Labour's ineffective databases reveal bungling snoopers

There are plenty of alternatives to uploading your medical records to the NHS Database (I have listed a few on my site: www.nhsdatabase.info).

The Telegraph is spot on.

This whole wreached government has been beyond the pail for years now.I can only wish that left wingers develope a sense of honour for the sake of their country, and go to the country.Some hope.

Money is no object, the game plan is for micro-chipping. These database systems were designed to fail. First the velvet glove then the iron fist.

I too have worked on some very large government projects (you don't hear about the ones that were successful by-the-way). For me, the issues are essentially related to a single core theme. The government buys a perfectly good piece of software and then in the belief that their processes are unique, immediately sets about customizing it to a point where it either doesn't work or runs very very slowly. As for bespoke systems like the CSA or RPA you have a situation where the specification of the requirements has either not been done or has not been performed to the correct level of detail. The result is an enormous system built upon loose designs and installed on an ad hoc (make it up as you go along) basis. Instead of neat and sensible interfaces and joins rather like a electrical blueprint, you end up having something resembling the rear of an average home cinema HiFi arrangement.
I am a 'several' hundred pound a day consultant and in my defence it is the market that sets this rate, not me. Also, I build IT systems, just like engineers build oil-rigs and thus the decisions I make whilst not being solid like a rig, have similar and thus multi-million pound impacts.
I have fixed the mess created by off-shoring and agree with the comments of others. Communication with programmers is difficult when they are sat at the opposite side of the table - imagine the situation when they are halfway around the world. Buy cheap - buy twice. You can't even manage the building of a house unless you are on-site so why should an IT system be different?
My advice for the procurement people in the government is this - look at the successful IT projects and figure out why they were successful.
It is easy to blame the consultants and the contractors but you would be amazed at how often a fundamental system design decision is made by somebody who has absolutely no concept of its gravity. You would perhaps be less amazed by how easily that decision is accepted by the consultancy - kerching!!!

I too have worked on some very large government projects (you don't hear about the ones that were successful by-the-way). For me, the issues are essentially related to a single core theme. The government buys a perfectly good piece of software and then in the belief that their processes are unique, immediately sets about customizing it to a point where it either doesn't work or runs very very slowly. As for bespoke systems like the CSA or RPA you have a situation where the specification of the requirements has either not been done or has not been performed to the correct level of detail. The result is an enormous system built upon loose designs and installed on an ad hoc (make it up as you go along) basis. Instead of neat and sensible interfaces and joins rather like a electrical blueprint, you end up having something resembling the rear of an average home cinema HiFi arrangement.
I am a 'several' hundred pound a day consultant and in my defence it is the market that sets this rate, not me. Also, I build IT systems, just like engineers build oil-rigs and thus the decisions I make whilst not being solid like a rig, have similar and thus multi-million pound impacts.
I have fixed the mess created by off-shoring and agree with the comments of others. Communication with programmers is difficult when they are sat at the opposite side of the table - imagine the situation when they are halfway around the world. Buy cheap - buy twice. You can't even manage the building of a house unless you are on-site so why should an IT system be different?
My advice for the procurement people in the government is this - look at the successful IT projects and figure out why they were successful.
It is easy to blame the consultants and the contractors but you would be amazed at how often a fundamental system design decision is made by somebody who has absolutely no concept of its gravity. You would perhaps be less amazed by how easily that decision is accepted by the consultancy - kerching!!!

PaddyBoy,
Were you one of those of "much lower rank" by any chance? Your post smacks of typical "if only the chiefs let themselves be run by the indians" crap.

This morning and as a result of the recent merger, my wife received a new share allocation certificate from Lloyds. This certificate contained an invented middle name. The proceedure for correction involved two phone calls with a myriad of advertising preamble and information of share conversion rates and valuations, choice of buttons to press. Eventually, the first call reached a human who said that the correction should be addressed to xxx ie a new number. On examination, the new number turned out to be identical to the first, but a different button selection was required. The second human requested a return telephone number so that a call back could be made within 48 hours. I am grateful to know that the calls would be "recorded for monitoring purposes". Still cannot understand how a completely spurious name could be added to an established record!

