Braben and Bell in the Radio Times

[Disembodied]

Ah. Well that would explain the inevitability of the next government train-wreck: the NHS national computer network...

Oh, that's just a warm-up for the bigger SNAFU of the Identity Card scheme... Yes, let's entrust huge amounts of personal identification information to not just this but all future governments, in a country without a written constitution, so some ninny can accidentally upload it for everyone to see, lose it in the post, dump it at a roundabout (!) or leave it on a train! If I wasn't helping to pay for all this it would be funny.

(These are just the tip of the iceberg; there's the DWP (again), the DVLC, the MoD, the Police, and laptop thefts -- including one from a Cabinet Minister -- too numerous to mention.)

[DaddyHoggy]

Well, this thread certainly has gone a wandering, hasn't it!?

[Disembodied]

Er... yes, sorry about that. I blame it on the fact that I only get Council telly, minus even the occasional interesting thing that Channel 5 might show if they don't have any cricket highlights (an oxymoron, surely!).

[JohnnyBoy]

In this article (from 2004): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3613220.stm it's overbudget at £6.2Bn

By the time this article is written (in 2007) its up to £12.4Bn! http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/ ... tlight.htm

£12.4 billion. Am I the only one who wonders why this national project wasn't handled as an open-source venture? Not only could some of the country's brightest minds have been allowed to put a robust and evolving computer system together, but the taxpayer could have saved about 12.399 billion quid.
(As an aside, somebody's already keeping the financial score: "Squandered" by David Craig and "The Bumper Book of Government Waste" by Elliot and Rotherham)

This is the one run by Crapita isn't it? (As Private Eye refers to them)

"Run by" - Hmm, that was a term that once gave the impression that somebody was in control. Oh, those were the days....

Oh, that's just a warm-up for the bigger SNAFU of the Identity Card scheme... Yes, let's entrust huge amounts of personal identification information to not just this but all future governments, in a country without a written constitution...

Yeah, that one just might be the mother of all train wrecks....

Well, this thread certainly has gone a wandering, hasn't it!?

Well, we've managed to maintain the common theme of how the ruling classes have no grasp of science/technology. I thought we did rather well!

[Selezen]

National Prgramme for IT? Pah! National programme for SHIT, more like.

Speaking as someone who was (until VERY recently) involved in NPfIT, it was/is a bag of wank. In the East Midlands they spend over a million on a new system for local practices that was binned just before completion because it hadn't delivered what was promised.

That's a million quid of taxpayers money down the drain for nothing.

Why is NPfIT (or Connecting For Health as it's now known) such a disaster? Because it hasn't been managed properly. The place I worked was a good example of the NHS in its approach to project management. Lip service is paid up to a point, but at the end it's the senior managers and directors who pull the strings and they don't have a CLUE about how IT should be used or implemented. The people who are responsible for actually executing the work that is being planned are given huge bloated pieces of work to do and no time to do it. They don't have a specification or any sort of project tolerances. The best bit is that once the software has been developed according to what it is THOUGHT has been asked for, the clients are turning round and saying that it isn't what they asked for, or that it doesn't do the job well enough! So they expect people to come up with exactly what they want without actually telling the developers what they want!

Madness.

[DaddyHoggy]

Just the usual then - glad I stopped programming...

[JohnnyBoy]

I've just looked it up on Wikipedia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Programme_for_IT ...and it's pretty shocking stuff.

[TGHC]

IIRC the guy who is running the project failed his IT exams at school.

[JohnnyBoy]

IIRC, the government hadn't even appointed a computer-savvy manager to take charge of any IT super-projects until 2002. Before then, project after project had been given to senior civil servants to manage and had been utterly screwed up at colossal expense to the taxpayer (Remember the computer system commissioned for the Passport Agency? Or the one for the Child Support Agency?).

The government had presided over so many IT balls-ups that the National Audit Office broke with tradition; instead of starting its audit of government work after the project was completed, the NAO opened a file on the NPfIT to monitor the work before it had even begun.

And all of this at about the same time that Tony Blair was attending lessons to teach him how to use a web browser.

You couldn't make it up.

[Disembodied]

You couldn't make it up.

