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NHS Awards Contract to Microsoft
ChocLinux writes "Microsoft has won a £500m nine year contract to supply software to the NHS, a week after the OGC (the government procurement body) released a report describing Linux as a viable desktop alternative for the majority of government users."
NHS - National Health Service
OGC - Office of Government Commerce
£500 million - $924 million
wow, seems like you didnt do research first....
I cant speak for fedora core, only played with it a little bit, but debian...
even the installer for woody (debian stable) is not particulary hard to use, but the installer for sarge (debian testing) is incredibly easy to use. The installer for testing asks like 3 questions if you arent using it in "advanced" or "expert" mode (which I usually do). Testing runs with amazing stability, and the package repository that debian has makes installation of software a cinch.
why dont you try sarge and say again the terrible installation. While I'm not sure that linux is ready for the desktop yet (general users should not have to drop into command line every so often to get things done), it certainly is capable of doing what you wanted
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
IAAUD -- I Am A Usability Designer/HCI major.
Usability design is not merely throwing together a bunch of buttons, fields and text. It's a whole lot more than that and involves some quite well thought and established principles, both quantitative and qualitative.
The best designs are those that you do not notice and are really intuitive - there is a reason why usability experts get paid so much.
What I suggested was start something of an Opensource UI consulting group, where a bunch of usability experts could pitch in and help out the development of UIs and do some serious usability testing of interfaces.
If you _ever_ worked in any half-decent usability project, you'd realize that the time and effort that goes into the precise positioning of a button involves a whole lot more than meets the eye.
Don't worry, this is just a small part of the estimated £30 billion ($54b) that the NHS is going to blow on IT over the next few years. Money is no object when it comes to IT spending it seems.
/ ne ws/2004/10/12/nnhs12.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=
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I have worked with two programs for designing buildings (Finite Elements Method) - one was designed according to the Windows(tm) Interface Design Guidelines - working with this program was a nightmare, while the second was designed to naturally mirror the steps engineer takes - and it was real pleasure to work with it. However the second one could never qualify for a certificate of conformance to Windows GUI standards.
You can defy gravity... for a short time
I setup openoffice on my step-mom's PC (I was tired and bored of even pirating OXP due to the support calls I'd get from her,) and to this day she has no idea it's a different product than Microsoft Word. To you and me the differences are obvious, but she literally just thought I'd changed the appearance of Word.
Great points brought up in your post.
The current system is already based on MS products, and to try to replace that with Linux all at once would cost more than the half a billion pounds that the new Microsoft license costs.
Half a billion pounds - close to a billion dollars - that's a lot of money. That buys a lot of custom code. And you're sure about this, are you?
Of course you've got the numbers at hand to back it up, or you wouldn't have stated it so positively, would you.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
close the error dialog (which actually is an error monolog in most cases anyway).
Right, it's not a 'dialog'....it is what's known as a 'modal' window, meaning it floats over the action, as an interrupter/error/alert, not offering an alternate path according to the program's normal flow.
If it were designed to act and react the same as a 'dialog window' (representing a flow with choices to proceed), it would then present a similar impression to the user, and thus not serve the purpose intended, which is to act as an alert, to which you say 'OK', I got it, let's go back to work. (and then try something else...something else that is not tied to the halt brought about by the alert).
actually, judging from the numerous "warning to users of [x] - [y] doesnt compile under new kernel" posts everytime news of a new kernel gets posted to /., it seems to me that ms's backwards compatibility record is alot better than linux's
These arguments really aren't as compelling as they seem. If you split it up in to three levels...
Servers
I'm talking about everything from nationwide databases down to local hospital medical records, from DNS to authentication and filestore. These have always been a mixture of Netware and Unix servers at the higher end, with perhaps Windows boxes more recently for lower end stuff at smaller institutions. Retraining? Not really - the guys administrating these have a Netware and Unix background and have grudgingly accepted the creeping integration of MS systems - but probably wish the didn't have to.
Workgroups
By this I mean departmental filestores, local printer shares, document management (i.e. paper->electronic), specialist systems like storage of x-rays and ultrasounds. These have been Microsoft for a long time, but local admins have had to retrain to administer these every 2-4 years: the differences between 9x, NT, 2000 and XP are confusing enough that you cannot upgrade without either retraining or a significant period of time when things break and the admin has to sit and 'play' for a long time in order to fix it. Try training someone to create a network share and then set permissions on 9x, then sit them down in front of a 2000 or XP machine. A well-deployed system using webmin would not, in my opinion, require vastly more retraining that this and has the advantage that it's fully customisable for local or national rollouts.