If Britain really WAS a democracy and the government's IT projects WERE safe, then EVERYBODY would be included on them! Just like the old communist regimes, nu labour 'says' everyone is equal, but SOME are much more equal than others!
Time to vote these fools out!

This lot couldn't manage a note in a cleft stick.

I have made a point of commenting on each topic the last two days, result? One comment published. What is this?
Manufactured vox populi?

GPs are OK thanks. The rest of the NHS could learn from us, but prefers to reinvent wheels.

 

If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.....yeah - right!!

Just wait until the oppression reaches new heights with ID cards and PC Plod demanding "Papers!" on street corners.

Astonishing that the sheeple of Britain are happily sleepwalking into the gulags.

James Cameron
on January 28, 2009

Why heap this praise on Indian technocrats? I have managed a large engineering project in India and would never place an Indian company in any position of responsibility, they have a habit of 'outsourcing' any thing you tell them to do.
This means they will blame someone else down the line when things start going wrong.
Try driving a TATA car for an example of their 'quality' engineering.
 

Notwithstanding Labour's well-known inability to handle IT projects, what we are witnessing in this country is Communism, pure and simple.

I agree with the posts disagreeing with James Cameron. But the real issue is not really his view but why at all, if this system is so reliable that we need not be concerned, is there a need for anyone to be exempt, excluded or protected regardless of perceived status?

We are assured by this government of demonstrated incompetence that the system will be totally secure and that CDs containing sensitive information will not be sent by post, left in computers on buses, and that no one will be able to ask a member of the House of Lords for favours in accessing personal information or anything else. Obviously our government has no more confidence in themselves than we have, and the same with the ID card system.

On the IT side of things, as a system user rather than an IT guru, I know that there are plenty of off the shelf applications designed to handle enormous volumes of personal data, any one of which could be used, if this is really necessary, which it probably is not. If the multi-million pound (at our cost) consultants don�t know this, who is conning who into wasting our tax payers� money?
 

James Cameron could not be more wrong. As an IT Graduate from a UK University it's been all too obvious to me from the beginning that these systems were going to be an expensive farce.

This has been cause by a failure to understand what was actually needed, a failure to manage the process properly and a failure write contracts properly. There is a lot of good talent in this country and Mr. Cameron does it a disservice.

Incidentally a significant proportion of the Indian Graduates Mr. Cameron refers to trained at UK Universities...

James Cameron is wrong. Most of these humungous IT projects are developed, installed and implemented by huge American corporations who then outsource half of the coding to India. The problem is not with UK graduates, an easy target for which you should be ashamed, the problem is with the people ordering these projects and selecting money grubbing corporates to implement them. I could have put together a team of mostly British IT specialists and delivered a decent working solution for a fraction of the cost so far. And that would have included refitting every GPs office.

When a project goes over budget it is a management problem, not a problem of the IT guys. As for importing Indian students, half of our work is fixing the mess made to software outsourced to the sub-continent. Mr Cameron's post just highlights how little he understands.

Incidentally, the conservatives plan to put a cap on the value of all IT projects and set it at a relatively low level. No project will be considered if its cost is over 100 million. That seems quite sensible to me as the vast majority of government projects that ended up costing several billions each could actually have been delivered within such a budget. All it needed was better management and more honest companies to do it.

Since when have MPs been celebrities. They are public servants and as such, there is no possible excuse for details of their children not to be included on a 'secure children's database' - or are they telling us that actually it isn't secure - but that doesn't matter for the proles!

Cameron should pledge to scrap the Childrens' Database, along with the ID Database when he is elected. Any Company bidding for the Contracts should know in advance that they will be scrapped.

