Good piece by Peter Smith on why the government’s major IT suppliers may continue their rule over the Whitehall IT budgets (for the time being).
Ten reasons government procurement spend on SMEs isn’t increasing.
By Tony Collins
A report by Deloitte on problematic Cerner installations at some hospitals in Australia calls for the government to appoint a chief medical information officer to oversee computer projects across the State.
The Deloitte report is a reminder that new IT in hospitals can have good – and adverse – safety implications for patients.
Obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald under Australia’s Freedom of Information Act, the Deloitte report is said to accept complaints last year that the system put patients’ health at risk by providing insufficient alerts to clinicians when messages did not reach their destination. Deloitte found no evidence of harm to patients.
Though the Deloitte report is specific to the Cerner “FirstNet” system as installed at some emergency departments in New South Wales, the idea of a chief medical information officer is arguably a good one for the UK where the Department of Health’s CIO (currently Katie Davis, interim Managing Director, NHS Informatics) is not responsible for the medical implications of IT go-lives in NHS hospitals.
New systems bypass the sort of regulation that helps protects the public against harm from medical devices. After hospital IT disasters there is no requirement for a genuinely independent investigation, as happens after airline crashes.
The Sydney Morning Herald [SMH] reports Deloitte as saying that the FirstNet system, which was installed to help run emergency departments across New South Wales, is chronically underfunded.
Deloitte was asked to report on the system after some hospital staff last year lost confidence in the software and returned to manual record-keeping.
Despite continuing problems and excessive time spent on data entry, the FirstNet system is too entrenched to be scrapped and the government should instead invest in bringing it up to scratch, said Deloitte.
”With some exception, FirstNet reporting is inadequate for effective governance of [emergency department] operations,” said Deloitte as reported by the SMH.
Nurses and doctors had complained that the system increased the amount of time they spent at a screen and reduced contact with patients. But the Deloitte report said more time spent on data entry ”was essential to realise the eventual benefits of an eventual [electronic medical record]”, such as greater accuracy of test results and medicine orders.
Upgrades were improving safety at some hospitals but needed to be across the state.
The government should appoint a chief medical information officer to oversee computing projects across the state, and pay for continuing development and training for FirstNet, said Deloitte.
The Health Minister, Jillian Skinner, said clinicians did not want to scrap FirstNet because they didn’t “want to start anew”.
The list of hospitals that have had serious problems after IT installations is growing, in part because the increasing use of technology in healthcare. Though hospital staff tend to learn in time to manage new systems, the unanswered question is whether patient care and treatment – and potentially their health and safety – should be damaged in an unregulated way until the problems are solved or mitigated.
Below is the UK list where it is known that the installation of new IT has caused serious disruption. Any effect on individual patients has gone unreported:
Milton Keynes Hospital NHS Trust
Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS Trust
St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust
University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust
Birmingham Women’s Foundation Trust
**
Links:
Does Hospital IT need airline-style certification?
Hospital computer system found lacking – Sydney Morning Herald
By Tony Collins
After years of depicting problems at an IBM-led shared services company, Southwest One, as teething, Somerset County Council has conceded that the venture is failing.
The Conservative leader of Somerset County Council Councillor Ken Maddock used the word “failing” nine times in a speech on Wednesday about Southwest One, a company run by IBM on behalf Somerset County Council, Taunton Deane Borough Council and Avon and Somerset Police.
Southwest One’s contract, which was signed in the early hours of a Saturday morning in 2007, was doomed from the start, in part because of the complexity of the arrangements and in part because of pervasive secrecy that antagonised hundreds of Somerset council staff who were already opposed to the joint venture; and they were the very staff who were seconded to Southwest One to make the venture work. [It’s a truism that staff, if they are motivated, will often make their way around difficulties but may be overwhelmed by them if not motivated.]
Last month Campaign4Change set out in detail some of the most disruptive and continuing problems at Southwest One; and we said the difficulties could not be tackled in earnest while Somerset council and its partners were portraying the venture as a success. On 31 January 2012, our post was mentioned on the website of the local Conservative MP Ian Liddell-Grainger.
The good news now is that the council has, this week, for the first time, spoken of Southwest One in unequivocally negative terms. No longer is every council criticism of the company qualified by a positive comment, such that one cancels out the other.
Whether our post last month has made any difference is not important. What’s pleasing is that IBM and Southwest One’s partners are free to make progress, now that Somerset has told it like it is. Much of the credit for the council’s emergence from its long, self-administered anaesthesia lies with Dave Orr who has campaigned for years to highlight the failings of Southwest One, as has Liddell-Grainger.
