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."
great deal (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like to see the SOW for all these projects...if they exist.
"Dayum!" (Score:5, Funny)
I cannot fathom any software system costing that much. I imagine even the people over at SAP are going, "Dayum!"
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:4, Interesting)
That amount is not for the software and hardware alone. There has been a big reorganization of systems and computerization of records. Staff have been trained to use what has been delivered so far, and patients are being asked for permission to make their records available on the system. It's not a total write-off.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe they had more people (like me) say no than they expected making it non viable? Given the govt's record on protecting data, there's no way they were putting my medical records on it.
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they had lots of people that said the system was unusable.. There were priorities of error, and a priority 1 was a showstopper.
The places that consistently tested showed that the system for the first several years (already way past expected implementation date) for the Care Records part was seriously broken, and not fit for live use (bear in mind, this system isn't just supposed to be able to hold your office files, and it's fine if it's down for half an hour now and then, and perhaps lose a few things along the way with only a grumble; it holds your medical records.. The things that make the difference between life and death in some cases).
With things not working out on either side (again, for the Care Records parts; some parts, like PACS [Picture Archival and Communication System;the digitisation of your X-Rays instead of using film] work fine and are in almost universal use now, vastly changing the nature of care in the NHS.
The big problems with it were:
A) Tony Blair not having a clue what was wanted, but saying it should be done in a year.
B) Setting a guy in charge of it that failed his computing degree.. One Richard Granger [wikipedia.org]. It was pretty much his ideas that doomed the Care Records part of it, and allowed out a spec that was more a back of a cigarette packet sketch than a real spec.
C) Failing to have a real spec. Now the companies all bid for a very nebulous thing that said "You give us a lovely system that does what we want, and we'll give you billions.". Of course, they produced what they thought the NHS wanted, but the NHS discovered that it wasn't what they wanted. You know, basic Spec documentation you cover on computing. Which Granger failed.
D) There was also fault with the companies who leaped at the cash without a real spec.. They should have known that the contract was WAY too wooly and actually tied it down to real deliverables.
At renegotiation time, some of the vendors (like Fujitsu) worked out the cost of really doing what the NHS asked for (which was all the project management of the first round, plus a semi accurate spec). Which was a truly staggering figure. More than the NHS could stomach. The two are still in a legal scrap.
Some vendors still kept the lights on in the data centres, and hosted what was there, but those installations are likely going to have to move out of those data centres by about 2015, as they're too expensive to maintain for the few installs.. And none of the vendors want to renew the system contract.
So, the price tag covers all the allocation (it was scaled to host EVERY NHS hospital in the UK, which is most of them), training, consultancy, migration of data (a high precision activity that needs zero data loss on a vast amount of very complex information, coming out of a vast quantity of different databases, and being shoehorned into one uniform schema. Doing this while still providing clinical care (you don't get to shut a hospital down for ripping out the heart of its data systems and replacing them with a new; it's all done while still treating patients and making sure nothing gets mis-recorded).. Training of a huge number of clinical staff (doctors, nurses, and anyone else who needs to use the system inside the NHS), the feeds.. Interfaces between that system and the various disparate ones that it needs to communicate with inside a hospital..
When you look at it, it's a breathtaking proposal, just nobody on high seemed to recognise that, and expected fast results because they said so and waved a fat wallet around. Unsurprisingly it went awry. The current UK government looked at the figures, the legal position and the chances of getting it sorted from a more businesslike side, and canned the bits that wouldn't work (the care records area).
As for the data protection side, that was one of the most heavily guarded I've seen anywhere.. It was pretty robust. The few 'leaks' that happened (people looking at records they shouldn't) were spotted by access audit, and people lost the jobs.. That simple, that strict.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
You forgot to factor in health insurance costs. From what I hear, they're quite high due to some boondoggle computerized records project.
Re: (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: (Score:2)
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 now have $8 billion left over to pay people, assuming each person working on the project makes $100,000 a year, for $8b, you can get 80,000 person years. The project was launched in 2002, so even counting 12 years, that means they could have hired 6666.667 (nice how that works out) people to work on the project.
I can imagine it. FIrst off, you are counting salaries, but not benefits, offices, personal computers, and other things it actually take to run a business. That'll cut your estimated number of employees in half right there. They're also not dealing with one location working on one program. They are developing a system that has to integrate and be deployed at every hospital in the nation. Each of those hospitals (and other health care locations) will have to treated individually with most running unique comb
Re: (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
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, if you put 6k+ people on a project, I'd fully expect it to go nowhere.
