Tony Collins's IT Projects Blog

The Taxpayers' Alliance claims that IT projects have contributed about £11bn to a total overspend of £19bn on government projects.

Will it be any different under the Tories?

One answer is that there are at least four certainties in the life of any UK or US government:

1) Over-optimism

2) A willingness to believe inspirational thought-leaders in the private sector who say that, yes, complexity in government can be simplified with technology (as opposed to changing the way things are done)

3) An insistence by ruling politicians and senior civil servants that what seems to be an IT-based disaster is, in fact, a success

4) What can be covered up will be

Continue reading "Four IT project certainties - whatever the government" »

Patients who received a letter from NHS Hull saying that their medical records had been viewed without authorisation by a former employees have left comments on their local news media's websites.

Some of them say in effect: so what?

"So many other patients' had their records accessed, including me, but you don't see us crying to the Hull Daily Fail," said one.

Continue reading "Comments of patient "victims" of smartcard security breach" »

It's interesting that NHS Hull promptly answered all my questions about the breach of smartcard security until I mentioned the use by the trust of NPfIT systems.

Then all went quiet.

Continue reading "NPfIT politics and the NHS smartcard security breach" »

Matthew Swindells, who led a Whitehall review of NHS informatics, is the new head of the British Computer Society's Health Informatics Forum. He is managing director for health at consultancy Tribal and has been NHS chief information officer.

Dr Glyn Hayes had successfully chaired the BCS's Health Informatics Forum. He led a review on NHS IT for the Tories and more recently has sat on a medical advisory board set up by iSoft, one of the NPfIT suppliers.

Continue reading "Ex-NHS CIO is new head of BCS's Health Informatics Forum" »

[Summary of article on ComputerWeekly.com homepage]:

An NHS trust at the forefront of work on the £12.7bn NHS IT scheme has called in police after a breach of smartcard security compromised the confidentiality of hundreds of electronic records.

Patients in Hull have expressed their dismay that an unauthorised NHS employee has accessed their confidential records; and the local primary care trust, NHS Hull, says it is "shocked" at the breach of security by a member of staff who has since left.

Details of the breach emerged as health officials in London were, in an unrelated event, telling journalists about the start of a roll-out of electronic records across London, as part of the National Programme for IT [NPfIT].

Continue reading "Police investigate NHS smartcard security breach as SCR launches in London" »

Mike O'Brien, the minister in charge of the NPfIT NHS IT scheme, has replied to questions put by Conservative MP Richard Bacon who sits on the Public Accounts Committee. These are his questions and O'Brien's answers:

Continue reading "NPfIT minister reveals Lorenzo costs and payments to BT and CSC" »

The collective memory of some departments is short. Few keep records of IT failures that pre-date the general election of 1997.

So officials at the Department for Work and Pensions say they cannot recollect the aborted "Camelot" system in the 1970s to computerise welfare benefits, or its successor, the £2.6bn "Operational Strategy" in the 1980s, which was set up to give people information on all their entitlements "at the touch of a button". Opstrat, as it was called, cost three times the original estimate and the DWP has yet to integrate its welfare benefit systems.

Indeed the Department is working on its "third attempt" at integrating welfare IT systems, said the National Audit Office in a report earlier this year.

Below are excerpts from a report of the Committee of Public Accounts, 21 June 1984.

The fact that the PAC published the report 25 years ago, and has been saying much the same thing in numerous reports on IT-based change projects ever since, suggests to me that the assumption of a happy ending and a concomitant underestimation of complexity, potential problems, costs and risks is congenital to large IT projects within central government.

Continue reading "What MPs said about State IT projects in 1984" »

A council has ended a contract for the disposal of its used computers and plans to make the machines available to local residents, particularly the disadvantaged.

Shouldn't all organisations/IT decision-makers be doing this?

All credit to Stephen Hilton who is leading Bristol City Council's social inclusion work. He gave details of the council's plans at a social inclusion panel at the G2010 government IT conference.

Full article on ComputerWeekly.com

The Ministry of Justice has begun a consultation on giving the Information Commissioner's Office the power to levy penalties of up to £500,000 for the most serious breaches of the Data Protection Act.

The most serious breaches are made by government departments and agencies. So are there provisions for deterrent sanctions against them for serious breaches? Nope.

Consultation papers - Ministry of Justice website

500k fines for data protection breaches? - ComputerWeekly.com

Missing HMRC CDs - what went wrong and lessons for NPfIT and ID Cards - IT Projects Blog

 

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, sees similarities between the malfunctioning NPfIT and the exploratory brushstrokes of Cézanne,  the French painter whose works grew out of a slow process of refinement, trial and error.

The comparison is, perhaps, the greatest success of the NPfIT. 

It may be worth noting that, at one point in his career, Cézanne, because of a shortage of models, was forced to design from his imagination.

Links:

Malcolm Gladwell: why the NHS computer programme is like Paul Cezanne - The Times

The problem with the NPfIT is the "NP" bit - Yorkshire ranter

IT procurements in the south set for January - Techmarketview