19/11/2007

The Ministry of Defence's (MoD) £5 billion defence IT system has been attacked by the media for changing its systems 22 times and for having only a quarter of its 70,000 systems being ready for installation by July 2007.

In response, the MoD told GC News that it was installing thousands of new IT terminals each month and that its changes were being made due to the increased demands from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The MoD's Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) programme is one of the largest and most complex IT programmes in Europe, according to the MoD, and is designed to improve communication between headquarters, battlefield support and the troops on the ground to more than 50,000 users.

It aimed to bring together about 300 disparate defence IT systems under a single infrastructure.

An investigation by Computer Weekly and Channel 4 News into the DII found that the MoD and its main contractors, the Atlas consortium, led by services supplier EDS, initially reported that the project started in 2005 found that delays in the implementation meant that another £1 billion would have to be spent on the project.