A UK government report (board minutes from the Health & Social Care Information Centre) says that the National Health Service has £5 billion worth of Information Technology projects at high risk of failure:
The ratings are based on gateway reports assessing the risk of four IT projects this year. All are related as "red" or "amber/red" meaning successful delivery is either impossible or extremely unlikely. Those projects include the remaining electronic health records contracts with BT and CSC, due to end in 2015 and 2016.
According to the HSCIC report, the £2.3bn CSC Local Service Provider (LSP) programme has now been flagged as "red", up from "amber/red" when the Major Projects Authority last released its rating for September 2014. Both programmes were originally started in 2003/2004 and have had an extremely troubled history.
Other high-rated projects on the list included the £168m NHSmail2 programme, to provide secure email across the NHS, which has slipped from "amber" to "amber/red".
NHSmail2 is an upgrade to the NHS's Microsoft Exchange based email system. Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and BT Health London have managed IT services for different divisions of England (CSC manages the North, Midlands & Eastern cluster, BT manages the London cluster).
Previously: UK National Health Service Dumps Oracle For FOSS NoSQL
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @09:27AM
The bigger the contract the higher propensity to fail. The rule of 5s: Any project involving more than 5 companies, or 5 million dollars, or 5 years, has a one in 500 chance of being completed AT ALL, let along on time, one in 5000 chance of being on budget.
Wasn't like that before e.g. Manhattan Project, Apollo program. And plenty of other successful military aircraft were built too (Harrier, Lightning, Panavia Tornado, F14, F15, F16, A10, Apache, Lynx). Same goes for many other stuff like ships and submarines.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday December 09 2015, @05:29PM
And plenty of other successful military aircraft were built too (Harrier, Lightning, Panavia Tornado, F14, F15, F16, A10, Apache, Lynx). Same goes for many other stuff like ships and submarines.
No.
You name a bunch of successful projects, to suggest that large scale failed IT projects have always been with us.
Yet IT has not always been with us.
And IT systems seem particularly prone [computerworld.com] to monumental spending over runs yet in the end being scrapped totally, because they could never be completed.
http://calleam.com/WTPF/?page_id=1445 [calleam.com]
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