Re: (Score:2)
IMO: Taking that much money from government should be considered a very literal hanging offense.
You are assuming that the government had nothing to do with this failure. Software development by committee never ends well.
It's not too uncommon for government projects to have every bureaucrat in the mix trying to get their grubby little paws on it and make it how "they want". I can't even imagine trying to write software and having, literally, thousands of "bosses" giving you contradictory or impossible requirements. Add in lowest-bidder and you start to understand why every government software servic
Re: (Score:2)
non-development employees such as executives. I didn't disount these guys. We can lump them in with the 6000 employees working on the project. I didn't say that the 6000 people were all writing code. That would be even more absurd. This would probably include benefits as well. $100,000 is actually a somewhat high salary.
The rest can be lumped into the 8 billion I took off at the beginning for "hardware" Obviously, you c
Re: (Score:2)
Let's see some what you left out:
yeah so you can ONLY afford what.. 4444 guys? and that is taking into account putting 8 billion in hardware.
you stupid? do you really think the cost is reasonable? it's an absurd money pump that only got to be so because the government kept paying the bills and they would have pumped it for far longer. government should have made such pumping illegal.
(not to mention that most of those mentioned are already in the xxx dollars per employee price, like a computer. you fail math and common sense ac).
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: (Score:2)
Isn't that what happened to New York City's time system?
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, it's not just the software that cost all the money, all the fuck-ups along the way compounded and inflated the price tag way beyond what it should have been.
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: (Score:2)
This is the one area where I think government should do the job but at the same time is incapable of doing it well. Government is no necessarily more corrupt that the private sector and no more greedy. However when government is greedy they tend to just spend more money, whereas when private sector is greedy they spend less money and pocket the savings.
The best outcome I think is a mix. Leave the implementation and management to the private sector but at the same time have a strong and robust regulatory
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: (Score:2)
I can imagine the cost of your current for-insurance-co.-profit system.
Will it be more expensive than that?
Re: (Score:2)
Oh yea, it's going to be LOTS more expensive.. Insurance companies are in business to make money, government is about spending money.
The beauty of capitalism and the profit motive is that if somebody starts making loads of cash in some specific business line, others will see that and rush in to "make their share too". So competition reigns, supply increases and prices go down. The business of health insurance was no different. Government has no such "profit" motive to keep it efficient.
At one time, long
Lost cause (Score:5, Informative)
My father was contracted a few years ago as a consultant to help update the NHS's infrastructure. After a year working there for a year he ended his contract. He said that it was impossible to get anything done because the higher ups didn't listen to the engineers and project managers on the teams. There was also a lot of unmotivated and lazy people working on the teams that slowed everything down. Politics also played a big part and people cared more about keeping their comfy job that never really had an end date than finishing the project.
Re: (Score:2)
Thats fairly common with IT install projects. Between mission creep and idle time (usually caused by mission creep and work outage disputes) its surprising anything gets done on these contracts. Install projects take a special kind of insanity to manage.
Re:Lost cause (Score:4, Informative)
On the NHS projects I was working on, most things were working nicely on Sun systems. Then came this big idea that they should change everything and use Microsoft windows. Chaos ensued. I did what I could for about 2 years, but could just see the change going nowhere. In the meantime, the old systems just kept running.
This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:5, Funny)
Thank God that here in the U.S. we're protected from this kind of system. Sure, getting sick here without insurance can bankrupt you, drive you into lifelong debt, etc. But at least we don't have to put up with any red tape in our health care system!
America, America, God shed his grace on theeeeee!
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: (Score:3)
About the only major issue with the electronic medical records
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:4, Informative)
The silly thing is that 'obamacare' doesn't actually change anything. Same doctors, same hospitals, same procedures. No grandiose new projects. For most people, same insurance company. All it does is subsidize health insurance to make it affordable to those on low income - that's it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
2009 just called. They want their blatant lies back.
Re: (Score:3)
Just more expensive...as I just saw during open Enrollment. Why? Because although I am single and have a vasectomy, my new and improved, Obamacare approved plan is required to cover Obstetrics.
Re: (Score:2)
*Ahem* Someone is going to have to pay for that.
And it won't be all those low income people.
And it won't be any of the people exempted from Obamacare; like most unions and Federal employees.
