Into the valley of death

Many, many years ago, I was a military chap. I look back on my ten years defending Queen and country with fond memories and an ever-increasing amount of nostalgia for an organisation that was just that - organised! Quite often I resort to military metaphors to try and get across what I see are some of the things our senior NHS dafties get up to.

Time to bring on Connecting for Health.

CfH is a big plan. No, bigger than that. It's bloody enormous! Conceived as a "let's do away with these little systems and get big companies installing massive systems across whole regions". Multi-million pound contracts that now have a couple of extra noughts on the price tag. A completion date that is moving away so fast you'd have the warp drive from the USS Enterprise to keep up with it. The functionality is poor. The user interfaces are "clunky" and the speed of the system often reminds me of telex. Apart from that, it's a winner?

It feels like a battle where the plan was to capture the enemies' gun emplacements on the hilltop so the infantry could advance in safety across the valley and engage the main enemy force. Good plan. However ...

The attack on hilltop fails. When told, the general realises that the main body of troops has already started advancing. "Well, they've started now so I guess we'll just have to let them carry on. It would be just too embarrassing to admit defeat before the main event!"

Delays to right of them, cost overruns to the left of them,
Into the Valley of Financial Death rode the 600 ... um ..milllion
nope make that 2,4 billion
ooops, I meant to say 12,6 billion
or should that have been 16,billion

for an electronic care record to be delivered in 2005,
2007,
2009,
2011,
2014 .....