Mistake
It has been widely reported (here, here and here) that Accenture is subcontracting the remaining blame for the failure-to-be that is the NHS’s “Connecting for Health” project to CSC. My employer has outsourced all of the company’s IT, from cabling infrastructure to web management, to CSC and I can’t say that CSC’s involvement with the NHS fills me with joy. I’ll just post my CSC experiences…
Regularly, about once a week, someone in my department of forty will have their Windows profile overwitten or deleted for no apparent reason. You can see the expectation is that everyone will have theirs buggered about once a year, or more. What you have to do then is call the woefully mis-titled “Help Desk”, where someone who doesn’t really understand what they’re doing takes you through The Ring-Binder Of Questions in excruciating detail.
Maybe there are some people who call the help desk without having checked that their power, network and keyboard connections are plugged in. Maybe there are some people who aren’t sure whether this is what their desktop looked like yesterday, who don’t remember deleting all their e-mail. And I’m not saying this is easy – its really, really difficult to diagnose a problem on someone’s computer without actually being there. So, after about 15 minutes of pointless questions they give a reference number and send someone from the local office over.
Perhaps ironically, the CSC people from the local office are actually knowlegable and helpful. Its such a pity we don’t deal with them directly.
So, when one in forty patients are given the wrong drugs or the wrong operation, we’ll know to check that their catheter is plugged in correctly.
Sadly, I very much doubt that
1 comment October 1st, 2006