Yeah. Fuck 'em, right? Let 'em, die?
Re: (Score:2)
You fucking idiot, my great-great-....-grandparents moved from Europe to avoid shit like this. They "Galt-ed" a couple centuries ago. Now pieces of lazy, greedy shit like you are telling us we have to do so again, because you want something you can't afford.
Fuck you, go back to Europe if you want the government taking care of you your whole life. My ancestors didn't want it, and neither do I.
Re: (Score:2)
My ancestors didn't want it, and neither do I.
Fine by me. Stop drinking clean water, breathing clean air, taking safe medications, eating safe food, driving on safe roads, living and working in building that adhere to proper safety regulations, and so on and so forth, you fucking hypocrite. Seriously, you leeches need to be rounded up and shipped the fuck out of here.
Yes, because not wanting a company to pollute the air and water is exactly the same as wanting the government to force some third party to pay for my health care, regardless of my desire as to whether they should be forced to do so.
You fucking idiot.
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:4, Informative)
It also doesn't work very well. Maybe if it was an actual government health cover system of some form rather than just chucking giant heaps of money at private insurance it would work better.
Re: (Score:2)
As if insurance companies do not have red tape. Or death panels, they kill people all the time by denying care. Or computer systems that are running on bubble gum and bailing wire. God Bless the Insurance Companies!
Re: (Score:2)
As if insurance companies do not have red tape. Or death panels, they kill people all the time by denying care.
And that is the basis of why you guys can't figure out the real problem.
Insurance companies don't deny care.
They just don't agree to pay for some of it.
The doctors decide not to offer that specific care since you can't pay for it yourself.
And for that, you blame the insurance company.
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: (Score:2)
I have anecdotes as well. The year after it kicked in, my insurer sent me a check for the premiums they collected, but didn't spend on health care. This year my premiums didn't rise at all. The year before Obamacare, my rates rose by nearly $15 a month, which for a health plan that was only charging a bit over $100 a month, that was a huge increase.
Bottom line is that insurance rates have been increasing by an average of 12% for a long time, blaming Obamacare when it hasn't even finished coming into effect
Re: (Score:2)
And you failed to provide any evidence in your post either. Just another misinformed moron spreading FUD about the health care overhaul without even bothering to understand what the reality is.
Re: (Score:2)
I love how you pretend like this hasn't been a problem over the last couple decades. Magically when they passed the ACA suddenly the health care rates became unaffordable. The reality is that the ACA was a conservative proposal that the Democrats barely got passed because it was the best they could do.
The fact that you're willfully ignorant of the trend in insurance costs is adequate justification for calling you misinformed.
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:2)
They are afraid they will get sued.
If you are a doctor, and you are sued for malpractice, even if you are proven innocent, your career is over. So doctors all try to cover their ass as much as they can and order every test that MIGHT help prevent a suit from going forth. So as more and more doctors are asking for more tests... Hmm high demand, limited supply... what happens?
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, BS. I've been sued before (unsuccessfully) and my career is hardly over. I have to review the applications of new docs coming into our system and quite a number of them have been sued successfully in the past. We need to perform due diligence, so I look at the reviews of the case, it's almost invariably bizarre. A doc sued for not preventing a heart attack when the last time he saw the patient was eight months before the event. A radiologist sued for missing a breast cancer that only one expert witness (out of five) saw on a mammogram. And on and on.
If we see someone who is sued repeatedly, then you have a big red flag. But it is rarity for an experienced practitioner not to have been sued at least once.
And yes, 'defensive medicine' is real - cost estimates range from 10-20% of the US health care dollar, so it's quite significant. But it's hard to pin down exactly what is meant by defensive medicine. It's not just fear of being sued - more of it comes from the understandable desire to get the diagnosis correct. Nobody, but nobody, knows just what the 'right' level of medical testing is appropriate. I suspect this will remain true for quite some time. Even in diagnoses that have been studied carefully, like a lot of heart diseases, we still don't know what the best treatment strategy is when patients deviate from study populations (like having two diseases simultaneously, the horror).
Re: (Score:2)
They can simply direct them to the nearest animal hospital. Lawyers families too.
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is that every post on every site you see about "Obamacare" is an accusation with no facts to back it up, just like the post you replied to.
Fox News did two identical polls recently, the only difference being the term for the program "Affordable Care Act" or "Obamacare" was used. When there was a significantly higher percentage of people that liked the act when it's called the ACA than when it is called Obamacare.
