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On Mon, 17 Sep 2007 11:56:58 +0100 Simon Williams <systemparadox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Tom Potts wrote: > > On Monday 17 September 2007 09:24, Neil Williams wrote: > > Can anyone tell me where I can apply for these NHS contracts - I guess all you > > have to do is make up a figure and then get a contract lawyer to pull holes > > in the agreement and you can be rich! > > Oh hang on - I can actually write software - I guess that will exclude me! > > My question is where does all the money go? I can't possibly see how you > can spend 5 billion pounds on any piece of software. Or did it all go on > Microsoft licenses? 1. Time - government has no idea of how to manage something like this so it goes on and on and on. Every time a new bod appears in the relevant department, they want their "stamp" on it so they tinker with it. Again. 2. Bad choice of mutually incompatible closed systems from suppliers in direct, multi-billion dollar international competition with each other as the starting point for a singularly *national* project that cannot be easily rolled out to other nations, leading to zero cooperation between developers or users. (As the NHS is unique, the NHS system is not designed to cope with the needs of private medical insurance companies and therefore cannot be used in systems without a "single-client" (government) run health service.) Who's bright idea was that?! Simply choose or develop a multi-user system and only configure one user!! Duh! 3. Constantly rewritten specifications causing more rewrites when if the problem had been resolved in good time there would have been no need to waste development. Proprietary software isn't cheap - especially when you want a quarter of a million installations (or more?) of an ever changing specification linking to dozens of independent proprietary packages that have no common method of data interchange over a custom-built nationwide network that has to be separate from the general internet, secure at all points yet accessible to millions of "authenticated" persons and millions more who work under the supervision of an "authenticated" person yet completely inaccessible to everyone else (yeah, right) and all for a single client who can't make up their mind and carrying scary amounts of highly confidential data [1], running on an operating system that is known to be insecure. Oh, and it was all meant to be operational in October. (Yes, 2007.) It would have been far simpler to trash the whole idea and start again by now. [1] After all, what could be more useful in identity fraud than medical notes? All the GP surgeries have to be linked to the spine, all the hospitals are meant to be linked as well and all the pharmacies. Every one of those uses a different piece of software to access the data on the central spine over normal broadband connections and not once had any developer of those packages considered any method of data exchange with their competitors until this whole farce started. Every pharmacist and receptionist has to be authenticated and authorised for access to the spine and all the old paper based prescription systems have to be converted to digital. Over and above all that, the contracts governing the entire system have all been rewritten and added huge amounts of extra requirements that have consistently broken old versions of the specification causing rewrites of the spec and delays in compliance. Yes, it would all have been a lot easier with free software because all those disparate packages would be able to use the same data exchange protocols but that's just how government works in the UK. Too pally with the patent trolls to see the reality. Not to mention, of course, that the £5bn doesn't include the charges that the doctors and pharmacy groups had to pay for the software updates (which in many cases are ground-up rewrites so might as well have been requested as entirely new software, i.e. free software). It could have been a lot easier if the idea from the start was to use free software for the data exchange protocols, force the rewritten packages to be at least open source and just pay the developers direct from the Treasury. Problem was that this whole thing was started so long ago that free software wasn't as useful as today. The GLUG archives are full of stories of how difficult it was to install RH5 or earlier. This thing has been in the budget for a decade or more already and there's no sign that those on that particular gravy train want to get off - let alone allow others on for free. The more you spend on proprietary the more you will continue to need to spend because the interests of those who have already paid out (and are looking for a return on their cash) will outweigh the needs of those who cannot pay. You only have to look at Northern Rock for an example of what happens when those who have paid in come to a collective perception that they aren't going to get their cash back. Right or wrong, the reaction is predictable. In the case of NHS software, those who have paid in happen to be the only providers of the entire NHS pharmaceutical and general practise IT provision. They are intent on locking out anyone who can undercut them and as the client cannot afford for them to go to the wall, the client listens to them and not to the taxpayer. So it'll be another 5 or 10 or 25bn before the system actually works. The software is relatively easy[2], what is locked-down is access to the data updates on new products, new codes etc. that allow the systems to place orders for stock etc. and which are solely controlled by either the organisations themselves or quangos in the pay of the organisations. It is these locked-down data updates that also comprise the majority of the mutually incompatible data-exchange bottlenecks because the GP system has to be able to be understood by the pharmacy system by using the same codes. It would be so much simpler if someone made the decision to dump all the existing code systems by reason of mutual incompatibility. [2] Heck, there are packages in Ubuntu today that could form the basis of a replacement system. There were packages in Debian that could have acted as the starting point before Canonical was even created. One would have thought that the country that cracked Enigma (via a government agency) could have created a new code system that replaced all the incompatible systems but no, someone thought it would cost more that way. Never - more than £5bn to create an open system of codes for products that typically already have barcodes???? Absolute farce, the whole thing. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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