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Abandoned UK National Health Service IT System Has Cost $16bn... So Far
dryriver writes with news of yet another major software project gone awry. From the article: "An abandoned National Health Service (NHS) patient record system has so far cost the taxpayer nearly £10bn, with the final bill for what would have been the world's largest civilian computer system likely to be several hundreds of millions of pounds higher, according a highly critical report from parliament's public spending watchdog. MPs on the public accounts committee said final costs are expected to increase beyond the existing £9.8bn because new regional IT systems for the NHS, introduced to replace the National Programme for IT, are also being poorly managed and are riven with their own contractual wrangles. When the original plan was abandoned the total bill was expected to be £6.4bn."
Unfortunately, what we're seeing is a preview of what I expect with Obamacare.
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Yeah, It certainly is absurd. I can't even imagine it if you factor in the hardware to run it on. Assuming you spent half of it on hardware, you'd have $8 billion worth of hardware (which is just plain ridiculous). You now have $8 billion left over to pay people, assuming each person working on the project makes $100,000 a year, for $8b, you can get 80,000 person years. The project was launched in 2002, so even counting 12 years, that means they could have hired 6666.667 (nice how that works out) people to work on the project.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I cannot fathom any software system costing that much.
Padding... The money was/is being stolen, looting the treasury.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The funny thing is: this horribly wasteful government system is still about twice as efficient as the perfectly organised private system in the US!
I cannot fathom any software system costing that much
It cost that much because that was the amount of money available to pay for it. If there had only been £5Bn in the budget, the project proposals would (magically!) have cost that much - and would STILL offered the same results. And exactly the same final outcome would have been proposed if the budget had been doubled. Success or failure was not a function of the budget, nor of the requirements. Even back in the 2000's when this was still a comparatively young project, I was asked to work on it. I spent a day with some of the project people and knew even than that it didn't stand a chance of ever going live. Mainly due to the intransigence of the NHS workers, especially the doctors and consultants (who all believe the only function of the NHS is to keep them employed - any resulting healthcare is merely a bonus).
The sorts of companies who bid for this work, just like defence contractors, are masters at configuring their projects to consume all available resources for a constant output. The problem is that they are much better at negotiating than government employees (who have no personal investment in the project) and more highly motivated, what with their contuned salaries, bonuses and commissions.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I cannot fathom any software system costing that much.
It is easy to fathom if you look at how the program was structured. All the incentives were inverted: nearly everyone involved actually benefited from cost overruns (the contractors got more money, the bureaucrats had the prestige of managing more resources, and the politicians had more patronage to dispense). There was no accountability (no one is being disciplined or fined). There is not even any political fallout because the blame is smeared out over multiple administrations (Conservatives can blame Labour for starting the project, while Labour can blame the Tories for mismanaging the implementation). It is like it was designed to fail. A decade from now you will be reading about some other project that failed in the exact same way, for the exact same reasons.
Actually, if you put 6k+ people on a project, I'd fully expect it to go nowhere.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.