Workstations
By this I mean the machines on people's desktops. As far as the user is concerned these are: a desktop, a 'start menu', a web browser, Word, Excel and Powerpoint. A Free/OSS solution can duplicate these and be no more different for the end user than XP is from 2000. Most bespoke software now runs from within a web browser; in fact, for the NHS, the supposedly failed maxim 'the browser is the OS' is actually true: everything from x-ray and biochemistry results to e-mail runs through a browser so is completely OS agnostic (well - I don't know what ActiveX controls are used..!).
NB I am a medical student working at one of London's largest hostpitals, so I have seen a cross-section of the NHS's IT in action. I am very disappointed that contracts are going to Microsoft because I'm sure there's no real need for it, and lots to be gained from switching. The NHS has the resources to have its own distro - say based on debian... but I'm just going glassey eyed now so I'll stop...
I mean, this is an organisation that only recently ditched X.400 email. Most of their practices are either paper-based, or use outmoded legacy systems that no-one understands anymore, because the coders responsible for their creation have been downsized long ago.
Hardly anything is designed with interoperability in mind ; I have personally resorted to screen-scraping chunks of VT100 terminal output because the other supplier had no handle on their ancient pathology system (and possibly didn't even have the sourcecode).
The resistance to change is enormous, and not without justification; the overall experience of NHS professionals of IT projects is bad.
And why? Healthcare is almost certainly one of the most challenging problem domains for IT projects in existence. Not only does it require the reliability and robustness of the banking industry, the informational complexity of the subject matter exceeds most other problem domains in human usage. Even the everyday things like the prescription and administration of drugs are horrendously complex ; the computerisation of a full medical record is something that I would describe as more challenging than a dozen Manhattan Projects.
In all, this is an area where the potential benefits are tremendous - even a small reduction of the estimated 70% of working time that a junior doctor spends doing paperwork instead of caring for patients would be an enormous boon. An hour a week saved per ward (very realistic even with basic electronic prescribing systems) essentially amounts to an average sized hospital getting a free doctor. In a cash-strapped, overburdened NHS, every little thing helps.
The potential for public benefit is enormous, and I would suggest that this should be a matter for public research. Instead of pouring these funds into the pockets of shareholders of enormous foreign companies, gov.uk should found a number of public projects, all bound over to interoperate freely, all open-source, and trial them.
But unlikely to happen, with the corporates back-handing government so effectively. With the recent funding changes for NHS IT, the funds are effectively placed in the hands of a very few huge monolithic corporations, who then decide who to subcontract to. As a result, smaller, more innovative companies are either shoved out of their niche, bought out, or try to compete on an equal footing with the giants and get crushed in the scrum. Money will haemorrhage into the pockets of foreign shareholders (iSoft, Schlumberger-Sema, etc.).
Yet another reason I'm glad I no longer work for the NHS.
Maybe the NHS Trust I work for, as part of the Web Development Team, is an exception, but Linux is making inroads here. For example, while our Intranet presently runs on IIS and we do have a large number of third party applications that require IIS, signficant areas (like our homegrown document publishing system) take advantage of having a Linux server in the mix.
Likewise, I often get involved with extracting useful data from huge data sources and Linux provides me with an efficient and effective way to do that. It's not just me, either. Our network still has a Novell backbone and that is of course moving towards Linux, thanks to SuSE.
It is, of course, a far cry from Linux on every desktop but the penguin is definitely in there, helping to get the work done.
Wulf
Soundcheck Poem: 1 2 was a racehorse and 1 1 was 1 2. 1 2 1 1 race and 1 1 1 1 2.
Just in case anyone has forgotten, here's a quick summary of recent major state-funded IT projects in the UK:
3 33 .htm
Immigration service document system (1999) - 18 months late, cost £77m, scrapped after 2 years because system couldn't cope with load
National Insurance system (1997) - delivered late, didn't work, caused a 14 million record backlog, delayed pensions payouts in 1999 and lost 5.2 million people's tax files
Passport office(1999): new system less efficient than what it replaced, caused a backlog of half a million applications, price of passport put up by 30% to fund development of replacement system
Air traffic control(1999): six years late, crashed three times in eight days after installation, complaints from controllers about difficulties with the system.
So, combine the system that created those blunders and Microsoft, a company with a terrible track record on reliability and honesty. I hope I don't need to go to hospital any time soon.
