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apparently it has just been revealed that the government spent 11.8 million pounds on the app.
some people I know involved in software development for big companies say that seems like an awful lot for what it was/time spent developing it.
I believe they were paying top whack money to get it down ASAP, which is understandable
it wasnt working, so they had 3 options
keep on developing it, spending more money and it still not working
release a app that didnt do the job ( putting us at risk )
write if off and look at something else ( the google / apple app )
with all of them options they were dammed with whatever they decided to do
i'm guessing once a big organisation approaches a supplier that supplier has the upper hand in charging whatever if can , as they know the requirement critical and urgent , I'm sure the same happens with everything procured in this crises, very sad really providers will want to make a buck for government and NHS at such critical times with folk dying .
I remember us debating it!
It seemed a strange thing to do, when there was already something that could have worked. I got the feeling at the time that the government were hell bent on trying to show they could be world leaders in something, possibly to get one over on a certain political and trade union, but let's not go there. Dare I say it, but every time I hear how we're going to be world beaters at something, I get a rather underwhelming feeling, a feeling that a cockup is imminent. If something works from elsewhere, use it.
I think the more pertinent questions are around the business and IT architecture around the "app". Did NHSX contract a single supplier to provide the end-to-end service with a single supplier responsible and accountable for delivery of the outcome? Or did it have a procurement strategy of contracting for "lots" where a few small to medium enterprises were contracted to provide different bits of the service and NHSX was the integrator and took on the risk for delivering the outcome rather than paying a premium to the prime contractor to deliver it on their behalf and setting that risk/reward into the contract. Until you know what £12m was supposed to deliver and who owned the risk I think we are all pissing in the wind.
The issue is, the Apple/Google app doesn't work that well either. It cannot distinguish whether you have been 1m or 3m away from a covid infected person. In fairness to the Government, this is what they were aiming to achieve but their app works on 75% of android phones and a whopping 4% of Apple phones.
It is incredible the rate at which the Government rush out to tell us good news is on the way, we have a game changer coming up. Only, to then go back and say "um, no, and it isn't that important anyway". I reckon Boris Johnson tells his wife/girlfriend/mistress (delete if appropriate, no? Ok then) their Christmas presents well in advance of the big day.
So who was the integrator and who took the risk, one of those contractors or NHSX? If it was the latter, and that would fit as the Government Digital Service mantra was big IT (think Accenture, IBM etc) bad......Small and Medium Enterprises using Agile development tools good. The problem being that government has not recreated quality in-house programme and integration management teams so instead of paying 25% mark up for an integrator to own some of the risk the government teams full of starry eyed idealists take on that role. if, as you say, there were 15 contractors involved then NHSX would own the integration of the APIs between the user interface and the back-end systems when all the 15 developers were blaming each other as none of them wants to end up with contractual liaibility!
It would be unlikely that a single contractor would take all the risk and I would suspect it would be down to NHSX. I've worked on projects with 2 contractors and the conference calls are painful when it comes to identifying which cog is not working. 15 contractors, well, it would be easy for a CGI (say) or Unisys type company to go missing with fingers pointing elsewhere.