The debate against Obamacare has been the most fact free debate that the U.S. has seen in years. It's a screen for every projection of every annoyance we have about healthcare in the U.S. The people that are preaching against it the loudest have no idea what it really is and they show it daily.
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:4, Informative)
I agree, but it has been mostly fact free because the law that was passed only dictates that the regulations need to be written, that is, we haven't really seen what the end result of the ACA passage will be.
Re: (Score:2)
We already know what the results will be, the care will improve, the costs will go down and if it doesn't work, the private insurers will be removed from the equation. That's basically what happened in the UK when they first tried to reform health care.
Re: (Score:2)
You mind sharing what you're smoking? Or is that sarcasm I'm smelling?
Re: (Score:2)
That's because most people that use the term "Obamacare" are doing it to disparage the President. I use the term because it's an accomplishment that the President should be proud of. It's just that until next month when people can start signing up, a lot of people view it as a failed initiative. Even though those plans don't start until the first of the year.
As soon as people start to actually get those plans, it's going to be impossible for the GOP to get them away from us. It's also harder to scare people
Re: (Score:2)
No, most people use it because "ACA" is just another acronym, and Obamacare actually has some meaning (good, bad, indifferent, but some meaning) to most people.
If I were to mention the ACA to my parents, they'd just look blankly at me. I say "Obamacare", they know what I'm talking about (and really don't care what I think about it, since they're not going to be affected by it in any way).
Re: (Score:2)
Obamacare is the most fact free government program ever.
Mark my words, it will be common for people with identical conditions and similar physical attributes to be treated differently by Obamacare. Some will be denied treatment, others will get one kind of treatment and others will get a different treatment, all for the same malady. No one will know why and the people running Obamacare won't care until someone dies AND it gets on the evening news. Then, it will be "unfortunate" and require "re-examination".
Re: (Score:2)
Getting sick without insurance may bankrupt you everywhere, where insurance companies are the dominant payers for healthcare.
The problem outlined by this news is that, when the insurer has no competition, they can continue raising their premiums to no end and survive any sort of idiotic inefficiencies and waste. The joys of the "single-payer" system, that Obamacare is the harbinger for...
Re: (Score:2)
US' higher expenditures are explained by the availability of much better treatments. Once the government officials begin deciding, what's "appropriate" (depending on the patient's age, health, station in life, political leanings), we will, likely have the costs reduced, yes...
Re: (Score:2)
Most of those treatments are available because it's more profitable to neglect preventative care and treat the chronic conditions that result from it. We do very well at treating strokes and heart disease at later stages because we allow for the conditions that are likely to lead to those disorders to crop up unchecked. And then spend a crapload of money treating something that could have been prevented.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit there. Again, it's profitable to screen people and the treatments themselves are very expensive. What's more, we have a tendency to keep treating people that are probably best just allowed to have their dignity. Most Americans don't want to be hooked up to a ton of machines when their time comes, but when it comes to what actually happens, they usually wind up hooked up to a ton of machines.
I'm not sure how your assertion disproves my assertion. Doctors in the US over test pat
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:5, Informative)
The United States life expectancy of 78.4 years at birth, up from 75.2 years in 1990, ranks it 50th among 221 nations, and 27th out of the 34 industrialized OECD countries, down from 20th in 1990.[2][3] Of 17 high-income countries studied by the National Institutes of Health in 2013, the United States had the highest or near-highest prevalence of infant mortality, heart and lung disease, sexually transmitted infections, adolescent pregnancies, injuries, homicides, and disability. Together, such issues place the U.S. at the bottom of the list for life expectancy. On average, a U.S. male can be expected to live almost four fewer years than those in the top-ranked country.[4] According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the United States spent more on health care per capita ($8,608), and more on health care as percentage of its GDP (17.9%), than any other nation in 2011. The Commonwealth Fund ranked the United States last in the quality of health care among similar countries, and notes U.S. care costs the most. In a 2013 Bloomberg ranking of nations with the most efficient health care systems, the United States ranks 46th among the 48 countries included in the study.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
And finally, you can get private healthcare in the UK too.
Re: (Score:2)
Numerous factors other than quality of healthcare factor into life expectancy. You knew that, didn't you? But chose to make the fallacious argument anyway...
Sure. And I can send my child to a private school here in the US as well. I just have to pay for it in addition to paying for the public one, that some other children will be attending...
