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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."
That makes the $1B Ontario (Canada) government spent in E-health for nothing a great deal to me.
I cannot fathom any software system costing that much. I imagine even the people over at SAP are going, "Dayum!"
Proverbs 21:19
My father was contracted a few years ago as a consultant to help update the NHS's infrastructure. After a year working there for a year he ended his contract. He said that it was impossible to get anything done because the higher ups didn't listen to the engineers and project managers on the teams. There was also a lot of unmotivated and lazy people working on the teams that slowed everything down. Politics also played a big part and people cared more about keeping their comfy job that never really had an end date than finishing the project.
Thank God that here in the U.S. we're protected from this kind of system. Sure, getting sick here without insurance can bankrupt you, drive you into lifelong debt, etc. But at least we don't have to put up with any red tape in our health care system!
America, America, God shed his grace on theeeeee!
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
So, with all that money spent,
how can we, the taxpayer, get the
code open sourced ??
Usually when I hear about a doomed IT project, I share my optimism with other colleagues:
this means that we still have plenty of IT job offers guaranteed by these failing managements.
I'd be more than happy to save them a lot of money by abandoning a similar system for a mere tenth of that amount!
Dont forget PRINCE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRINCE2)
Before all the anti-government bozos show up to point and laugh:
However, 10 years on CSC has still not delivered the software and "not a single trust has a fully functioning Lorenzo care records system". This failure, the report said, was "extraordinary", while CSC was accused of a "failure to deliver" and "poor performance".
Yeah, that's a private corporation failing to perform/deliver. They're too busy focusing on cashing their checks, locking in their revenue stream, and paying their executives to actually deliver the product they agreed to.
What the government is bad at is managing contracts:
"systemic failure" in the government's ability to draw up and manage large IT contracts.
"there is still a long way to go before government departments can honestly say that they have learned and properly applied the lessons from previous contracting failures."
CSC should be sued for breach of contract, sued for fraud, sued for damages.
The funny thing is: this horribly wasteful government system is still about twice as efficient as the perfectly organised private system in the US!
Clinical records are the last big domain that resists computerisation.
Why? Because it's really hard to get right. You have a massive quagmire of competing interests, egos, a very complicated domain model and legal/regulatory environment that changes constantly and is different in every country. And to top this off, you have privacy whingers.
Common sense suggests that if it was an easy problem, they've have cracked it by now. As it is, I walk into my local GP for a checkup, and behind the reception, there's a massive wall of paper patient records. In 2013.
You have government of course (let's face it, governments have few very good people, and hire literally millions of bozos), but I'm not sure if it's any worse than the privatized, Balkanized carpetbagger-fest that passes as a health system in the US...
Absolutely not excusing the disgraceful and self-serving behaviour of the big integrators here (CSC and BT, amongst others), but they've blown billions for a reason.
Throughout my life, I have never heard of a government contractor completing a project anywhere near on budget or on time. I assume it must happen sometimes, but what their incentive to do so?
The bidders come in, underbid each other to an unrealistic level, pump out a bunch of documents claiming they can accomplish a project without any proof of actually understanding the project.
The government pays a certain amount up front and some along the way and that money isn't used to develop the project but instead is invested in preparing for second round funding and lobbying for it.
The people who bid the initial deal are fired with gigantic golden parachutes for gross negligence.
Papers and stuff are assembled to make it look like they project is far enough along that the government can't possibly justify dumping the contractor and feeds the contractor the "Real financing" which they should have asked for when they initially bid.
The project is then overstaffed through an employment/consulting agency which charges 400% of what they're paying the employees which happens to be run by one of the guys fired for gross negligence.
Management is constantly promoted and the developers who actually can do the work are promoted to management several times ensuring that at no point in time does anyone actually have a good overview of the project.
A product goes into testing only to find out that instead of a medical billing system they wrote a medical pilling system for pharmaceutical management.
A new budget is approved to adapt the pill pusher records to hold medical data for patients.
Rinse and repeat.
This is not even something we need to be surprised about. These people are thieves and they play their hands the same way every time. Wouldn't it be better to feed all the bidders the startup money for the project. Then as milestones are met, the companies not managing to keep up lose their budgets until there's only one? It's a massive amount of wasted energy and work, but the project will probably come in at much less money then if they're managed in the classic sense.