Abandoned UK National Health Service IT System Has Cost $16bn... So Far 220
dryriver writes with news of yet another major software project gone awry. From the article: "An abandoned National Health Service (NHS) patient record system has so far cost the taxpayer nearly £10bn, with the final bill for what would have been the world's largest civilian computer system likely to be several hundreds of millions of pounds higher, according a highly critical report from parliament's public spending watchdog. MPs on the public accounts committee said final costs are expected to increase beyond the existing £9.8bn because new regional IT systems for the NHS, introduced to replace the National Programme for IT, are also being poorly managed and are riven with their own contractual wrangles. When the original plan was abandoned the total bill was expected to be £6.4bn."
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, what we're seeing is a preview of what I expect with Obamacare.
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Excellent! (Score:2, Insightful)
And because the private sector always does everything better, they wasted billions contracting it out to the private sector.
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:2, Insightful)
We get more tests than anyone else because the doctors are paid per test^W^W^Wafraid they might miss something and get sued.
I'll Save Them (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be more than happy to save them a lot of money by abandoning a similar system for a mere tenth of that amount!
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:4, Insightful)
I cannot fathom any software system costing that much.
Padding... The money was/is being stolen, looting the treasury.
Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Insightful)
The funny thing is: this horribly wasteful government system is still about twice as efficient as the perfectly organised private system in the US!
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because you're crazy. But, thankfully you'll be able to get affordable coverage starting in a few months.
Honestly, when you look at the cost of health care in America compared with even the most expensive systems in the developed world, the costs are higher here and the outcomes are inferior.
In other words, it may cost more in the near term as preventative care becomes more accessible. But, fewer people using the ER for primary care and fewer bankruptcies caused by medical bills should start to bring the costs down fairly quickly. Then in a few decades the savings from preventative care should be apparent.
It's mostly people who watch Fox Noise and have no idea what it is that they're paying for when they go to the doctor's office that are afraid. All that charity care isn't being paid for by the government, it's being tacked on to the cost of insurance.
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:5, Insightful)
I cannot fathom any software system costing that much
It cost that much because that was the amount of money available to pay for it. If there had only been £5Bn in the budget, the project proposals would (magically!) have cost that much - and would STILL offered the same results. And exactly the same final outcome would have been proposed if the budget had been doubled. Success or failure was not a function of the budget, nor of the requirements. Even back in the 2000's when this was still a comparatively young project, I was asked to work on it. I spent a day with some of the project people and knew even than that it didn't stand a chance of ever going live. Mainly due to the intransigence of the NHS workers, especially the doctors and consultants (who all believe the only function of the NHS is to keep them employed - any resulting healthcare is merely a bonus).
The sorts of companies who bid for this work, just like defence contractors, are masters at configuring their projects to consume all available resources for a constant output. The problem is that they are much better at negotiating than government employees (who have no personal investment in the project) and more highly motivated, what with their contuned salaries, bonuses and commissions.
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:5, Insightful)
I cannot fathom any software system costing that much.
It is easy to fathom if you look at how the program was structured. All the incentives were inverted: nearly everyone involved actually benefited from cost overruns (the contractors got more money, the bureaucrats had the prestige of managing more resources, and the politicians had more patronage to dispense). There was no accountability (no one is being disciplined or fined). There is not even any political fallout because the blame is smeared out over multiple administrations (Conservatives can blame Labour for starting the project, while Labour can blame the Tories for mismanaging the implementation). It is like it was designed to fail. A decade from now you will be reading about some other project that failed in the exact same way, for the exact same reasons.
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:3, Insightful)
Note that you can't put 6+k people on a project and have it go anywhere. A project like this would have at most a few hundred people working on the various components. Wages, including support personnel like managers, are therefore an absolutely insignificant part of this. Hardware, dito. Utilities, dito. If you're spending more than five-ten million per year on this, you're doing something ridiculous and/or illegal.
Not actually producing something after 12 years, that's just the icing on the cake.
IMO: Taking that much money from government should be considered a very literal hanging offense.
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:4, Insightful)
I cannot fathom any software system costing that much.
Haven't worked on any government programs I see.
Start with lots of money, fuzzy requirements and add general stupidity in the contracts office and you can get a LOT of money wasted. Who's got more money to waste than the government?
I've worked on government programs that I firmly believe where managed to get as much money out of the customer as possible (not to actually *deliver* something they wanted). One such program had taken more than 3x the initial cost estimate, taken 3 times as long and was nowhere near half done (by my estimate) before it got cancelled. Mission accomplished... (I made the mistake of actually voicing this theory in the midst of the program too.. I don't work there anymore...)
And here in the US we are rushing head long into government run health care... Yikes.. It's going to be way more expensive than you can imagine.
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, It certainly is absurd. I can't even imagine it if you factor in the hardware to run it on. Assuming you spent half of it on hardware, you'd have $8 billion worth of hardware (which is just plain ridiculous).
You don't get it at all.
Before you even start buying hardware or writing code you have to build some modern new offices and fill them with nice desks, leather chairs, etc. to attract the right sort of people for the management positions. Then you need hot young secretaries around the place and plenty of thousand-pound lunches to discuss their six figure salaries, annual bonuses and exactly what model of luxury car they'd like to drive to work.
Only then can you start the actual "IT" part of the project.
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, if you put 6k+ people on a project, I'd fully expect it to go nowhere.
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:0, Insightful)
Why does the government use government contractors (Score:4, Insightful)
The bidders come in, underbid each other to an unrealistic level, pump out a bunch of documents claiming they can accomplish a project without any proof of actually understanding the project.
The government pays a certain amount up front and some along the way and that money isn't used to develop the project but instead is invested in preparing for second round funding and lobbying for it.
The people who bid the initial deal are fired with gigantic golden parachutes for gross negligence.
Papers and stuff are assembled to make it look like they project is far enough along that the government can't possibly justify dumping the contractor and feeds the contractor the "Real financing" which they should have asked for when they initially bid.
The project is then overstaffed through an employment/consulting agency which charges 400% of what they're paying the employees which happens to be run by one of the guys fired for gross negligence.
Management is constantly promoted and the developers who actually can do the work are promoted to management several times ensuring that at no point in time does anyone actually have a good overview of the project.
A product goes into testing only to find out that instead of a medical billing system they wrote a medical pilling system for pharmaceutical management.
A new budget is approved to adapt the pill pusher records to hold medical data for patients.
Rinse and repeat.
This is not even something we need to be surprised about. These people are thieves and they play their hands the same way every time. Wouldn't it be better to feed all the bidders the startup money for the project. Then as milestones are met, the companies not managing to keep up lose their budgets until there's only one? It's a massive amount of wasted energy and work, but the project will probably come in at much less money then if they're managed in the classic sense.