What looks like a very sensible idea to open up the NHS IT landscape: provide a set of interoperability guidelines so that the big providers can focus on the core clinical systems, while smaller players can provide add-ons like the SMS messaging mentioned in the article.
Monthly Archive for October, 2009
Herefordshire is joining up its NHS and council IT provision. I wonder whether this lower level of sharing is the way forward as opposed to / alongside shared Chief Executives (given that the nature of the CEO job is mostly dealing with “politics” either with members or medics)?
Useful OECD source on how government works in their member countries. Coupled with the Guardian’s public spend graphic: I’ve seen it on many walls (link).
While we all see digital inclusion as a required push for government, I can’t help feeling that the push to get broadband everywhere is driven by the technology providers (what about tethered mobiles or dongles?). It also focuses on a relatively small proportion of the populace: the majority can use digital channels, and many of them want to. In that light, it’s good to see a debate starting on the potential additional costs of digital channels and the requirement to shift customers to high value, low cost-to-serve channels.
I was talking with a school friend earlier in the week who is tasked with implementing new contact channels and services across a London council. He said that email was not a preferred channel, as the cost to serve was equivalent to face-to-face. The real saving was in web forms that interface directly with the council’s systems, exactly as Ian Cuddy’s analysis of the data supporting the Economic Case for Digital Inclusion report.
I have long been a supporter of running multiple parallel pilots for major IT projects. The cost of funding the additional pilots should be recouped in better specification and a more fit-for-purpose delivery. I think this was used for the congestion charge (first time around). There are some details of the Technical Design Study at 6.3 / page 56/57 of this long background report (pdf) on the charge itself.
I’m not sure how the conservatives think that this approach will weaken the reliance on major vendors: they are often the only players with the required scale. That’s a function of the projects, rather than of the vendors.
Whether you like the term “total place” or not, the idea of providing services around the citizen rather than through organisational boundaries makes sense. The issue that Birmingham has highlighted is the 1-3 year funding model:
Every
pound Birmingham spends on early intervention in child welfare saves £4
over 15 years, Lowther said – but three quarters of those savings will
accrue to organisations other than the city.
Councils already have long-term commitments (waste contracts, for example) so wouldn’t it be better if they could negotiate (not sure with who: local advisory panel, Treasury?) longer-term activities around total place? That said, any payback period longer than a few years is essentially meaningless, as things will have changed once the payback comes to be measured.
Ouch. Defra cancelled an EDRM project in 2005 which had already spent £12.6m. Another paused project cost £9.9m to deliver £0.25m of outputs. That said, there aren’t enough cancelled projects in my opinion: once they are running a life they start having a life of their own. Project and programme governance good practice has plenty of ways of closing down early: they aren’t often used.
BIS looks a lot healthier (although it is a far smaller department). I wonder how many government IT projects have the same acronym (I noticed two SPIREs).
Nice idea to get a “newspaper” (well “informationpaper”) when you (for example) move to a new area. Surely some form of PDF delivery would ease production costs? Obviously the web / scraper back end costs money, but you could cache output as it would be relatively slow changing.
We’ve been without one since July, which suggests the government doesn’t take this very seriously. I would imagine that moving government services over to digital channels should be a major cost saving: not something to ignore in these straightened times. It’s Angela Smith, who was effective at the few things I’ve seen her do in the past. Jim Knight at DWP takes on digital exclusion and Directgov (which feels odd, save that DWP is becoming the de facto shared services centre for government).
Interesting take: do you prefer the homebrew Birmingham council website or the council’s own one? Obviously the former can’t work without the latter, but what sort of feed is there from one to the other? Will BCC learn from the relative simplicity and ease of navigation?