Anyone who has ever been involved in Government sponsored IT programmes will know exactly why they never work and always cost the earth just to get it wrong. I used to work at the main headquarters of one of the branches of the Armed Forces. Whilst there, it was decided that a �corporate� solution to IT for the site was required. The usual committees formed, as ever constituted from people who had no idea what they were talking about. Consultants were engaged on sums of about 800 Pounds per day (a huge sum at the time) and a special mini IT Network installed by the �in house� specialists for their use. They had been chosen because they held the relevant IT qualifications of the time but it was clear when discussing this network with them that they had no practical experience of how the thing actually worked. Over a long period of time, reams and reams of consultation papers were produced proposing how the strategy should be implemented. Meanwhile, the in house IT department had exactly the same expertise as the consultants, and a huge amount of experience gained through several years of installing network platforms and programs. However, these people could not be used because senior officers did not like to told, by people of much lower rank and status, how such a thing should be done. On setting out on this course of action, Windows 95 was the current Operating System. Over the course of the consultation period, Windows 2000 superseded this and had, in the meantime to keep the headquarters functioning, been deployed on new PCs just under 2000 �corporate�users by the in house team. The end of the consultation period (yes it was long) saw Windows 95 proposed as the preferred Operating System. I know this was because a certain senior officer had it on his PC at home and persuaded his colleagues it was best for the job despite being virtually obsolete. So, there we have it, we were expected to remove virtually new PCs installed with the latest software and replace them with lesser equipment and systems. It did not happen in the end because of the outcry from the end users and because someone was able to point out to someone very senior how ridiculous the whole thing was. Meanwhile, the in house team had actually done what was required but was seen as �interim�. Millions of pound were spent for nothing except to promote deep frustration and anger. And nothing was ever said or don about it. And that is just one example I can quote.


 

I worked in a department of a large bank with operating units spread right around the globe which had a range of identified IT needs but were essentially discrete islets in a 24/7 disconnected archipelago.

Our solutions were pragmatic. No monolithic all singing all dancing solution which did everything for everyone and everywhere was built. Instead, needs were boiled down and a set of criteria determined to interface very different existing systems.

The situation is no different with NHS data. You need to define the data set entities for patients, the servicing locations (GP surgeries and hospitals etc) the practitioners and the procedures.

It is not rocket science and an application front end could be knocked up to work on any PC. Provided the data set has been rigorously tested as exportable every point of access could then be networked.

You then get into the issue of whether data storage is local or central or both - the point at which current IT thinking is now changing even for casual PC users (the 'cloud' etc).

The task here has been made massive by lack of understanding on the part of those commissioning it - who will surely have created a parallel universe of consultants on day rates that would make you swoon - essentially to tell them how to do jobs for which they are being well paid.

All this before you even consider the task of converting existing data on record cards into the electronic system - bulk scanning or whatever. Then you could link in prescribing records (and tests, checks and balances) and have all the dispensing chemists able to access and renew drug scripts for patients. Where is the big thinking here?

Thank to the "King's new Clothes" principle, they will, if they ever deliver, be late, incomplete, and it will 'fall over' almost immediately - and the consultants will all walk away, the civil servants will be promoted to another project and so on.

Here in Spain, we walk into the surgery, we are on their computer, having booked appointments remotely, and our data is up in front of the person we see, including test results, wherever we attend.

This sounds like a solution in search of a problem to me - a classic Labour IT monolith farce.

280109-09:04

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that Brown sits with his cabinet asking, "Right, ideas for more wasting of money, we've got X billion to get rid of this quarter." or similar? This is all they seem capable of doing.

The inability of the British to handle big computer projects simply reflects the appalling training offered by our "pretendy" universities. If we are going to proceed with these statist ventures we are going to have to import a large batch of Indian graduates to run the computers. UK graduated can text each other but not much else.

You mean Labour should be scrapped. They understand all too well the end result of 'equality for all'. The top layer has to be brought down to the bottom.

This is why they need exceptions. The MPs are not willing to see their status get closer to the great unwashed and they do not wish to be associated with the electorate.

One rule for us, another for them.