In other words, these private options aren't really in competitio
Re: (Score:2)
That must be the reason, why the US has a far higher child mortality and lesser epectancy than any Western European country.
I have heard that the biggest reason is we actually count live births as "live births". Many countries don't include babies that die soon after birth.
Can someone confirm or deny that? My google-fu is borken right now.
Re: (Score:2)
Hardly. There were very few and all were (and remain) harshly and strictly regulated.
Somehow I doubt, you can get the government health-care to pay for your gender-change in Cuba (or even in the UK), but in the US insurers are obligated to cover the procedure for all. And that'
Re: (Score:2)
Spoken by someone who knows nothing whatsoever.
Do you think people don't get sick and die broke in the UK?
Do they go bankrupt because of unpayable medical expenses? So rare as to be unheard of.
If you want to get care with the unwashed masses then you get the bare minimum and still die anyway.
For every story about proton beam therapy being unavailable on the NHS I will give you another about a non investor-class person who saw a GP for free and thus found an illness earlier and was treated and cured at a lower overall cost.
(I mention cost, because to people like you $$ mean more than human life.)
Shall I give you a story?About being sent to a different hospital
NHS software: open source it !! (Score:4, Interesting)
So, with all that money spent,
how can we, the taxpayer, get the
code open sourced ??
Re: (Score:2)
That much money spent on a failed software product? I think releasing it in the public domain would violate a dozen geneva convention regulations. It could be legitimately argued that the code base would constitute a weapon of mass destruction.
No, the only way to effectively handle that steaming pile of...code...is to destroy all copies but one, which you then entomb in a sealed vault miles under the surface of the earth with warnings in every language imaginable.
Re: (Score:2)
I say we dust off and nuke it from space.
It's the only way to be sure.
But yeah, source code please or it never happened and we want a refund.
IT employees rejoice (Score:4, Funny)
Usually when I hear about a doomed IT project, I share my optimism with other colleagues:
this means that we still have plenty of IT job offers guaranteed by these failing managements.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course you're right to ironically point out that tax payers money should have been better spent, especially for struggling sectors.
In that case I would rather have mixed feelings: too bad for the country, those wasted resources are a shame. Still good news for IT jobs.
And employees are not the ones to blame. We are not parasites fed in an ecosystem maintained by a deficient management. Or are we?
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: (Score:2)
I think it could all be done with Excel.
Wait, aren't these the guys that defined ITIL? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dont forget PRINCE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRINCE2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, sadly I think at some point everybody decided private companies would do it better and cheaper.
When all it really turns out is they did precisely *nothing* for 10 billion pounds.
If they are interested, I'll write the entire thing myself for just one billion.
I am literally one tenth the cost, it's a deal, it's a steal, it's the sale of the f*****g century.
Re: (Score:2)
Monolithic vs. standards (Score:2)
Surely for a few tens of thousands of pounds, it would have been better to publish and API for storing and modifying the info on (secured) web servers locally in a way that could be indexed and catalogued separately. Then, incentivize private firms to make and sell software to surgeries and hospitals that provide the API. Why do people always go for monolithic top down solutions for these things?
Re: (Score:2)
Because the moron with the cash listens to the psychopath that wants an early retirement.
The moron with the cash doesn't even have to spend his own cash, it's tax money after all, so he just signs whatever sounds good and goes home.
Re: (Score:3)
Contractor Failure (Score:4, Informative)
Before all the anti-government bozos show up to point and laugh:
However, 10 years on CSC has still not delivered the software and "not a single trust has a fully functioning Lorenzo care records system". This failure, the report said, was "extraordinary", while CSC was accused of a "failure to deliver" and "poor performance".
Yeah, that's a private corporation failing to perform/deliver. They're too busy focusing on cashing their checks, locking in their revenue stream, and paying their executives to actually deliver the product they agreed to.
What the government is bad at is managing contracts:
"systemic failure" in the government's ability to draw up and manage large IT contracts.
"there is still a long way to go before government departments can honestly say that they have learned and properly applied the lessons from previous contracting failures."
CSC should be sued for breach of contract, sued for fraud, sued for damages.
Re: (Score:2)
Too slow and expensive.
Seize all assets and nationalize them, fire every manager and conscript them into the army.
Good lesson for all the others, play the game and the rewards ($16bn) are tremendous but the risks come with catastrophic consequences.
>-)
Re: (Score:2)
Too slow and expensive.