Source:http://www.computerweekly.com/Article102
The NHS has 9 years remaining of the largest IT project in the world today. The cost is somewhere in the region of £30 billion. The country has been split into different regions, each with a very large IT services company running the show (BT consulting, CSC, Accenture etc). Ther job is to integrate the old systems and bring on new ones to allow patient details to be shared nationally. It is a massive project, £500 million goes to Microsoft to ensure that they will support TODAYS operating systems to the end of the programme so they can get the hard job of getting it all up and working before the OS gets pulled out from underneith them. Once the system works they are in mantience mode and can port it onto the latest and greatest of the day. They have some very very old applications that only run in Windows inside of the NHS today, and they are part of the clincial application suite. The truth is that the NHS believes that Windows is unlikely to disappear in the next 9 years, I think that is a fair assumption myself. Unfortunately they have to think that long term since their software really is that complex. Besides it's all about value, redeveloping the current systems that do work will cost more than paying the licence fees.
How far do you think 200 projects of 5 staff each would go in the NHS?
A quick hint, the NHS employs somthing in excess of 1.3 million people.
Especially in IT Groups of 1 IT Person to 20-80 Users (Which is the normal ratio among companies) Linux fails to be as useful in that range, most companies at this range don't have the budget to pay for high quality system administrators. They often will train a tech with other specialties such as an engineer (Not computer engineering mind you) or someone else who is good at computers. Or you may also get a Jr. Administrator with a degree from a 2 year school or vocational training. Many people in this range my know about linux but don't really have the skills to lead a migration strategy to Linux. Plus for people in that Linux administration linux comes with plenty of good roadblocks, such as driver problems with hardware, a complicated file sharing system even samba. Setting up print servers can be a bit tricky as well (That is part of not having the right drivers). And finding and installing applications still need a lot of work. These are features that Windows handles quite well most companies from 20-80 just use windows servers as a File/Print Server and configuration these services only takes a right click and a couple of left clicks. While on Linux the person has to dig threw a bunch of docs to find the name of the service that they need to run. Then they will need to make sure they are up to date and then install it. Then configure it. To a non Linux users. Who would think a name like SAMBA would be for windows file sharing, LP for printing server (Yea SAMBA can do that too), or Apache is for Web Server. The Linux Interface is more then just a GUI. Even if there is a GUI application it may not be consistent with other ones. When you hit print on one application it will just print and other will give you print options, and the options are different for each program Making each application a program that you need to compleatly have to go threw.
In Large Companies where there is 1 Administrator for 100+ people that is where Linux/Unix shines. In such large scale Linux is quite useful because you have one well paid professional administrator who is savvy on what is happening in the tech world and easily adapts to changes. But most of the unix tools and remote administration is setup of large number of people w. Command Line interface speeding up a lot of processes that may need to be done with a lot of users and powerful scripting abilities a job that could take all day on a windows box can easily be done in 1/2 hour on Linux. Also with companies this size downtime is very expensive 1/2 hour down time with the average wages of $15 an hour * 150 is $1125 that is not including potential losses in sales. On Linux with the significantly less downtime any extra time it takes to administer a Linux system is still cheaper Heck $1125 would be considered a very good weekly wage for an Administrator. So having him spend 2 hours to fix a problem while keeping the system running vs. 1/2 hour of down time is much cheaper.
Also the company less then 10 then Linux is good too, the Set it up, and keep it running administration, usually done by a outside contractor and managed by them with the most computer savvy guy in charge of the most basic of administrations (make sure it hasn't crashed or power failure) In these sizes Linux is setup more as a server appliance then a true server and has a real cost advantage to the small company.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
1. Hospitals is what the NHS is looking at nowadays, Practices have solutions (actually we lead the world, but being typically British and understated don't make so much fuss about it)
From this end, the need is for ways of sending messages between systems, which IMHO FLOSS people are likely to be better at avoiding combinatorial explosions on a large scale than closed/proprietary ones are.
For hospitals there is VISTA, in which respect the US VA looks like a world-leader (and the three US gov services that use software suites based on the same core seem the closest analogues of the NHS that are readily available, with software.)
This produced a corps of maintainers and supporters www.hardhats.org (the history is well-worth reading) www.openvista.org who are a good bunch, the interesting example of one of the business models for making your crown jewels Open Source (GPL) with Sanchez' GT.M - on Sourceforge but mainly they do big iron stuff for banks.
So, there is an open (public domain, FOIA, with embellishments) hospital and patient management system and medical records system available.
(It has been translated into Finnish, German - Berlin Heart Institute) and Arabic (cancer hospital in Cairo) so there is a sporting chance it can be translated into English - there would be a fair few changes needed to fit into what we use instead of billing and the work the USN MC at San Diego was doing to extend it with Paediatric modules would need to be continued at least, but it is a plausibly promising system with a long pedigree)
VISTA has been ported by WorldVista to run on GT.M which of course runs on Linux. VISTA I am told was designed early on to move platforms, with a bit of alteration to a shim layer, and survived moves across different sorts of M and Unix (and I think VMS before that) so the alteration to run on GT.M and on Linux was not a large task (it looks like a big job to me, but Rick Marshall et al seemed quite happy with it - key points: there is experience, there are people, it was designed for it.)
