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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
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.
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.
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.