems.

"So rather than just saying 'cut the spend', or 'standardize', which is essentially what the Liberals tried to do ten years ago, which has proven to have not worked — it just creates chaos — it would be far better to insist that every federal government department and agency implement highly effective corporate governance of IT from the top."

Toomey said the recent difficulties highlighted by the Victorian Auditor-General in that state's troubled HealthSmart project point to the difficulties in trying to achieve objectives when too many constituents are running different agendas.

"So Senator Tanner can be successful if he makes his objective the same objective that all of the Department and agency heads have. He won't be successful if the agency heads aren't on side, even if the CIOs were on side because CIOs with noble intention haven't got the wherewithal to make change happen. And that's a fundamental, so we see the issue in Victoria, we see it in other health systems, and we see the same thing in the UK National Health Service," he says.