Biometric Capability Update Project Failure: Has agnotology prevailed?
Government can conduct a limited review or listen to what experts have been saying for a decade, writes Jennie Vickers.
During an early 2026 spring clean, I decided to discard a stack of printed reports and articles that I had once considered important but assumed were no longer relevant. The papers made it as far as the recycling bin, but the bin had not yet left my office, just in case.
More recently, a report authored by Greg James and titled Review of the Biometric Projects: Biometric Capability Update, BCCU and IPE Projects (Greg James Report) was publicly released on 16 June and has attracted much press attention over recent days.
It is essential reading for anyone with an opinion on New Zealand Government procurement.
Meanwhile, a report I eventually saved from the recycle was one from 2016 titled Contracting for Success in Complex Projects. Stemming from a project involving an international panel of project and contract experts, it included recommendations for governments and organisations that, if followed by our government ten years ago, would likely have prevented the catastrophic project failures described in the Greg James Report.
“The fact that the report refers only to “project leadership and governance” would seem to indicate that the critical role of contract management is still being ignored. ‘Project management’ and ‘contract management’ are not the same things, and they require distinct skill sets.“
The next step in the Biometric Capability Update (BCU) project saga will be an integrity review by the Public Service Commission.
I shared the Greg James Report with Tim Cummins, who was President of World Commerce and Contracting (World CC) at the time of the 2016 study and who now also heads up the Commerce & Contract Management Institute, and asked for his thoughts. Tim’s response was:
“Ten years ago, the ICCPM (International Centre for Complex Project Management) and IACCM (now World CC), published a report on contracting for success in complex projects. Its findings were presented to governments and public sector bodies around the world. Yet here we are, observing a familiar story play out in New Zealand: a project launched without ministerial sign-off, pivoting in technology approach without due diligence, persisting through multiple red flags, and ultimately delivering nothing after seven years and NZ$33 million.
“The PSC investigation will focus, as these investigations always do, on individual conduct and governance failure. What it will most likely not address is the systemic question: why do governments keep entering complex commercial relationships without the capability, the frameworks, or the measurement systems to manage them?”
As Einstein famously said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” What threshold has to be passed to effect change to the system? Does it need to be even more than the NZ$33m in public money already wasted, or could this be the catalyst needed for change?
The Greg James Report
One notable omission from the Greg James Report is any direct reference to the New Zealand Government Rules of Procurement.
The 4th edition of the Rules went live in October 2019 (the Biometric Business Case was presented in August 2019). There was substantial comms activity in the years and months leading up to this replacement to the 3rd edition, making it hard to miss.
The 4th edition included a foreword from the Procurement Functional Leader Carolyn Tremain littered with several apple pie statements. We are told, for example, that: “These Rules are essential in reforming government procurement to support broader social, economic, cultural and environmental outcomes, as well as continuing to represent the government’s standards of good practice during the procurement process.”
Further on, the document makes clear that each agency “must have policies in place that incorporate the five Principles of Government Procurement and the Government Procurement Charter. The Principles and the Charter apply to all procurements, even if the Rules do not apply.”
The five Principles referred to were already in place in the 3rd Edition (i.e. at least since 2015) and they are not complex or difficult to understand:
- Plan and Manage for Great Results
- Be Fair to all Suppliers
- Get the Right Supplier
- Get the Best Deal for Everyone
- Play by the Rules
Yet, they are notable in that the BCU project seems to have disregarded every one of them, and that’s despite the requirement that the Principles be applied to every procurement – even those where the Rules do not apply.
The Greg James Report is thorough, but it does not (possibly due to scope restrictions) contain recommendations that go far enough to prevent this sort of mess happening repeatedly. As Tim Cummins noted above, going after specific individuals will not change the system.
In a ‘Lessons Learned’ section (Page 20), the Greg James Report lists 18 principles that, it states, should be applied to all initiatives by “project leadership and governance”. Virtually all of these principles are already addressed in the Government Procurement Framework.
One further glaring omission from the Greg James Report is the failure to address Contract and Commercial Management as a discipline, distinct from Project Management and Procurement.