Maddock’s speech on Southwest One
Maddock’s speech to a full council meeting is reported at length by the Somerset County Gazette and by Liddell-Grainger.
Maddock said
“As an administration we inherited a partnership that promised a huge amount, but it was not delivering. Southwest One’s accounts year on year show losses, staggering losses just published of £31m, and failures to hit modest savings targets.
“We have bent over backwards to try to make this partnership work. But we have to state clearly that our primary duty in looking after the public’s hard earned money is to make sure we get the best possible deals, that we get the best possible value for the public’s money.
“I have to say that Southwest One is failing this test.
“We are currently looking at all our services and all our contracts to see whether we are doing the best we can for our customers, whether we are providing the best possible services for our customers and at the best possible prices for our customers.
“I have to say that Southwest One is failing this test.
“We need a Council that can cope with future government cuts and rising demand. We will need to be efficient and flexible.
“I have to say that Southwest One is failing this test.
“Sadly, Southwest One is failing. It is failing to deliver promised savings; failing to cope with a changing financial landscape; failing to be flexible enough to adapt in challenging times and provide the best possible value for money.
“To make up for this failure, we will now accelerate our extensive review of everything that the council does: Almost half our most vital services are carried out by private sector or not for profit organisations – we will look to increase this where appropriate.
“We will encourage social enterprises, partnerships, communities and voluntary groups to get more involved in what we do and what we run. We will look to put the customer at the heart of what we do.
“And we will do this whilst we continue to do all we can to make Southwest One work. But I have to be clear; it is failing; it is inflexible; and it is intransigent. We are therefore looking at all the options available to us.
“I do have one final message for Southwest One – and that is to the staff and our Somerset County Council colleagues and secondees working there. The message is this: This continuing failure is not about you. It is about the contract, the complications, the failed technology, the missed opportunities, the lack of promised savings. It is about Southwest One itself, not about the people working for it.”
Comments on Maddock’s speech
Some of the comments on the Somerset County Gazette website were apt. One said “Somerset County Council has finally come to accept what we, the minions, have known for years: South West One is a failure and a pretty expensive one…”
Another said
“At last SCC admits to what everyone in the real world knew from day one …”
Comment:
One of the lessons from IT disasters in the private and public sectors is that things often start to improve once the main parties own up to the seriousness of the problems. The good news, perhaps, is that Southwest One may now be at its lowest point. It has at long last purged its bowels, so to speak.
Ian Liddell-Grainger’s website.
Southwest One gets £10m IBM amid “staggering” losses.
IBM struggles with SAP two years on – a shared services warning?
By Tony Collins
CSC has confirmed in a statement to Techweekeurope that it may cut 500 jobs on its NHS account.
“We can confirm that, regrettably, we have recently started a formal 90-day consultation process in the UK which could reduce the number of people working on our NHS account by up to a maximum of 500 people,” CSC told TechWeek Europe.
“This action is necessary mainly because we have now substantially completed many key development activities with NHS, and are now moving away from a focus on development work.”
CSC told The Register that it regretted having to take put jobs at risk, but it was necessary because its NHS workload was getting smaller.
CSC has confirmed it is to write-off almost $1.5bn (£957m) as a result of its involvement in the National Programme for IT (NPfIT).
Comment:
CSC is by no means quitting the NHS. Its NPfIT contract is still in force although it remains unrevised, out of date and subject to legal discussions. CSC has large numbers of UK trusts and GP practices as customers, which will need support and upgrades. If it cuts 500 jobs this may indicate the effective end of the monolith that was the NPfIT which will continue in a much diminished, though still expensive, form, largely because of contracts between the Department of Health and BT.
It appears that the dismantling of the NPfIT has begun in earnest, thanks largely to Cabinet Office officials, its Major Projects Group, the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, David Cameron and the Department of Health’s Managing Director of NHS Informatics Katie Davis.
The campaign to stop a new deal being signed with CSC was led by the Conservative MP Richard Bacon, a member of the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee who was concerned that a new deal would not be good value for money.
It’s to be hoped that CSC will manage to find other work for the 500. The company says it hopes to achieve the job changes through voluntary redundancies and redeploying people within other parts of its business, without the need for compulsory redundancies.
Techweek europe article that includes CSC’s statement.
MP contacts No 10 and Cabinet Office over future of the NPfIT.
Posted in Campaign4Change, IT projects, NHS, npfit, project management, public sector
By David Bicknell
I am in Amsterdam to speak with a Dutch SME about its work examining the energy efficiency of software.
