| | By Mick James
More problems emerged
with the Government's
troubled Connecting to
God programme yesterday,
as it was revealed that
another group of master
masons had walked away
from an unfinished
cathedral, citing
problems with the
controversial Gothic
architecture that
underpins the scheme.
Critics say the scheme
to provide a large scale
place of worship in
every city in the land
is fundamentally flawed
and that the nation's
spiritual needs would be
much better served by
upgrading the country's
existing network of
parish churches using
tried and tested
Romanesque
principles...
Sorry, where was I?
Oh yes, trying to think
of something positive to
say about the latest
developments in the
Connecting for Health
project. As you're all
probably aware by now,
Fujitsu has become the
latest supplier to walk
away from the project,
citing irreconcilable
differences over the
renegotiation of its
contract and joining
Accenture in the sulky
corner. Fujitsu is
understandably reticent
about the size of the
hit it has taken by
doing this, but the
losses are clearly in
the hundreds of
millions.
They can't say they | |
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| | a clear principle that
no-one would be rewarded
for failure. And it's
that frank embrace of
the concept of failure
that makes the project
remarkable in my view.
Critics are always
asking why government IT
projects fail. It's a
complicated question,
but the simple answer is
that government IT
projects really are the
cathedrals of our day.
No-one's built this
high, this fast, this
way before. It's obvious
that at some point large
lumps of masonry will
start landing on
people's heads, the
question really is –
whose head?
Totting up the cost
of all this is pretty
meaningless exercise.
The much touted figure
of £12.7bn is a
guesstimate, which
refers to a massively
diverse range of
spending, much of which
would have happened
anyway. It comes out at
£200 a head, which when
you think about it isn't
much – Bill Gates can
get that much out of you
just by bolting a new
front end on Windows
(writes a disgruntled
Vista user).
Whatever the final
cost of the system is
announced to be, it will
be an equally notional
figure. Will it take
into account suppliers’
losses? Not that that
will stop people
dividing it by a nurse's
salary or the cost of | |
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| | building a hospital and
cry "Shame!".
But it will be big,
because the NHS is big.
Did you know that NHS
employees drink four
billion cups of tea a
year, using roughly the
same amount of water as
it is lost annually to
pipe leakages in the
whole Thames Valley
region? (I'm not making
this up.)
Could it be done
cheaper? After all we
already have the
internet, and you can
even upload your own
medical records to
Google Health if you're
bold enough. I'm sure
something could have
been cobbled together
for a lower cost, but
just as big things cost
a lot, so do lots of
little things. Tot up
all the loose change and
foreign currency lying
around in people's
houses and you've
probably got a billion
quid right there. That's
enough to build five
hospitals or employ
50,000 nurses! (Again,
I'm not making this up
but I might as well be.)
There are a lot of
genuine advantages to
breaking big systems
down into smaller chunks
but also a cynical one,
in that it's much harder
to work out a total
cost. Is £200 too much
to ask for a little bit
of rigour in the data
that might inform a
decision on whether to
slice you open? In many
ways it is to the NHS' | |
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| | credit that it has
actually bitten the
bullet on this one, and
tried to impose order on
chaos. One of the
genuine problems with
the project has little
to do with IT design but
the high degree of
autonomy the NHS allows
its constituent parts.
In fact, the system
may never be fully
comprehensive for these
reasons, but the process
of cathedral building
goes on. Soon a rival
spire will emerge, known
as the National Identity
Register. (By the way,
has anyone mentioned to
the Government that
there's a considerable
overlap between the
groups "patients" and
"citizens"? They could
have introduced the
whole ID card scheme by
the back door as a
"biometric health card",
to be carried at all
times.)
We'll probably never
really know what these
schemes will end up
costing or what the
ultimate benefits are.
But in many ways these
are the wrong questions
to be asking about them.
They're cathedrals,
monuments to the
centralising power and
philosophy that builds
them. The day
governments stop doing
this kind of thing will
be the day they vote
themselves out of
existence.
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| | weren't warned. Former
NHS IT chief Richard
Granger did, after all,
say that he would "hold
suppliers' feet to the
fire until the smell of
burning flesh is
overpowering" when
negotiating the
contracts. Then, that he
would manage his
suppliers like a "team
of huskies" shooting the
lame ones and feeding
them to the other dogs.
At which point some
suppliers said "Torture,
death and cannibalism?
Not for me, thanks."
While presumably others
said "Sorry what was
that again? Something
about keeping us all
warm and well-fed? Never
mind, where do I sign?"
It's worth labouring
this point because for
all the hand-wringing
and cries of "Why can't
we get government IT
right?" the NHS
contracts were anything
but starry-eyed.
Personally I think they
went a bit over the top
in leading too many
suppliers to withdraw,
narrowing the choice.
But the programme did
manage to shift a
massive amount of risk
onto the shoulders of
suppliers, and laid down | |
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