The fact that the report refers only to “project leadership and governance” would seem to indicate that the critical role of contract management is still being ignored. ‘Project management’ and ‘contract management’ are not the same things, and they require distinct skill sets.
What does the wider public sector have to say about the need for change?
World CC issued the report Public Sector Contracting in Australia and New Zealand: 2025 Benchmark Insights in November 2025, focusing on public sector contracting in Australia and New Zealand in comparison to other regions.
The World CC Report’s introduction notes that there is increased recognition internationally that contracting is no longer an administrative function but that it has become “the backbone of public value delivery”. Yet is also notes “fragmentation, inconsistency and capability gaps that must be addressed for it to become a reality”.
Respondents to the benchmarking survey rated ‘strategic relevance’ and ‘skills and training’ highly as strategic priorities, reflecting, states the report’s authors “pressure to deliver greater value”, while ‘digital strategy’ and ‘tools and systems’ were considered low priority, suggesting “a recognition that clearly defined processes must precede technology implementation.”
40% of respondents indicated they would like their organisation to undertake a skills audit or assessment; 57% reported that their function’s budget does not include funding for contract management technology; and a whopping 58% showed little or no interest in advanced automation. While the report did show New Zealand ahead of Australia in many areas this is not saying much!
This report would provide relevant background reading for the Public Service Commission team undertaking their review – assuming system change is a desired outcome.
Does New Zealand have the will to change the system?
Without a change of system, it could be argued, based on the information disclosed in the Greg James Report, that many of the report findings could have been avoided, or impacts minimised, if the existing basic requirements around Government procurement and contract management had been adhered to.
The challenge is that with increasingly complex projects on the horizon, will actual compliance be enough?
In carrying out research for the 2016 ICCPM/IACCM report, seven round table events were held across the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Each group discussed a range of questions (Page 69), the answers to which varied depending on the audience and nation. The report authors found much commonality, presenting seven categories of recommendations:
- Contracting for Success in a Complex Project
- A Burning Platform -the Business Case to Invest
- Competence to Lead Complex Projects
- Organisational Maturity to cope with complexity
- Addressing Risk from a Systems Perspective
- Governance in Complex Environments
- A Holistic View
The full set of recommendations, which make for a must-read, should be sufficient to get the ball rolling in New Zealand, if there is a will for change.
Who knew what?
One final feature of the Greg James Report is the issue of who knew the project was in trouble and what was communicated (or not) up the chain.
Tony Ridley (my go-to risk and assurance expert) reminded me about the concept of Agnotology this week and how it impacts risk. As he explains:
“Coined by the historian of science Robert Proctor in collaboration with the linguist Iain Boal, the term derives from the Greek agnosis (not knowing). While epistemology traditionally explores how we come to know, agnotology serves as its shadow, an “anti-epistemology” that investigates how we come not to know—and, crucially, who benefits from that absence of clarity.” This is the skill of ignorance.
Ridley describes the managerial superpower of ‘not-knowing’ and environments where strategic ignorance is a tool for leaders to preserve plausible deniability as “manufactured confusion and strategic ignorance”. It would seem to be relevant to this latest New Zealand complex contract/project disaster.
As Ridley says: “By structuring information flows so that inconvenient facts never reach the top, decision-makers can claim they were unaware of risks, thereby avoiding liability for the resulting harms.”
While the Public Service Commission’s work might uncover ‘who knew what’, it is going to take a fundamental change to the system to rid it of agnotology.
Is doing nothing for another ten years an option for New Zealand?
The introduction to the 2016 ICCPM/IACCM report notes that “In the 10 years since the inception of ICCPM we have witnessed an increasing emphasis on improving the delivery performance of complex endeavours”. In 2026, it is now at least 20 years since these issues started to be debated.
I am wondering if we will still be having the same discussion in another 10 or another 20 years. Tim Cummins’ comments to me suggest that this may well end up being the case:
“Our forthcoming research on outcome-based contracting surfaces exactly this pattern – an excess of attention on symptoms, project by project, and almost none on the underlying policy and institutional design that makes failure this predictable. Until governments develop and position commercial and contract management as a genuine discipline rather than an administrative oversight, no integrity probe will break the cycle, and underlying policy will remain unchallenged.”