There is a GUI for VISTA.
Thing about this - a GUI is not a good choice of interface for a proportion of tasks commonly done in healthcare organisations. SO having a GUI that goes alongside a functional plain terminal interface makes excellent sense.
The GUI is behind stuff in use in General Practice in the UK in its development at present, but is generically usable, and does not trail the state of the art in hospitals.
It is in Delphi, so if we use Windows on a desktop that is fine, I do not doubt that it could be ported to Kylix or otherwise moved to GUIs on newer operating systems as they take over.
Tools exist as Open Source and in production, to connect GT.M to SQL and to the Web, so a web interface is a reasonable approach. Jim Self in LA has done a lot of this rather impressively for the Veterinary Hospital he is at.
Others
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There is also the Care2Ex project which has a lot of energy going into it in Europe, and is a cross-border effort (a nice thing to see in the evolving European Confederacy) this is aimed at hospitals, the University Hospital of Geneva has been using its BolinOs system for Radiology and other records and administrative tasks for a while, and there are a stack of Practice systems in early stages. My source code is available, but in VIsual Basic, so possibly best left buried for now; but Horst Herb's GNUMed project based in Australia www.gnumed.org and www.gnumed.net are promising approaches to doing it all in a provably correct fashion - and hence are taking a long time.
The ontologists - a proper medical automation system requires a sound ontology to be based on or else you end up with a local curiosity - are agreed AFAICS that medical ontologies do not work unless they are Open SOurce and Open Licence (Galen which is one based in Manchester University in the middle of England) has a slogan "Making the impossible very difficult" which semes to accurately reflect the level of c
I work at local general NHS hospital in a seaside town east of London.
The most used aplication is office (Word Outlook excel) followed by the PAS (Patient Admin System) running on an HP alpha server. All the rest of the clinical systems run on Windows server 2000 or Sever 2003. Except the system that I am responcable for, it runs on RedHat 7.2
We went with the Linux option as we wanted to get away from working on Novell netware. Novell and NT (as we where on then) didn't work together well. Our supplier agreed to do the port (most of the sites are on *nix so it simplifys things for them). Support for the Linux box is a bit thin basicly I know a bit and one other bloke who knows more are responcible for it.
However running this particular app on linux is great, it runs about 100 times faster (real test done to conferm) and getting access is a doddle from any computer in the hospital.
Do I wish we used opensource more? Well I can't see many clinical apps going over as there just isant the demand for it at the momment and to be honist nurseing staff are very resistant to change.
Oooh 'eck DM!
I believe it was Alias PortfolioWall. I've seen it used primarily with gestures, which never seemed to work well. People would drag right for the next slide, but get so lost that an assistant at the keyboard had to help. The guy on TV stuck to simple button pushing and map zooming, which was effective.
Actually, it got there by Marketing, pure and simple.
The workgrouping was done by Novell servers, by and large, well before MS was anywhere in that league.
That was tried and true tech, so, by your argument, it should have held that market.
MS advertised to the management structure (not the tech staff) that anyone could administer an NT server. So, many companies took this challenge, and stripped out the Novell servers to put in NT, and got rid of the old Novell admins, to try and save money having basic staff administer NT.
When things went awry (which they usually did, as general staff didn't really understand what was going on, just hoped clicking buttons would give the right answer), MS informed them that anyone could administer an NT box at the basic level, but if you really want it to run properly, you need to get an MCSE certified Admin. For the same price you'd had your old Novell Admin.
Now, the choice is, going back to your old system and trying to rehire admins you've got rid of, or cutting your losses, and staying with the new system.
Unsurprisingly, people were unwilling to pay loads of cash for no perceived extra benefit (both systems need admins.
The switch originally came about because of a perceived benefit that wasn't actually there. But once it was made, and discovered, it was too late to go back.
So, if Linux needs to do the same as MS to get into the market, it needs to turn round and say in adverts that you'd never need to admin it, it'll run magically and even make you your coffee and polish your car, do everything that Windows does and have a rep drop round every so often to take your managers out to lunch.
MS made a lot of claim that almost every tech that read it exclaimed "Bullshit".
They used adverts with wording that skirted on the edge of allowable, hyped vaporware that never appeared (or worked) and so on.
That being said, MS were a boon in getting computers to be a home commodity item, and standardising on the PC. They were great when they were actually doing something new.
Now, they're pretty much resting on laurels, and using Lawyers to maintain the business base and stifle any competition, and certainly prevent anyone doing what they did.
If anyone else now made the claims that MS did back then, I can guarantee they'd be sued out of existence.