UK Chancellor targets IT projects in £6 billion cuts
computerworlduk.com
computerworlduk.com
The budgets we currently see when the public sector is involved are borderline vulgar.
Most of these projects could be made for 1/10th of what they are currently being made for.
By being forced to cut spending perhaps the governmental institutions will start to listen to more lean oriented approaches.
Unlikely, but possible.
There are however times when this backfires.
When some long awaited and praised system goes 300% over budget, at least in Denmark it's not going down well with the public.
Another area that no country yet seem to have solved satisfactory is the digitalization of patient journals. But the main problem there seem to be incompatibility between different divisions which I have a hard time believing can be that difficult to solve.
Anyway it sure is quite sad to see how bad the government is at running IT projects. Although large corporations don't seem to be doing much better.
It needs to be solved.
It is a fiction maintained by the NHS bureaucracy that any cuts must affect the frontline. But the NHS has more managers than beds...
It's such a crying shame - the NHS frontline staff can be utterly wonderful, I just hate the layers of parasitical managers gaming the system of daft metrics to get their bonuses.
Can you give some examples of the difficulties?
You have to rationalize the processes in an organization then make them use the same systems. In fact, I've seen scenarios where having totally inflexible IT systems was actually a bit of a blessing - there was no endless wrangling over requirements, people were told "you are going to use this and like it" and they had to change their processes to fit in with the systems.
I wouldn't have believed how well this can work unless I had seen it happen in a fairly large multinational.
Whether this is true or not it. It would be easy to imagine that the wrong technology decisions can be made to make the work roll on for years.
With the way the world works now, much of these systems could be put together from fixed priced components built under tender.
Most governments believe that they can simply will a successful solution into existence.
Instead of thinking how they would like the system to be used they should think about how to get to a point where the system is used and then expand from there.
What a wonderful world it would be if they actually learned to think like entrepreneurs.
Start simple, stay simple Add as the needs arise Don't do everything that is possible only what is necessary Think how not what Make it for the actual citizens rather than for some political goal.
And for @#((@# sake. Lets get all the data available, yesterday!
The cynical way that the public has been mislead is unbelievable. The public ought to be treated like shareholder, instead they were treated like fools. Expenses is not the only reason for loss of faith.
And nobody really cares as it is "only taxpayers money".
Very few things make me really angry - this whole mess is one of them.
The government spending becomes the means to buy votes. This was seen probably most obviously when Chancellor Helmut Kohl bought the votes of the former East Germany by promising them beyond what the state could deliver driving germany into one of it's worst crises since the thirties.
He has some really interesting ideas on how to solve many of the problems we face today IMHO.
However, none of these projects made any sense from that perspective. Massively overpaid consultants probably don't vote Labour anyway (even New Labour) and there weren't that many of them.
Simplest answer I can come up with is that the people who commissioned and ran these projects were, in the best British tradition, bumbling idiots.
The ID card system was never going to save any money nor make the country safer (it's original selling point). The NHS system seems to be going very badly so far and is late.
You end up with something that has taken 10 years, and is delivering a 'requirement' that is 10 years old and now not relevant (even less relevant than the imperfect 10 year old spec).
The only real way to do this is to break these projects up - either in scope or in size - ideally get something as off the shelf as possible and iterate it until it suits the needs, and then roll out wider. I.e. get well away from a waterfall process of massive scope.
For example, instead of trying to put in place an NHS wide system (which then fails at great expense), get each individual Trust to go on their own with off the shelf suppliers or at least smaller, cheaper bespoke organisations. Smaller, more manageable and cheaper. You can define interoperability standards if that's needed; you can buy enterprise licenses if one supplier does end up being obviously better.
In other news, there is talk of changing the rules so that a substantial proportion of such work must be given to smaller, independent companies, who frankly could probably do a better job given the track record of places like EDS. As long as they don't then find they "need" to bring in expensive management consultancy firms to co-ordinate the smaller teams, that is...
I've only seen a US presidential motorcade once, but it had some thirty vehicles and travelled at about sixty miles an hour down a closed-off street. That, combined with the private 747, is probably the most obscene thing about the modern US presidency. Waiting in traffic in an unmarked car would do the President a lot of good.
Yes, I know it's for security, but nobody has taken a shot at a Presidential motorcade for nearly fifty years, and simply having a roof would have solved Kennedy's problem.
New Labour got a lot of credit from some for scrapping the Royal Yacht, but they neglected to point out that in wartime the Royal Yacht was a actually fully-functional hospital ship. When we're not at war, why not use it for diplomatic functions?