Tony Collins's IT Projects Blog

The board of HM Revenue and Customs discussed a "PR offensive" in December 2007 to counter negative publicity weeks after two CDs went missing containing details on 25 million people, we've learned.

At a conference on spin, PR and government press officers last week, I was asked to speak briefly (a challenge).

I said I had noted over about five years an increasingly aggressive approach on the part of some government communications directors - with some honourable exceptions.

I said: "We often get supplied incorrect information. We know ministers are given incorrect information...the Prime Minister has even been given incorrect information about the NHS computer system". This is not usually the fault of press officers but is sometimes the responsibility of senior civil servants or advisers who brief ministers - or who brief press officers. 

Are poor communications contributing to Whitehall's IT failures?

Members of the House of Lords' Communications Committee took an interest today [16 July] in the quality of the Department of Health's communications over the NHS's National Programme for IT [NPfIT].

I was among several journalists who gave evidence to the committee on whether there has been any improvement in openness and trust between the media and government since the recommendations in a review report on government communications by Bob Phillis, former Chief Executive of the Guardian newspaper group. It's known as the Phillis Review.

The journalists questioned by the committee this morning included Nick Robinson, Chief Political Editor at the BBC; his equivalent at ITV Tom Bradby; Adam Boulton, Political Editor at Sky News; Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor at The Times; and Frank Gardner, Security Correspondent at the BBC.

But assurances to Parliament contrast with new uncertainties at NHS trusts

NHS staff at Bath were unable to answer 25% of phone calls for Choose and Book appointments within 5 minutes partly because they were training to use the Cerner Millennium system.  The Cerner go-live was later cancelled. 

The termination of Fujitsu's contract on the £12.7bn NHS IT scheme is a sign of the programme's strength, says a government minister.

The comments of the minister Baroness Thornton show that the departure of Fujitsu as a major supplier to the National Programme for IT [NPIT] has left unchanged the government's official line that the scheme is a success - although a report of the National Audit Office in May found that the core NPfIT software, a Care Records Service, will finish rolling out at least four years later than first planned.

And what was left out of UCL report on the Summary Care Record

Comment/analysis

A senior executive working for the NHS says that, for the National Programme for IT [NPfIT], the new health CIO Christine Connelly could be what cold water is to a man dying of thirst.

But her success will depend on her freedom of action and the frankness of the briefings she's given.

Serious problems cannot be tackled if they're not officially acknowledged to be serious; so one hopes that Connelly will be given the unadorned facts, and be allowed to acknowledge them publicly. This honesty at the top would be good for the NPfIT.

A virus has caused a "major incident" at Barts and The London NHS Trust where some networks were still unavailable today [Wednesday 19 November], nearly two days after the problem was discovered.

Computer Weekly has learned that a virus caused a plethora of spurious messages to overload the trust's network. Barts and The London said the virus had caused a "major incident".

1) Fujitsu to withdraw from the NPfIT - what happens now? 

Summary: Only a week ago a deal aimed at rescuing the NHS's National Programme for IT in the south of England seemed imminent... But at what one NHS official said was the "59th minute of the eleventh hour" Fujitsu informed Nicholson that it was withdrawing from the negotiations...All that the NHS had been relieved to negotiate in the contract re-set has evaporated... It will be of little comfort to the Department of Health and ministers that Computer Weekly warned them in 2002 and 2003 that the NPfIT was too ambitious to be achievable, and that the programme incorporated some of the biggest mistakes of the past. For this warning ministers and some parts of the media branded us doom-mongers.
We still hope our critics will prove us wrong. But it's six years since the NPfIT was announced. How much longer do they need?

2) SAP go-live leaves 18,000 unpaid bills at Europe's largest local authority - what went wrong

[Not the shortest of headlines]

Summary: 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.

The BBC reports that "ministers have been ordered to publish two reviews into the controversial ID Cards scheme after a four-year Freedom of Information Battle".

This is true. But the BBC doesn't mention that the two "gateway reviews" in question, on the ID Cards scheme, may never be published.

With alacrity, ministers and some senior civil servants regularly criticise the media for not checking facts properly. And now the Treasury has made a basic mistake in a formal report on the £7bn Defence Information Infrastructure.

On the first page of the part of the report which gives facts and figures on the DII, the Treasury attributes the project to the Ministry of Justice. It's an MoD project and has nothing to do with the Ministry of Justice.

Has the Government become lazy with checking the facts?

Twice this week I have put it to officials in the press office of the Treasury that the mistaken attribution of a £7bn project to the wrong ministry may cause people to question the accuracy of other parts of the report, in which the government gives assurances about progress on the scheme.

For some reason the Treasury has gone silent.

Link:

The Treasury's mistake - Computer Weekly's report

The flawed report in question

"The review [of the NHS IT scheme] makes clear that NHS IT will only succeed in improving patient care if information is held locally and centred on the patient.

"I hope this report helps redeem the national programme for IT from its current difficulties and transforms it for the benefit of patients and doctors alike."