Customers (at least the big ones) want to have a lot of influence over what we develop. At the same time, they love the idea of having very big international suppliers, which will be harder to influence.

I don’t understand how people get this to make sense.

In may 2011 a part of the insanely complex NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) was violently slammed by auditors. In a debate following the report a Member of Parliament claimed:

 a teenager in their bedroom can automate an e-mail from one system to another, or to a mobile phone; all that is trivial these days

In a post yesterday I said:

Leaders centralizing IT-projects have taken on a mandate that the public has not given them. They do that because they lack knowledge.

Thank you, Ian Swelles, MP. What a great illustration of my point!

I’m a Swede. My image of my home country is that it’s more state-controlled, centralized and regulated that most other places in the world. Especially places like the original free-trade champion England.

Well, time to think again. I’ve made some rough comparisons of the health care system in six countries in the diagrams below. Green means private, blue means public. Dark blue is state.

Hospital financing:

Hospital ownership/control

Fact:
The UK is far more state-controlled than any other country. As a consequence, IT-projects are more centrally controlled than anywhere else.

Fact:
Standish Group long ago concluded that small size was directly correlated to success in IT-projects.

Not surprising result:
The NHS National Programme for health IT in the UK is probably the most critized IT-project in the history of mankind.

The organization of health care probably reflects public opinion reasonably well. In these countries (except Holland), people generally feel it’s a good idea to to have strong public control over hospitals. Therefore, politicians have constructed such systems. And I am not going to argue with that.

However, citizens don’t care about how IT-projects are controlled. Leaders centralizing IT-projects have taken on a mandate that the public has not given them. They do that because they lack knowledge. They haven’t learned the lessons that everyone in the IT-industry have learned since the sixties (you have read The Mythical Man-Month, right?).

What can we do to, for once, learn from our history?