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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."
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.
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 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.