What is it with government and IT projects?

[scorza]

Open Source != free of licenses (nor costs associated with it). Also when "license fees" are mentioned, it typically means support costs. That doesn't come free no matter what license model you subscribe to.

Thanks for stating the obvious there.

 

[Dj_Jestar]

Uhuh. Then why did you bother posting what you did to imply that there are no longer any license fee costs?

 

[Abraham]

Of course there are people that will make it more complicated than it needs to be, that is why they managed to waste £12 billion in 8 years. I think there are probably people employed to do exactly that. Take a simple requirements and turn it in to a 8 year £12 billion hole.

It's not a simple requirement, and no matter how much you say it it still won't be.

From the sounds of things it was exactly what i said, an IT infrastructure/system to store patient records and make them accessible at hospitals. Something a private healthcare has already been doing for many years.

Something all healthcare has been doing for decades, like I said, it's not about a product for them to use, it's about tying up all of it so it works together. There's very little room for process changes because of the scales involved, but even given that I'd expect 25%+ of the budget to have been spent on process changes and enabling the 1000ish NHS trusts disparate systems to communicate with each other.

Sure there may have been more projects like eprescribing but no way they needed to spend that much money. I bet if it was truly audited it would uncover massive fraud and corruption. Companies getting 100 millions and doing nothing for it. Then everyone involved just makes up excuses when the whole thing fails.
<snip>. Of course i don't know the true requirements of what they were after but I know enough about IT to know that £12 billion is simply put, fraud.

There are a couple of explicit examples of money being poorly spent as part of NPfIT, there's been several mentions of iSoft, who did a lot of spending money before they had anything to deliver, mostly spent on trying to get them more business. I think the scale of the project is what really demands the cost though, I'm sure it could have been done more efficiently and effectively, but you'd still be looking at several billion, as it stands it's *only* £12m per trust, which probably doesn't balance out as being too far off.

As a greenfield project to provide all of the country with a single IT infrastructure for healthcare, yes you could cut a lot of that expense, but you'd then have to migrate, integrate and change process of upwards of 1000 different systems and implementations, which is going to make your costs skyrocket. The costs aren't just producing a software solution, but making it work with minimal disruption to existing and ongoing practices.

 

[thep02]

Corruption, aiding fellow travellers, lack of knowledge, hidden agendas, many snouts in the trough and over promoted individuals in key positions all coupled together result in the inability to get any project through anywhere near budget or serviceability by the British government.

 

[Terrier_Jimlad]

To be fair, the NHS Spine service which hosts the main patient database has recently been re-implemented using a host of open source products, so licence costs don't have to be an issue. Still costs more than £100k though

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/10/nhs_drops_oracle_for_riak/

The Spine to Spine2 driver was down to the Oracle EWA for the NHS coming to a close, you'll find that pretty much all trusts, given their financial situation, had to rip out anything Oracle.

I was given a £5.2m cost from Oracle, reduced to £1.8m if paid by xxx date. I spent about £100k replacing our entire Oracle apps - needless to say we saved a lot of money and i'm glad the rest of the NHS did the same and stuck it to Oracle. Oracle + VMWare = bad times

Looks like CCS are about to reinstate the Microsoft EWA though