Britannia Radio

This scandal is hopefully to end before billions more are wasted 
trying to fix it  [See "Money Thrown away" yesterday)

The Telegraph leader is robust but the  FT report yesterday relied 
less on spin from the interested parties involved and got nearer to 
the scandal!

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TELEGRAPH   29.10.08
1. (Leader)  Another Government IT scheme in trouble

The Department for Work and Pensions last year admitted that seven in 
10 government IT projects fail.

So it is hardly surprising that progress on the NHS's "Connecting for 
Health" computerisation scheme, already running at least four years 
late, has almost ground to a halt.

What is particularly concerning about this case, however, is its 
sheer cost - £12 billion.

There is nothing inevitable about any of this. The Government's IT 
programmes fail on cost, reliability and security grounds because 
Whitehall ignores the best practice in the private sector when 
designing systems.

It remains wedded to grandiose schemes commissioned centrally by 
civil servants, which are then imposed in their supposedly finished 
forms on to the entire country.

Politicians fall for the allure of the "perfect" system, wrongly 
believing that grandeur on paper is the same as effectiveness on 
implementation.

This approach remains diametrically opposed to the cherished rule of 
the most effective computing professionals, Gall's Law, which states: 
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from 
a simple system that worked."

So what can be done to create successful government computing 
projects? Whitehall needs to let go and allow different parts of the 
country to commission their own small-scale, modular systems.

By using open standards that allow one network to interact with 
others, the benefits, sought by government, of national access to 
information would still be enjoyed, but without the downsides of 
centrally planned, one-size-fits-all structures.

The quality of the software would improve because custom-written 
programming would be shared, permitting regional experimentation and 
allowing better systems to evolve.
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2. NHS IT system 'at a standstill'
The roll-out of a flagship £12billion NHS IT system has come to a 
standstill in many parts of the country because of problems with the 
system, the NHS has admitted.

By Kate Devlin, Medical Correspondent

Ministers want the computer programme, one of the largest in the 
world, to eventually contain the medical records of every patient in 
the country.
But NHS bosses in London have decided to halt the roll-out of the 
electronic care records to hospitals indefinitely, to sort out 
technical problems.

Across the south of the country no new hospitals are due to start 
implementing the system, because the NHS is still trying a 
replacement to Fujitsu, the Japanese computer giant, which pulled out 
of a contract to provide the programme earlier this year.

Problems have dogged the ambitious project, which is already four 
years late, from the start.

Last month NHS bosses attempted to resolve a damaging row over the 
confidentiality of medical records by agreeing that patients would 
have to "opt in" rather than "opt out" of the system, as had been 
originally planned.
In recent month managers at the Royal Free Hospital Trust in London 
have struggled with technical problems with the new software, 
prompting NHS London to call an indefinite halt to the project.

The organisation had hoped to introduce the system to three new 
hospital trusts in London by the end of this year, bringing the total 
number in the capital to seven, but those plans have now been shelved.

A spokesman for NHS London said: "Because of the general problems and 
in particular the problems at the Royal Free we have decided to stop 
any further roll out in other London trusts until these have been 
sorted out.
"The important thing is to get this right."

The Government has failed to find a replacement willing to take over 
Fujitsu's contract since the company pulled out in May this year, 
although British Telecom is currently in talks over the project.

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said that the IT 
programme was fatally hampered by its scale.

He said: "This huge centralised project has been a shambles from the 
start.
"Now is the time for a radical rethink as to how to proceed.
"Ministers shouldn't be pushing for the largest civilian IT project 
in the world.
"They should be giving control to local organisations which could 
instead work on improving the efficiency of services and the 
connectivity between health and social care."

A spokesman for NHS Connecting for Health, which oversees the 
implementation of all new computer systems in the health service, 
insisted that the problems did not indicate that the introduction of 
computerised care records had ground to a halt.

He said: "Many elements of the National Programme for IT are 
advancing and some are complete.
"The Programme is one of the largest IT change programmes in the 
world and it is inevitable that such transformation will present 
challenges.
"We are working with the NHS and our suppliers to ensure that systems 
are implemented as smoothly as possible.
"It is clear that patients and clinicians are now beginning to see 
the potential benefits these systems bring to improve patient care."

He added that it was for individual healthcare trusts to decide when 
they wanted to begin using care records systems.