Tuesday, February 13, 2007
The Lingering Death of the NHS Computer
I have just placed in Selected Articles a piece I wrote last year about the government's use of management consultants. There I said that the absurdly expensive and wildly over-ambitious scheme for an NHS computer would have to be abandoned. Today, a Fujitsu executive has come pretty close to confirming this. Bloggers and everybody else get terribly excited about all sorts of political trivia. But, for some reason, the disastrous use of management consultants in government - especially in IT projects - seldom causes outrage Anyway, it IS an outrage and, as far as the NHS computer is concerned, I told you so.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Of all the things government wastes money on, I simply can't complain when some of it is wasted on my fellow IT professionals.
ReplyDeleteWell quite, Tom. But it's not the pros that are the problem, it's the massed ranks of middle men who call themselves consultants.
ReplyDeleteSadly, you and a lot of other people are telling everyone else so -- you are by no means the only person to have predicted this at the outset or near-outset. It is not a surprise, any more than passports, child protection agency, etc etc. What big computer system for a "public service" does work properly these days? A modular approach to project management might do it - in the NHS case they did split it regionally, but maybe a task-based split (one system for the bookings, one for the drug ordering and so on) of systems that can interface with each other might be it? I dunno, but it was a bit of a doomed enterprise I am afraid to say. (not much fun for the patients.)
ReplyDelete... up to two years late ...?
ReplyDeleteGet real; the chances of any clinical benefit being realised within the next two years are zero.
Existing projects (such as DIMP - Digital Imaging Messaging Project), were cancelled years ago because NPfIT (interestingly, my word spellcheck insists on suggesting 'unfit' as a suitable alternative) would provide. As with all public services, the scope is being scaled down on a daily basis.
Bryan,
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid your piece is over reliant on this Glass chap, and also strewn with factual errors.
There were very few journalists who had a good idea of what was actually going on at NPfIT - it amazes me to say it but mainly the Guardian gets it right
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