Sad but true... fiction fails when it collides head-on with contemporary political stupidity. Like, for example, Tony and Cherie Blair having a rebirthing ceremony inside a pyramid in Mexico, where they also rebalanced their energy flows (nice) and prayed for world peace. In August 2001. So that went well, then. Remind me again, why are we not out on the streets, dragging these loons behind us in a tumbril?

Sorry to send things off at another tangent -- although I suppose it's still connected via the "our politicians are morons" theme!

[Cmdr. Maegil]

Remind me again, why are we not out on the streets, dragging these loons behind us in a tumbril?

I guess it's because of your very monarchic system: you've got nobles and their proteges, and they all need jobs...
You Brits only perform well under life-and-death threats, when you finally have to sack the incompetents just to stay alive. IIRC, you had poor starts on every major war you got into for the last 200 years and only improved when things got so bad that you had to remove the freeloaders and put real commanders in charge.

Sorry to send things off at another tangent -- although I suppose it's still connected via the "our politicians are morons" theme!

Thread derailing is one of this boards' favourite hobbies!

[Disembodied]

Hmm... maybe. Although "not being good at war" is, in my opinion, something to be rather proud of, it's hard to see how we could have carved out an Empire covering one-sixth of the land surface of the globe by not being good at invading, killing, looting, conquering and so on.

I think it's because we shot our bolt too soon, historically speaking. Britain -- actually, specifically England -- used to be regarded as a seething mass of chaos and insurrection. I mean, throughout the medieval period England was "ravaged by civil war" on a pretty much permanent basis, from 1100 to the end of the 15th century: pretty good going considering they were also making life deeply unpleasant for all their neighbours at the same time. Then they switched to religious strife, keeping that running for another 200 years, in the middle of which they deposed and then beheaded their king, setting up a republic ages before anyone else in Europe thought of doing anything like it. Now nobody seems to be bothered about the fact that the closest we come to being a democracy is every few years we have a choice between a right-wing party with blue ties or a right-wing party with pink ties, where 24% of the electorate is, apparently, a mandate. Tut.

See, what I think happened is that all the stroppy people, the genetically bolshie and awkward, they all were at the front lines and manning the barricades for over 500 years, too busy overthrowing things to breed. Instead, the more placid ones passed on their genes. The current generations are the descendants of those too mild to protest; the ones who said "I'd love to come and overthrow the Church/State/etc. but these leaves won't rake themselves" or "Oh, but the kettle's just boiled".

[Cmdr. Maegil]

You got me partially wrong - I mentioned the martial results as an extreme example, and didn't say you weren't good at it (you are) - just that most of the British 'normal' leadership stinks of nepotism and cronyism, and it's only when things really go bad that they get replaced by people with real qualifications; even then, they still must have some connection to the 'old boys'.

Returning to the martial matters, I refered to major wars - American revolution part II, Napoleonic wars, the Boers, Crimea, WWI&II, etc. In lesser engagements, well, there's the assimetric warfare thingy that eases the path - see Argentina or Irak.

[TGHC]

as far as nepotism is concerned, I'm only interested if I'm involved.

[Disembodied]

You got me partially wrong - I mentioned the martial results as an extreme example, and didn't say you weren't good at it (you aren't) - just that most of the British 'normal' leadership stinks of nepotism and cronyism, and it's only when things really go bad that they get replaced by people with real qualifications; even then, they still must have some connection to the 'old boys'.

Ach, well, everybody's military is like that, really. Get a bunch of men together, create a hierarchical system and place lots of emphasis on Obeying Orders and Doing What You're Told, and watch as the incompetence flows out like guano from a diarrhoeic cormorant. In the absence of any kind of limiting factor, e.g. an enemy actively trying to kill you, a military hierarchy is an almost perfect mechanism for siphoning the dimwits to the top. See, for example, the various studies of officer cadet photos from West Point, where facial appearance was a surer guide to final rank than their qualifications or abilities. It's all a matter of "looking like a leader" and "fitting in".

But the Old Boy network is a definite problem in Britain. Almost all of the current Tory party Shadow Cabinet went to the same (exclusive, private) school. Practically the entire upper echelons of the Civil Service went to Oxbridge (after first attending exclusive, private schools). Where did I put that tumbril?