I used to know the guy who ran a company that did one of those late over budget pieces of IT for the NHS.
His daddy is a close personal friend of several major Tory ex-ministers, well connected. This is how his sons company got the contract in the first place.
And the company consisted of, the Owner, a managing director, a corporate director, 4 project managers, and 1, yes, 1 programmer.
Having done contract IT work for the government - albeit local government rather than national - I am not even slightly surprised. And having used the NHS' IT systems I'm frankly surprised a programmer was ever allowed near the things - I thought they were just manifestations of pure entropy.
1) The one programmer wasn't very good. But none of his superiors knew he wasn't very good. Because nobody else in the company even really knew how to switch a PC on.
2) The management team spent a lot of time flying down to London for high level meetings with civil servants, and would come back with extensive lists of things that needed to be implemented, would sit down with the programmer, and yell at him when he said this would likely take months of work.
3) They were just contracted to do one small part of the overall NHS IT system, and it was supposed to interlock with the other small bits being developed by other IT firms, but none of the other firms ever spoke to each other to discuss how they would actually integrate their systems.
And they got paid millions. Most of which went into opening a big new office suite in Edinburgh because the management didn't have enough office space. And during this move, their one programmer finally quit.
I believe they carried on for another year or two on the project, without any actual development being done because they didn't hire any more programmers.
That sounds exactly like the company I worked for, CompuWeb, which had a staff of approximately thirteen, of whom three were in any way technical. The company went bankrupt due to incompetence on the part of its founder, who bailed and left its debts behind and now runs an IT consulting firm with a whole three employees - the owner, a 'technical account manager' and a 'director: strategic projects'.
Yeah, this is endemic across the whole industry isn't it? A bunch of crooks and con-men.
The government really desperately need to stop shelling out millions upon millions of pounds for IT projects that a couple of smart teenagers could complete in a week or two.
To be fair, not all of it is like that. I know of one system that was very good (because I worked with the people doing it) for recording data from intensive care cots. And I worked myself on one system for recording all care carried out in neonatal intensive care units in South-East Thames.
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His daddy is a close personal friend of several major Tory ex-ministers, well connected. This is how his sons company got the contract in the first place.
And the company consisted of, the Owner, a managing director, a corporate director, 4 project managers, and 1, yes, 1 programmer.
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1) The one programmer wasn't very good. But none of his superiors knew he wasn't very good. Because nobody else in the company even really knew how to switch a PC on.
2) The management team spent a lot of time flying down to London for high level meetings with civil servants, and would come back with extensive lists of things that needed to be implemented, would sit down with the programmer, and yell at him when he said this would likely take months of work.
3) They were just contracted to do one small part of the overall NHS IT system, and it was supposed to interlock with the other small bits being developed by other IT firms, but none of the other firms ever spoke to each other to discuss how they would actually integrate their systems.
And they got paid millions. Most of which went into opening a big new office suite in Edinburgh because the management didn't have enough office space. And during this move, their one programmer finally quit.
I believe they carried on for another year or two on the project, without any actual development being done because they didn't hire any more programmers.
It was truly epic fail.
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The government really desperately need to stop shelling out millions upon millions of pounds for IT projects that a couple of smart teenagers could complete in a week or two.
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But a lot of it really is awful.