Tony Collins's IT Projects Blog

The Times reports on its front page today [1 February 2008] that the Treasury is to review spending on government IT projects "in an effort to halt a series of scandals as Gordon Brown’s ambitions to computerise public services were dealt another blow yesterday".

A blog reader asks:

"Do you know if anyone has done a report on the following questions? Shouldn't they have?

1. How many government computer projects intended to provide nationwide cover have been delivered on time and/or to budget and/or perform roughly to spec)?

Did you know that the waterfall model is as popular as agile? That only 7% of software testers keep track of the cost of testing? Or that 12% of software testers prefer classical music? How does the salary of software testers compare to others in their job and age range? What percentage of tools end up as shelfware?

- The lead for Birmingham City Council's IT-based transformation programme said of the unpaid invoices after go-live with a SAP-based financial system:

"What has led to a larger backlog than we originally anticipated is a combination of all these factors. We probably anticipated every one of them but what we didn’t take into account was the cumulative effect."

**

The lead for an IT transformation scheme at Europe’s largest local authority, Birmingham City Council, has expressed “regret” after the troubled go-live of a SAP-based system left a backlog of more than 18,000 unpaid invoices.

Baliffs have been called to at least one Birmingham City Council site, some suppliers have withdrawn goods and services, and employees claim that staff have used their own money to buy food and other supplies for children in their care.

Analysis

When advisers to ministers write replies to Parliamentary questions they have no legal duty to be candid. Within reason they can say what they like. So for them answering written Parliamentary questions may be no more challenging than playing tennis with the net down.

Indeed, when asked about the NHS's National Programme for IT [NPfIT], ministerial advisers can use Parliamentary replies to make light of the concerns of clinicians and others. And this is what happened when Worthing MP Peter Bottomley put a question about Cerner sites to Ben Bradshaw, who's the latest in a series of ministers to be put in charge of the NPfIT.

To keep secret the Downing Street papers on the NHS's National Programme for IT [NPfIT] the Cabinet Office climbed a succession of legal steps.

For three years the Cabinet Office put up legal arguments against our request under the Freedom of Information Act to publish the Downing Street papers on the NHS's National Programme for IT [NPfIT] - so why has it suddenly confirmed it is to release them?

NHS Connecting for Health, which runs part of the NHS National Programme for IT [NPfIT] has confirmed in a letter to staff that Richard Granger, former head of health IT, has left, and that an Informatics Review is underway. Granger left on 31 January 2008.

"There is a lot of information where there might be little expenditure, but very little information where there is a lot of expenditure"

This is quote attributed by the Health Service Journal to Tom Denwood's team. Denwood has been appointed Programme Director for the National Programme Office at NHS Connecting for Health.

Now that a memorandum of understanding between Fujitsu and the NHS has expired the two sides have reverted to the original contract - which both view as obsolete.

The timetables and products set out in the contract are seen as irrelevant, even obstructive, superseded by changes in the NHS.

Cabinet ministers come and go, as do prime ministers, and heads of departments. So who will actually be responsible for ID cards or the NHS's National Programme for IT? Nobody. Thank you to Brian Sherwood Jones for providing this excellent definition of responsibility, from the US Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.

The “Downing Street papers” released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal the names of some of those who attended a meeting, chaired by Tony Blair, which spawned the NHS’s £12.4bn National Programme for IT [NPfIT].

By the end of next month (March 2008) just over £4bn of centrally-directed funds will have been spent on the NHS's National Programme for IT. The figure includes money spent by NHS Connecting for Health which runs part of the NPfIT but excludes spending allocated locally.

About £600m was spent in 2004/5, about £1bn in 2005/6, £1.1bn in 2006/7 and a projected £1.32bn by April 2008.

Summary of article

- Tony Blair tried repeatedly to shorten the time to make health records available online, which would have made them available to patients shortly before the 2005 general election

- Original timetable for NHS National Programme for IT [NPfIT] is revealed in Downing Street papers released to Computer Weekly under the Freedom of Information Act, after our three-year campaign for their disclosure

- Downing Street meeting in February 2002 gave birth to the UK government's biggest IT investment, but no minutes were taken

The National Audit Office is at a draft report stage after a second investigation into the NHS's National Programme for IT [NPfIT]. It's expected the National Audit Office will publish its second report on the NPfIT by May 2008.

Among the Downing Street papers released to Computer Weekly by the Cabinet Office under the Freedom of Information Act is a letter which indicates that the NHS IT programme was agreed largely before a meeting of Tony Blair on 18 February 2002. It seems that Blair's main influence on the programme was, initially at any rate, to compress the projected timescales.

The letter is from Simon Stevens, then No 10 health adviser. He writes to Tony Blair to brief him before a meeting on NHS IT at Downing Street. The meeting is to be chaired by Blair and attended by representatives of two IT suppliers, Cabinet Ministers, policy advisers, and health experts.

The letter leaves the casual reader in little doubt that a plan for a "step change" in NHS IT has been all but decided and that one of the biggest remaining challenges is speeding up progress.

Among the Downing Street papers released by the Cabinet Office under the Freedom of Information Act was the Department of Health’s briefing to Tony Blair. The briefing was given to Blair four days before an NHS IT seminar at Downing Street on 18 February 2002 which spawned the National Programme for IT – NPfIT.

Colin Beveridge of the Better Practice Forum has sent these comments on our coverage of the Downing Street papers on the National Programme for IT – NPfIT. His comments refer also to some other government IT initiatives.

“Well done to CW for finally extracting this information, which confirms only too well what we have known from the outset: the initiative was positioned as an IT project, rather than the Information Systems initiative that was really required.

On a planned IT-led modernisation of the NHS, Tony Blair said at a meeting at Downing Street on 18 February 2002 that there were three main issues:

- to ensure the NHS had the right systems
- how these were implemented locally by managers and clinicians
- how we increase the pace of development.

The Government’s CIO Council is planning a “green” strategy for the public sector which includes cutting tens of thousands of printers, buying PCs by how little power they use as well as price, and keeping equipment up to two years longer.

This is the set of papers supplied by the Cabinet Office after my request under the Freedom of Information Act in January 2005 for details of a meeting at Downing Street in February 2002 to discuss a modernisation of the NHS based on IT.

A separate set of documents (1.3MB) discloses the Cabinet Office's legal arguments against a ruling of the Information Commissioner that the Downing Street papers should be released.

Links:

Irrational exuberance over clinical IT

Openness and accountability

Richard Granger leaves NHS

Is the Freedom of Information Act any use?

The brave and campaigning Birmingham MP John Hemming is continuing to use an online forum to defend the city council and its SAP-based “Voyager” system.

For nearly a month Hemming has regularly posted defensive comments to “The Stirrer”, a forum that’s popular with employees of Birmingham City Council.

Hemming is a Liberal Democrat MP where the local council - the largest local authority in Europe - is run by a coalition of the Tories and Lib-dems. The Lib-dems want to maintain a reputation for competence in helping to run some local councils.

Researchers at Cambridge University Computer Laboratory say they have shown that chip and pin machines are not as secure as the banking industry claims.

They claim that two widely-deployed models of pin entry devices fail to protect customers' card details and pins adequately. BBC 2's Newsnight on 26 February 2008 broadcast a short film on the findings of the Cambridge researchers.

News analysis

It went largely unnoticed but the minister for the NHS’s National Programme for IT, Ben Bradshaw, has confirmed that data on a central database of millions of confidential health records will be made available to police where there is an “overriding public interest”.

The phrase “overriding public interest” is not defined.