UK Health Service Fears Huge Legal Fight Over Unwanted Contracts 127
DMandPenfold writes "The Department of Health is concerned that Fujitsu, CSC and BT would team up against it in a multibillion pound legal fight, should it decide to scrap the disastrous NHS National Program for IT. Fujitsu walked away from a £709 million contract in 2008, and remains locked in legal wrangling with the government over claims for the majority of the value. Today, MPs urged the government to seriously consider abandoning the program and therefore to consider terminating the remaining CSC and BT contracts, worth £3 billion and £1 billion respectively."
Re:related? (Score:5, Interesting)
Whilst you trivialise the problem to a degree (scalability and reliability of an NHS sized system is not trivial) it still shouldn't take a small team more than a few months, and a budget in the hundreds of thousands of pounds, to build such a system. This could then be incrementally evolved over time on a budget in the hundreds of thousands per annum (maybe low millions depending on speed of development). You do then have the data entry problem to consider, but that is surmountable for a fraction of the budget of these big IT solutions.
However that's not how the government thinks. They want to go all encompassing from day one, speccing out a bloated and unworkable unholy mess that the end user doesn't want or need, and certainly doesn't understand, that takes a budget several orders of magnitude more than is required. Then throughout the project more and more people will hear about it and give their input or point of flaws, causing massive amounts of feature creep and confusion, affecting budgets, delivery time lines, and ultimately the quality of the end product.
As a final anecdote, as a small web agency we once were involved in the build of a website for a London borough. We were in competition with some much bigger agencies, but we went back with a good proposal, some great design concepts, and what we felt was a fair budget. The decision maker loved our whole proposal except for the cost - he actually made us double the cost of the build, simply because that then matched his budget so that it wouldn't be cut the next year (spend it or lose it!) and because it brought it in to line with the bigger agencies (so his managers wouldn't think our offering was less feature rich because it was cheaper). This way of thinking is not unique to the the public sector but is endemic throughout it, and the big suppliers prey upon this.
NHS didn't know what it wanted. (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone who was involved with the project from early on...
The NHS really didn't know what it wanted, it just knew that it kinda wanted some sort of joined up system, and that it had a massive wodge of cash to spend.
Result? Even when the project was years late, the NHS was STILL delivering requirements.
Add to that entrenched company's refusing to be a part of the project and working against it from the outside (One of the biggest GP software suppliers did this), good old fashioned stupidity, and a reporting structure that was classically backwards, everyone could see it would have issues.
The big suppliers are far more astute than government is. They could see several years down the line that the project would get canned, especially if the Tories got in, so they started building to that conclusion to the project (and turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy).
One last kick at everyone involved... the GPs themselves. Under the ideas of "privacy", they fought the system wholesale. Despite the system having adequate safeguards in place. The reality is that the system would make it easier to expose bad practice among HCPs, and harder to bury evidence when needed by FOI requests. You can't sell that system to the people who are using it... it would be like making politicians vote for making themselves more transparent. Never going to happen.