Re: Warning of major NHS IT overspend (Off list)

[Peter Tomlinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]

Roland Perry wrote:

> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Dave Howe
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
>
> > the www is built on a disparate array of machines, managed by
> > people of varying degrees of competence and usually held in systems
> > maintained by external suppliers; DNS is simply an index into that
> > system
>
>
> Indeed, and comparisons with a distributed database of *actual data*
> are entirely fallacious :-(


Thanks, Roland.

I was hoping someone else would come in and help with this one.

A friend of mine handles system maintenance for his local doctors' 
practice in a large dormitory village outside Bristol, and I think that 
he can see the inevitability of the central database. But I'm hearing on 
a grapevine from an Englishman (who I encountered while at the Cartes 
(smart card) exhibition in Paris on Tuesday) that one of the NHS IT 
contracts is already in trouble: the contractor has reported that the 
requirements spec has many internal contradictions. Why didn't he vet it 
during the contract negotiations? More seriously, when will Ian Watmore 
(head of the new e-Government Unit in the Cabinet Office) be allowed to 
get his teeth into the spending depts?

Peter