Tony Collins's IT Projects Blog

Four IT project certainties - whatever the government

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:58:00 +0000

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

Comments of patient "victims" of smartcard security breach

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:00:00 +0000

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.

NPfIT politics and the NHS smartcard security breach

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:53:01 +0000

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.

Ex-NHS CIO is new head of BCS's Health Informatics Forum

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:36:00 +0000

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.

Police investigate NHS smartcard security breach as SCR launches in London

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:39:00 +0000

[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].

NPfIT minister reveals Lorenzo costs and payments to BT and CSC

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:12:00 +0000

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:

What MPs said about State IT projects in 1984

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:40:19 +0000

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.

Council to re-use old IT - a social inclusion exemplar

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:50:41 +0000

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

500k fines for data protection breaches - but what about Govt breaches?

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:44:00 +0000

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

The NPfIT and Cézanne compared

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:53:00 +0000

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

iSoft says Bury Lorenzo go-live takes healthcare to "new level"

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:50:00 +0000

iSoft has announced in Australia -where it's based - that its latest version of Lorenzo, as installed at NHS Bury, "takes the efficient provision of healthcare in England to a new level".

The go-live more than doubles the number of Lorenzo users in England. NHS Bury and iSoft say that the go-live supports "almost" 600 users.

Version RC 1.9 is the first patient administration system under the Lorenzo banner.

Below is iSoft's announcement - which three times mentions the supplier's support for CSC, the NPfIT local service provider for England except the south.

It's conceivable that there is a little tension between CSC and iSoft and over iSoft's decision to sell Lorenzo directly to trusts in the south. Elsewhere in England, Lorenzo is sold through CSC.

Biggest IT industry failures?

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:36:00 +0000

... according to Jack Wallen of TechRepublic. [I don't agree with all of them - there were 119 comments on the article at last count

Windows Vista
NeXT
BeOS
Cobalt Qube
Y2K
MP3
Richard Stallman
WordPerfect
IPv6
Mesh networks

Full article

Anatomy of an IT disaster

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:58:00 +0000

Below are key parts of today's Public Accounts Committee report on the C-Nomis report. Much the same could be said of other big IT-based change programmes such as the NPfIT.

Some will say plus ça change but some IT disasters are exposing near anarchy, and potentially worse, in some corners of government administration.

How not to develop a project

"We have taken evidence on cases of poor decision taking and weak project management on many occasions. The same lessons have still not been learnt, making the management by the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) of C-Nomis a prime example of how not to develop a project."

Beware US software which needs much rework for the UK

"From the outset those responsible failed to identify the modifications required to the
software to meet NOMS' needs. The Home Office assessed it as broadly meeting the needs of the prison service, but as a North American product the software needed to be adapted for UK legislation.

"In respect of probation, there was a serious failure to understand the magnitude and cost of the changes which would be needed, even though the Home Office recognised at the start that the software met only 29% of the needs of the Probation Service. The estimated cost of developing the C-NOMIS application rose from £99m in 2005 to £254m by July 2007 due to customisation."

Did senior civil service managers bend the truth?

"The programme team running C-NOMIS reported that the programme was delivering on time and to budget, when it was not."

"In May 2005, as part of the C-NOMIS project approval process, the Home Office's
Programme and Project Management Support Unit certified the C-NOMIS project as not suffering from the eight common causes of project failure. Subsequent analysis of the underlying causes of the costs increases and delay by the National Audit Office indicated that C-NOMIS suffered from four of the eight common causes of project failure in full and three in part."

Over-optimism and the culture of good news

"Planning for the C-NOMIS project was unrealistic, in part because of an over
optimistic 'good news' culture which was not challenged with sufficient rigour by
senior management with in-depth knowledge of the business."

"The first Senior Responsible Owner and other senior people involved with C-NOMIS demonstrated a remarkable lack of insight and rigour, coupled with naivety and over-optimism."

NPfIT Lorenzo - £57,500 per user so far

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:50:35 +0000

The NPfIT minister Mike O'Brien revealed in a Parliamentary reply yesterday that there are 174 regular users of the Lorenzo 1 system at five NHS trusts.

The Lorenzo system is supplied by services company CSC and software supplier iSoft under the National Programme for IT [NPfIT].

This number of users will increase when NHS Bury goes live with Lorenzo next month. But MPs are still likely to consider the number very low given the cost to taxpayers of the system.

Taking O'Brien's figure of 174 together with £2m as a conservative figure for the cost per site of installing the Lorenzo system, the cost per user of the system is about £57,000.

If you take the cost per concurrent user - 19 according to the minister - the cost per user rises to about £526,000.

It may also be worth bearing in mind that two of the five trusts have been live with Lorenzo for more than a year.

About £4bn in total has been spent centrally on the NPfIT and ministers have trumpeted the Care Records Service as the main aim of the programme.

Lorenzo is one of two main NPfIT Care Records Service products to be delivered to trusts in England, the other being Cerner's Millennium.

Lorenzo was due to have been delivered several years ago under the NPfIT. A typical NHS trust has about 1,000 to 5,000 users of its hospital administration system.

This is O'Brien's reply in full, based on a question by Conservative MP Richard Bacon, a member of the Public Accounts Committee:

Minister renews faith in Cerner and Lorenzo - but "challenges remain"

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:27:00 +0000

Junior Treasury minister Sarah McCarthy-Fry, the Exchequer Secretary, has affirmed her Government's faith in iSoft's Lorenzo and the Cerner Millennium software, though she added that "challenges remain".

She was responding to MP Richard Bacon during a debate in the House of Commons on the work of the Public Accounts Committee. Bacon had expressed his concerns about the lateness of Lorenzo and the "havoc" caused by the Cerner systems at some hospitals.