The Software Improvement Group (SIG) and the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) have come together to create the Software Energy Footprint Lab (SEFL).
The lab will enable researchers to examine such questions as:
The laboratory will have computers rigged with sensors to measure the flow of electric current into each of the computer’s components. Specially crafted programs or generic benchmarks are then run with the sensors reporting on where the current is flowing to and how much of it is flowing to each component.
The relationship, which I’ll learn more about today, builds on the knowledge of electronics from the HvA together with SIG’s work into the technical quality of software which provides insight into the quality of organisations’ software projects, and therefore, the quality of their software suppliers.
By David Bicknell
Mutuals taskforce chairman Julian Le Grand has written this piece in the Guardian, which argues that when it comes to the delivery of public services, no one type of provider i.e. the public monopoly, is suitable for all services.
Neither is a private firm nor a social enterprise automatically the best alternative. Even employee-led mutuals, he argues, are not appropriate in all circumstances: they may not be suitable for services that are natural monopolies, for instance.
He adds that it is of fundamental importance to consider what motivates those who work in the service. Only if they are appropriately motivated, he suggests, will those working in the public services deliver the quality of service that governments hope for and that users expect.
Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, mutuals, public services
Tagged Julian Le Grand, mutuals, Mutuals Taskforce, public service mutuals
By David Bicknell
The US Government wants to formalise a plan to send in specialist troubleshooting teams to rein in failing IT projects.
Federal chief information officer Steven Van Roekel said the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – which oversees the preparation of the US federal budget and supervises its administration in government agencies – is to create government-wide teams to take on the most problematic IT programs.
VanRoekel said agency CIOs also will continue to run TechStats, a government wide tool to shine light on and turn around underperforming IT projects. The critical details of a project’s health that are generated by a TechStat session reveal project strengths and the potential weaknesses that could lead to catastrophic failure.
As well as TechStats, VanRoekel said he will formally launch IT SWAT teams according to a US report. The concept has already been used to help the Office of Personnel Management sort out its struggling USAJobs.gov portal.
“We assembled a team of the best and brightest IT people across government and they evaluated the USAJobs infrastructure,” said Van Roekel. “They sent me back a bunch of recommendations we now are having OPM implement and take forward. It is a great program and I’m excited to take that concept government-wide.”
VanRoekel said the goal is to bring together other teams of experts throughout 2012.
Links
Ian Watmore: ‘Majority of projects go very well and the public never hears’
By David Bicknell
There’s not much doubt of the hot spots for IT spending over the next few years: the BRICS.
According to this piece on ZDNet, while Europe remains transfixed viewing a Greek tragedy, other countries, notably the BRICS, are pushing ahead in terms of IT spend.
That spending means we can expect large increases in new IT projects – or perhaps I should say business projects delivered through IT.
Will the BRICS do a better job of the project management and delivery of these IT projects than we’ve managed in the developed world? Well, let’s just say there’s plenty of useful best and worst practice for them to take on board.
Links
Posted in Brazil, BRICS, Campaign4Change, change management, China, India, IT projects
Tagged Brazil, BRICS, China, IDC, India, IT projects, IT spending, Russia
By David Bicknell
It’s a sign of the times that by 2017, according to the Gartner research group, organisations’ chief marketing officers will be spending more on IT than the CIO. It is departments such as marketing that are helping drive consumerisation within the organisation with healthy purchases of tablet computers – usually iPads – outside the remit of the IT department.
There are good reasons for that. As this article in Ad Age points out, data was once ‘the domain of tech geeks and direct-marketing gurus’, while chief marketing officers focused on loftier things like shaping brand perception.
Not now. Thanks to an explosion of data from social-media platforms, call centres, customer transactions and loyalty programs, CMOs ‘who want a seat at the table will have to harness customer data and leverage it – or risk being relegated to chief promotions officer.’
The article suggests a key alliance – or will it be a battle? – of the future will be between the CMO and the CIO to become a de-facto chief customer officer.
As Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff puts it, “The only sustainable competitive advantage is knowledge of and engagement with customers. Brand, manufacturing, distribution and IT are all table stakes. The only source of competitive advantage is the one that can survive technology-fueled disruption, an obsession with understanding, delighting, connecting with and serving customers. In this age, companies that thrive … are those that tilt their budgets toward customer knowledge and relationships.”
Posted in Big Data, Campaign4Change, change management, Consumerisation, Marketing
Tagged CIO, consumerisation, customer, data, Forrester, Gartner, Marketing
Campaign4Change 