I’m kind of curious how someone can expect Tony Sultana to lead the digitization of the civil service after his monumental failures at MITA. And I wonder how his selection happened. Tony Sultana was selected out of loyalty and not against his performance which has been abysmal ever since he took the helm of MITA. Most of his career at the helm of MITA has been one disaster after another as the man wasted millions of public funds delivering little to no results. A pure Labour bażużlu.
Back in 2017 MITA got obsessed with spending its available funds from the EU fund called CONVERGE. Several departments were promised a modernised system built on newer technology (since systems like mobile apps, hosting platforms, taxation, public registry and transport including many others had over 20 years of use and were outdated). The CIOs and government departments got excited about this. They were also promised hosting on state of the art Microsoft Hybrid Cloud which cost MITA millions of Euros mostly cofounded by the same CONVERGE Programme. The Microsoft Hybrid Cloud flopped big time and MITA is now steering away from its millions of Euros of investment due to technical issues which were never fixed and never served their purpose. Everyone at MITA knows it’s a failed project at the expense of EU Funds. Other projects failed during their analysis phase after hundreds of thousands of Euros were spent, as per for example, with the public tender won by Ernst & Young in 2020 who spent time on doing potential roadmaps for modernisation until they had their contract terminated (not renewed) due to their recommendations being incompatible for the Microsoft Hybrid Cloud setup. Projects waiting modernisation are still in a pending state and those completed experiencing serious complaints and service degradation. Then there is the failure of MITA’s Emerging Technologies Lab which produced nothing of value and wasted hundreds of thousands of Euros in failed research projects. All of these failures were dressed up in a very savvy PR campaign done by a very popular PR company which serves government departments.
Then there is another problem with Tony Sultana. He is not only incompetent and unfit for purpose, but he has a toxic character of a desperate man hungry for power. It is typical of an incompetent government bureaucrat to adopt a toxic character because these people can’t get ahead by being productive; they get ahead only by fraud, conspiracy, rent-seeking and appeasing special interests. Usually, this toxic character is projected with how the bureaucrat relates to and administers employees and colleagues. For example, Tony Sultana never wanted MITA staff to work from home and he only sent them to work from home after Mario Cutajar, the previous PPS issued the order to government CEOs to encourage work from home. As an executive, I had issued a work from home practice way before Mario Cutajar issued his directive, and we also didn’t need Mario Cutajar to do this. As CEOs it was in our own right to make arrangements for employees. Mario Cutajar only issued his directive after several CEOs like Tony Sultana were fiercely resisting the work from home practice. Tony Sultana also found this very problematic and was opposed to it ever since. He sincerely thinks that workers are less productive when they are at home. What I discovered as a CEO was that actually, making people work from home cuts lots of costs! Tony Sultana is not bothered about costs.
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