A quest for openness.

The article discusses the critique of an information technology (IT) project failure presented by senior diplomat Norman Ling to Great Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) last year. Looking at the lessons learnt from problems with the FCO's Prism project to replace 30 legacy systems with a single Oracle Corp.'s enterprise resource planning package, Ling said that the troubled implementation highlighted the shortage of project and program management skills at the FCO. He also urged greater transparency and independent scrutiny of future IT implementations.