Tony Collins's IT Projects Blog

A reader has responded to a blog post on the Ministry of Defence's £7bn project to build a Defence Information Infrastructure [DII] by making several good points. The points apply to government projects in general. 

They focus on the MoD's Parliamentary answer to MP Mike Hancock which put the cost of the Mod's DII contract with EDS at about £2.3bn. At the time the MoD knew that the project as a whole - outside of EDS's contract - would cost at least £5.8bn - but the Ministry didn't tell Hancock. This is the reader's comment followed by the MoD's response: 

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.

When the government awarded the contract to ETS to process and mark SATs, Whitehall's press release was, as to be expected, full of praise for the supplier and the procurement process.

But the press release showed how the government, in awarding multimillion contracts, can be not merely at arm's length but miles away.

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.

The writer of a respected US healthcare IT blog has questioned the credibility of a claim by a UK minister, Baroness Thornton, that Fujitsu's leaving the NHS's National Programme for IT [NPfIT] is a sign of the scheme's strength.

HIStalk was following up our article on a short debate in the House of Lords on the NPfIT.   

HIStalk says:

"A UK government minister with a glass-half-full perspective says that the roster of vendors pulling out of NPfIT, most recently Fujitsu, is actually great news. 'The fact that Fujitsu's contract was terminated is in fact a sign of the programme's strength. The programme is still on course and our contractors are not paid until they have delivered. In that sense, no money has been lost.' Expressing a preference to keep the project money rather than have vendors meet deliverables suggests that NPfIT was a bad idea in the first place, not that politicians are the best source of astute analysis."

Links:

Minister hails Fujitsu's leaving NPfIT as a sign of strength - Computer Weekly

Minister's claim about NPfIT and Fujitsu doesn't take account of trust uncertainties - IT Projects blog

Fujitsu to withdraw from the NPfIT - what happens now? - website of Richard Bacon MP, quoting Computer Weekly

Swindon GP Gavin Jamie, who runs the Quality and Outcomes Framework database website, writes in response to an entry on this IT Projects blog about NHS Connecting for Health's having achieved its 10 millionth "booking" on the NPfIT Choose and Book system:

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.

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. 

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".