Seize all assets and nationalize them, fire every manager and conscript them into the army.
3. Invade Great Britain.
4. Profit !
Re: (Score:2)
What the government is bad at is managing contracts
Well, if you broaden contracting to the whole concept of being a professional customer with requirements, deliverables, change orders and decision making. It's not the lawyers to set up a proper contract that is missing, it's that the "the product they agreed to" is some vague concept that is all but impossible to spec, estimate or deliver. No contract can give you cost control when the essentials of the contract are so bad, it's just trying to polish a turd.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Speaking as a dyed-in-the-wool data modeller and corporate database guy, I wonder what the problem would be with throwing all of that data modeling and medical coding stuff away and just letting people write into the system what actually happened, exactly as they do with paper records. Some tagging for "this was a procedure" or "this was a test", but free text the rest of the way.
At least the information would then be accessible through a computer to far-flung locations (Norwich) in case it was needed there
Re: (Score:2)
You can't really. Medicare for example has mandated that specific codes be used for billing and with that the rest of the industry has followed suit. These are called CPT codes and you'll see them on every medical bill you get here in the US. You now have multiple generations of doctors, nurses and medical coders who know what the codes mean and how to enter them for reimbursement but the doctors usually keep their own notes because the billing codes don't form a diagnosis or a treatment regimen, they ju
Re: (Score:2)
The two GPs I've used (both in London) have had electronic records. The first, which was the GP attached to my university, had what looked like quite and old system -- full-screen CLI based interface.
The second has a Windows desktop application. I've only seen it twice. It told the doctor I was missing a vaccination, and she set a thing to automatically remind my in 1 year to get the second part of the vaccination (for better immunity).
However, I don't know what would happen if I was taken to hospital an
Re: (Score:2)
It sounds like a joke, but it's not. Happens all the time. These office systems are so obscure that the new vendors often time don't even bother to migrate the data, forcing manual data entry for all the relevant records. It's very sad.
It's the same when these "office" systems have thousands of connected offices. Each would still have to re-enter its records.
Re: (Score:2)
Your companies should find better integrators. Data Migration is trivial and infinitely cheaper than manual re-entry (even if that was possible).
£10 Bn? Not too bad (Score:2)
should we be helping? (Score:2)
as a bit of a strawman, I'm suggesting that we IT people have a moral obligation to get involved in projects like this. sort of the way doctors are obliged to help any patient that presents, regardless of who they are or what they've done.
these sort of megaprojects seem to be self-justifying in some weird way: managers who don't know what they're doing adopt an incredibly conservative attitude toward risk management when any large project is proposed. once that phase-space is entered, it's an upward spira
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.
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
Terrible. Government taking over health care and a mere 50 years later they waste billions on an IT project.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
And because the private sector always does everything better, they wasted billions contracting it out to the private sector.
Re: (Score:3)
I bet the in-house developed and/or maintained legacy systems developed in the 70's, 80's, and 90's are still working fine. That was what happened when I was working for a University. The new system they bought from the was garbage but the systems built over the previous 20 years both in-house and through a vendor that specialized in University systems and university systems *only* worked fine. It problem was they did not have shiney new UIs. Oh, and the vendor scared the managers into purchasing their gar
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: (Score:3)
That's the thing, there's always going to be problems with the health care system, but when one system spends twice as much per capita as another, for worse results, only a die hard fascist would continue to support profits being made for inferior results.
Re: (Score:2)
Couldn't that $16 billion have been better spent devising sneaky new ways to deny medical care from the people paying into the healthcare system?
That would be alot better for the shareholders and executives, and would probably only kill a few thousand people.
What part of "UK NHS" do you not understand?
Anyway, everybody is thinking of the shareholders, the lucky shareholders of CSC who got 10 billion GBP for nothing.
Zowee!
Re: (Score:2)
Sort of like the health insurers in the U.S. who have gotten a multi-million dollar windfall by people being forced to buy something but won't use.
Re: (Score:2)
the lucky shareholders of CSC who got 10 billion GBP for nothing.
Sort of like the health insurers in the U.S. who have gotten a multi-million dollar windfall by people being forced to buy something but won't use.
And yet, it will still cause most of them to close within a decade due to huge medical payouts for a small fraction of those people.
That is assuming President Obama doesn't waive the individual mandate for everyone like he did the employee coverage mandate for businesses.
Re: (Score:2)