Does Government Understand IT?
The NHS plan for IT currently has a cost predicted at being something like £20 billion.
It goes beyond being over budget and expensive, and exists as a number beyond anything that I can sensibly comprehend. The idea that any IT project can cost so much is just banal.
But what I think is that the government really doesn’t understand data systems, and particularly, don’t understand how well they scale.
What’s always hard to get across to people is that unlike something like building cars, the volume that you process through a computer system is a very cheap part of the equation. As volume rises, you’ll have to get some better hardware, and maybe your software will need some changes to help with the management of the volumes, but, the "per unit" costs drops extremely fast.
The computer CPU is similar. The chips cost relatively little per-unit to manufacture. What costs is the research and development that goes into the design, and things like the cost of running the plant.
My concern is that the government thinks that it must cost a lot because it deals with something reasonably complex (patients records), but also that it costs a lot because of the system volume.
RSS
Some things don’t scale well - the costs of culture change and user training for example.
I wonder if the contractors share in this state of ignorance. They seem to manage to complete many of these projects with very little profit.
One final thought - the cost of two things scale inversely:
1. individual user requirements
2. interaction of programs created by multiple programmers
I think that the programme manager of a big programme should be the sworn enemy of these two.