There were some complaints about the depiction of the NHS in the Opening Ceremony of the London
Olympics. Maybe people were upset that the dancers were all dressed up as nurses and patients, when
we all know that in the NHS both these groups are heavily outnumbered by management consultants, IT
contractors and private finance merchants.
For example, it has emerged that the Department of Health (DoH) spent £179.44 million on its
patient record systems. Under the National Programme for IT, the aptly named DoH paid BT £9m for
each Rio patient record system – with 25 of these sold, BT made £224.3m.
But now another buyer, an
NHS Trust, has bought exactly the same system for a fifth of the price. Better still, for the IT
buyers of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, they obtained six year’s worth of
support from their Rio supplier, CSE-Healthcare Systems. That’s a whole year longer than BT
offered.
If the depiction of the NHS in the Olympic Ceremony was to be accurate, there should have been some
suits dancing around, waving contracts and lighting cigars with fifty pound notes. Then the dance
would indeed have been an artistic interpretation that inspired questions. Such as:
How on earth did CSE-Healthcare manage to make a profit on the deal? If they did manage to make a
margin, how much was BT making, by charging five times as much for the same system, only with less
support?
Why did the Department of Health agree to pay five times as much to BT as the NHS Trust paid to
CSE?
Perhaps it was because the NHS was going through a period of dramatic change, and in the confusion
it’s common for costs to escalate. That sort of expenditure won’t be repeated, so resellers must
look to the private sector for change.
Luckily, enterprises are going through a traumatic period of flux, driven by user demands, so there
might be opportunity there – albeit with a much less gullible set of IT buyers.
According to analysts at Gartner a ‘nexus’ of converging forces - social, mobile, cloud and
information - is transforming user behaviour and creating new business opportunities.
These forces for innovation/disruption are ‘revolutionising’ business and society, disrupting old
business models and creating new leaders, says Chris Howard, managing vice president at
Gartner.
Hang on, not another revolution surely? Am I the only person whose heart sinks at the sound of the
R-word?
It wasn’t that long ago that another Gartner analyst, Leif-Olof Wallin, told me that the IT experts
in most big companies dread the bring your own device (BYOD) revolt. Chief information officers, he
told MicroScope, are getting lumbered with all the costs and none of the benefits.
Isn’t it time someone came to their rescue? There must be hundreds of CIOs yearning for the days of
well managed IT services that were secure while being user friendly. Could the BlackBerry make a
comeback? Not if the Playbook – which I’ve been testing out – is anything to go by. Still, there is
still a chance for the BlackBerry to make a comeback.
“We’ve doubled the applications available and created a much larger developer eco system,” says Tim
Hodkinson, RIM’s director of enterprise marketing. The strategy now is to get app developers to
understand the BlackBerry 10 and there are 90,000 of them on-side now.
Law firm Clifford Chance, which allows staff to bring their own devices to work, has simplified
management by using Mobile Fusion (rather than multiple management platforms) to manage all the
tablets and handsets its lawyers bring to work. The Universal Device Service does the job for them
on a single console.
If only spending in the NHS was policed as tightly.
This was first published in August 2012
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