The Government was anxious to identify a “heavyweight” from the private sector with experience in digital and data, in order to help the NHS make better use of novel technologies. At present, around 20 per cent of hospitals still rely on paper records.
So they’re bringing the ex-Chairman of the TSB? Britain’s banking software being well known as entirely up to date and modern.
What does an x-ray look like in Cobol?
“What does an x-ray look like in Cobol?”
Like an x-ray. Which it wouldn’t, at 10 times the size and complexity and none of the clarity, if you left it to the AGILE crowd.
Dunno if he’s any “good”, but as the article states between the lines his candidacy is not about making the NHS Moar Modern, or even efficient.
It’s all about shifting blame for the inevitable waste of the billions pumped in the NHS. So they need someone used to “working” with billions, instead of someone who knows anything about Medicine, and the efficient application thereof.
Strangely the digital transfer of Xrays was something from the last multibillion IT balls up that actually worked.
They need to talk to HMRC about who does there’s. Each year when I do our self assessment returns I come away impressed with how well it works. They even have a decent and knowledgeable call centre.
It took less time to file them both yesterday than it did to register a LFD result when I took one recently.
@Grikath: The latest crop of programmers would be trying to sell you an NFT of the X-ray, telling you how much money you could make.
They could always get Fujitsu in, the ones that did the Post Offi..
Oh, ok, never mind.
I might be a dissenting voice here, but he might be the perfect person. On projects like this there’s no value in knowing how to embrace the new technology unless you can get all your old data and processes up to date. It’s the migration that’s the key. As well as having worked with huge quantities of out of date software, I think being involved with some software failures is a point in his favour. He’s got first hand experience of what goes wrong and what happens next.
But will I (or my estate) eventually get £150 when my urgent diagnosis gets lost?
I have to agree with BiND there. I logged onto the HMRC application this year and it told me not to bother ! Impressed.
They should keep their hands off and just let EMIS, SystmOne and Focus continue doing perfectly well from the bottom upwards.
Another one to agree with BIND. The only flaw is the “General Comments” box isn’t free format, it refuses such esoteric characters as – & £ + % ( ) and newline. Of course in a tax return I’m never going to need to write: The first £500 and then the next 50% of the income from 56-58 Church Lane…. Though I’ll grumpily accept that for the smoothness of everything else, and if fixing that would risk damaging the rest of the process I’d say keep off.
Given that £ is really just a stylised L, then just use that. Write the rest out longhand. If the taxcunts can’t understand it, it’s their problem.
“So they’re bringing the ex-Chairman of the TSB? Britain’s banking software being well known as entirely up to date and modern.
What does an x-ray look like in Cobol?”
Britain’s banking software works very well. The main reason so much is in COBOL is that it’s mature and resilient and rewriting it into something more modern would cost a lot of money and possibly introduce risks. Not broke, don’t fix it. And what most of the banks have done is to silo it into services, so all the new stuff around it is in java or .net.
And there’s nothing really *wrong* with COBOL. It’s missing some of the nice features of a language like C#. OO is either non-existent or not as good, no reflection, not as good for string handling. But can you process files and database records with it? Yes, you can.
The bigger problem is that it’s not about the man. It’s about the incentives and the culture. No-one blows even a fraction of £12bn on a software project in the private sector without getting something live because they want to see something for their money. They carefully track what is being delivered. No-one in government cares. OK, it’ll be in some public accounts committee report, but that’s after it’s happened. And no-one gets fired for it.
But does the ex-chairman of the TSB actually know anything about IT? If he does, then he’d probably be a reasonable choice – used to chucking £billions around and trying the manage the “consultancies” that are all too willing to help him do so (in their direction naturally).
If he doesn’t then he’s no more use than any other top-level manager, effectively steeped in the “cult of the amateur” so much beloved of the Civil Service.
Personally, I’d opt for the head IT honcho of a big bank. OK, their software might not be “bleeding edge” (and a damned-good thing too!!) but it’s bloody reliable (as long as they don’t too too much outsourcing to the con-shops in India).
to add… and handles phenomenal amounts of data.
What Grikath said. The cool new bleeding edge approach would involve microservices architecture on a Kubernetes platform in the Cloud, with all the inherent security of exposing your data to the dirty internet, undocumented reliance on a key open source software component that’s built and maintained by one guy in Nebraska in his spare time, and implemented by the finest, cheapest Pajeets from the Mumbai Institute of Googling GitHub And Copypastaing Code They Don’t Understand.
Baron Jackfield,
“But does the ex-chairman of the TSB actually know anything about IT? If he does, then he’d probably be a reasonable choice – used to chucking £billions around and trying the manage the “consultancies” that are all too willing to help him do so (in their direction naturally).”
I would bet yes. The thing with retail banking and building societies is that it’s mostly about making sure the computers are working, doing their job. As this became more and more the case, you got people running them (like Brian Davis) who had come through from IT.
The other thing is that almost everyone in an operational part of business has to deal with IT. And unlike government, it has to work. You write off a huge IT project that you sponsored, you are probably fucked. It’s a catastrophe when delivered, you are also fucked. Most people in business management have worked their way up and worked with IT and in broad terms, get it right. They don’t hire total idiots, they keep the requirements as simple as possible etc.
The civil service doesn’t have the same incentives. No-one got fired for their part in NPFIT. You can create the most ridiculous, over-specified requirements because it’s not their money. Which means that instead of just buying software off-the-shelf that does the job, the civil service has to have it custom made by one of the big agencies.
“And Copypastaing Code”
Thank you Steve, for a Christmas Eve chuckle. That one has mileage.
Spaghetti coding at its best.
@BiW
If the taxcunts can’t understand it, it’s their problem.
Here on the left side of the Pond, it’s your problem. In tax court, you have to prove your innocence. I spent six months and a dozen letters to get the IRS to add two numbers correctly. It is not their job to understand.
The reason that Cobol was used for business data processing (rather than Fortran, Algol or PL/1, which would have been the alternatives at the time) was that it was possible to show Cobol source code to an (intelligent) end user, explain what it was doing, and check that’s what they wanted. That’s not really possible with C#. OTOH a language where a misplaced (and hard to spot) ‘.’ can completely change the logic isn’t necessarily ideal.
I’ve never understood the fascination with banking software, which consists almost entirely of:
The difficulty and complexity lies in doing that billions of times a day with 24×7 reliability, but in pure programming terms, bill of materials processing is 10x more complex.
A pal who is a civil engineer asked why IT projects are always disasters ?
We explained that when one builds a bridge, one will know the span and the height and will have some equations to match them all together.
In IT we have a starting concept, let’s call it “wheel” and we have to design it from scratch each time, with all this extra functionality ( eg the ability to rotate) that the customer insists on loading onto the development. Then six months into the project, when we have melted down all the gold to make this “wheel”, someone notices that it is triangular…
One of the differences between civil engineering and software ‘engineering’ is that, if just one of the bolts holding your bridge together has a manufacturing flaw and fails, the whole lot won’t plunge to the ground (or, at least, if it does it was a *really* badly designed bridge). But with software, that kind of scenario is a real possibility.
One of the biggest problems of a large coding project is nailing down the specification.
With the NHS fiasco, the requirements kept changing throughout the development, which meant there was never a clearly defined product that the contractor was bound to deliver. So they didn’t. And they kept charging for all the extra boondoggles that were continually added on.
The companies who contract to supply to the Public Sector love to deal with Civil Servants, who are too incompetent/lazy/powerless to craft a proper ironclad contract and who know they will never be held accountable if a project goes pear-shaped.