Flemish Minister of Education Zuhal Demir has put an end to the “Persona” IT project for education following a damning audit. The project concerns the personnel data and payroll processing of some 220,000 teachers and nearly 4,000 schools.
‘Persona’ stands for Personnel, Education and Administration. The decision to replace the old legacy system dates back to 2000. The government’s traditional suppliers were selected for this project at a cost of 16 million euros. Cronos was responsible for project management, while Cegeka and DXC took care of development. Atos provided the shared platform in the private cloud. Proximus was also involved. The audit was carried out by Moore and is damning. “The proposed objective has not been achieved, there is no supervision of the hired expert, and there is no accurate financial estimate, control or reporting on the use of the allocated resources,” according to Moore. Less than 10 per cent of the applications have been implemented and the budget has been exhausted. An additional €10 million was requested, but Zuhal Demir pulled the plug.
It is striking that six months ago, Zuhal Demir (N-VA) was still very positive about the project in the Flemish Parliament and gave a detailed answer to Gianni Werbrouck’s (Vooruit) question.
Previously, the I-Police project had also been discontinued at the federal level. Sopra Steria was the supplier, with a budget of 299 million euros.
