Tony Collins's IT Projects Blog

Assist, an association of 1,800 IT professionals in the NHS, has produced an excellent paper which summarises the best and worst in health service informatics.

Assist is the Association for Informatics Professionals in Health and Social Care. It says in a paper that a "one-size-fits-all" approach does not work. And it calls for "simple systems" which can be configured locally - not more sophisticated systems which it says bring rigidity.

Continue reading "ASSIST says NHS one-size-fits-all doesn't work" »

An internal NHS document says that problems arising from the implementation of the Care Records Service at the A&E department of the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead, could continue indefinitely.

The document "Lessons Learnt from the Royal Free Hospital Emergency Department", refers to multiple problems and says there is a risk "the present situtation will continue indefinitely". The document is a detailed assessment of the Care Records Service implementation at the Royal Free's A&E department. The paper has been disclosed by an NHS employee and is focused on the problems, not any benefits arising from the implementation.

Continue reading "Hospital has long-term NPfIT problems, warns paper" »

Whittington Hospital NHS Trust says it has accounted for four discs that went missing, which contained the personal details of 17,990 health service staff and former employees. The incident has cost the trust (taxpayers) about £25,000.

Police had been alerted, and the trust held 24 separate briefings for staff over four days, including one on Saturday, 20 September 2008, on the possibilities of identity theft. David Sloman, Chief Executive, wrote "individually" to the 17,900 staff at their home addresses to advise them of the missing data. The trust wrote to them again to let them know the discs had been accounted for. The trust also reported a Serious Untoward Incident. An enquiry had been set up and the Information Commissioner's Office was alerted. Staff were advised to keep a regular check on their bank accounts and statements.

Searches were carried out in all areas of Whittington hospital's salaries and wages office and the post room. The trust is based near the Archway tube station in London. There was also a search of the European headquarters in Warwick of McKesson, the intended recipients of the discs. McKesson runs the MAPS Manpower and Payroll system for the trusts. The Royal Mail was alerted.

Continue reading "Missing NHS discs found - but incident costs £25,000" »

Continue reading "NPfIT Cerner: a user writes " »

Is a promise or a prediction made by a supplier's sales team ever a representation? When is a representation, if that is what it is, ever a misrepresentation? If ever there is a misrepresentation, can it be held to be fraudulent if it is made thoughtlessly rather than deceitfully? What if the customer relies more on promises than representations?

Some of these were matters raised at the nine-month hearing between BSkyB and EDS - the most expensive High Court hearing the history of the IT industry.

One argument made during the hearing was that promises, predictions and opinions are not representations. So can they be held to be misrepresentations?

Continue reading "BSkyB v EDS - a crucial judgement for IT industry?" »

Now the Labour Party's conference, which was held in Manchester, is finished, I've looked at the lessons and what went wrong on 13 large, government IT-based projects and programmes:

• Magistrates' courts
• Schools
• Intelligence Services
• GCHQ
• Passport Service
• National Health Service
• Rural Payments Agency
• Criminal Records Bureau
• HM Revenue and Customs
• Department for Work and Pensions
• Department of Health
• Department for Innovation Universities Skills
• Ministry of Defence

The analysis is tied in with an analysis and comment, to be published in Computer Weekly this week, on Labour's track record on managing big IT-based projects and programmes. 

Continue reading "New Labour's unlucky 13 IT projects " »

After Elizabeth Dove saw her GP about suspected depression she was dismayed and angry to find that her sensitive NHS records were put on a database which was shared with staff at the local council.

But it was no mistake: Dove discovered that it is routine for the NHS to make medical information on some patients accessible to some employees of local councils.

Doctors have told Computer Weekly that GPs refer patients to the local Primary Care Trust which shares some medical information with the local council through joint computer systems. The data sharing is done in the name of "offering best care".

Continue reading "Patient dismay as medical data shared with council " »

When civil servants announced they had reached £71.25m settlement with IT services supplier EDS over problems with tax credits IT systems, they left out some important details.

After tax credits were introduced in April 2003 - supported by a new system built by EDS, the main IT supplier to HM Revenue and Customs at that time -  thousands of families were unexpectedly overpaid. HMRC sought to claw back the overpayments while struggling to reduce delays in making payments to hundreds of thousands of families.

In November 2005 HMRC announced it had reached a settlement with EDS on compensation for the IT problems over the introduction of tax credits. But what was not mentioned in the announcement was that EDS was being quietly allowed to pay £26.5m of the settlement from any future business it won from the UK government. Under the deal it would pay quarterly instalments of 4.5% of income from future government work over three years.

The time is up in December this year. But EDS has not won the contracts it had hoped for from the UK government, leaving it well behind on its payments, Computer Weekly has learned.

Continue reading "HMRC again threatens legal action against EDS" »

With his use of the language Paul Maritz would be, perhaps, pre-qualified for a top job at any of the large IT companies. He said: 

"The degree to which we can help our customers become more cloud like internally will actually enable them to federate more easily with external clouds offered by suppliers selling computing resources."

Paul Maritz, VMWare chief executive officer and president

**

Doubtless there are some executives in IT suppliers who would call the Land of the Free the Catchment Area of the Disencumbered.

Links:

Dictionary of IBM jargon and acronyms

IBM's partner in £400m deal calls for less jargon - IT Projects blog, 2008

Plain English Campaign

The public sector is all too often "bloated, over-centralised, incompetent, and unaccountable", said the Liberal Democrat Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable in his keynote speech to the Liberal Democrat conference this week.

Cable is a former chief economist at Shell International. He said: "We've got to stop the gravy train of management consultancy in government; stop questionable government IT projects like that for the NHS and insist that procurement is from the cheapest, open source, and take an axe to the overgrown thickets of quango land."

Continue reading "Lib-dems' Vince Cable: stop questionable IT projects " »