Already three years late, NHS finance system replacement delayed again
- Reference: 1739271666
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/02/11/nhs_finance_system_delayed/
- Source link:
The Integrated Single Financial Environment (ISFE) processes around £170 billion ($211 billion) in health spending every year for NHS England, which is responsible for running the health service in England.
Plans to upgrade the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 system have been afoot since 2018, when the quango under the Department of Health and Social Care said the replacement would go live in April 2021.
[1]
An NHS England spokesperson confirmed to The Register that a revised go-live date of April 2024 had been missed.
[2]
[3]
"A decision was taken to extend the planning and testing for this highly complex critical national infrastructure and a revised launch date in 2025 for the new system will be communicated shortly," they said.
"The current system and service continue to operate as normal and we remain committed to the successful delivery of this next-generation national finance system, ensuring that services, the system, and users are operationally ready for its arrival."
[4]
In its [5]annual report for 2023-24 , the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, a UK government projects watchdog, said NHS England's project to upgrade ISFE had been rated red, meaning "successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable."
"The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed," said the report published last month.
The IPA report said the new finance system would support the NHS England Group of organizations, consisting of 42 Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), four Commissioning Support Units (CSUs), NHS England, and a provider organization with annual funding of £170 billion.
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The [7]data published with the IPA report said: "Following recommendations from a Red Gate 0 report in February 2024, an action plan is under development and the program is undergoing a re-planning exercise to determine a new go-live date."
Data from the [8]2020-21 IPA report said NHS England had planned to go live with the system in April 2024.
In December 2022, [9]NHS England awarded the £108 million ($134 million) ISFE contract – without competition – to the incumbent supplier, NHS Shared Business Services, a joint venture between the NHS and French outsourcer Sopra Steria.
[10]Cyberattack on NHS causes hospitals to miss cancer care targets
[11]UK govt must learn fast and let failing projects die young
[12]Ransom gang claims attack on NHS Alder Hey Children's Hospital
[13]NHS major 'cyber incident' forces hospitals to use pen and paper
The procurement process began in 2018, when a [14]prior information notice (PIN), designed to gather intelligence from suppliers before the formal competition started, priced the project at £200 million ($248 million) and said that a contract notice would be published by March 18, 2019.
In April 2021, [15]NHS England was forced to extend the contract with NHS Shared Business Services for the ISFE to accommodate delays to the procurement, at a cost of £59.2 million ($73.3 million).
"The ISFE re-procurement project is a large and complex project which will deliver a replacement for the current service," the procurement document said. "During the planning stages for the re-procurement, it was identified that short-term uncertainties regarding Group structure posed significant challenges to finalising a tender specification during 2019 with a view to implementing a replacement service by April 2021. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that the project team and other key colleagues have had to focus their resources on keeping critical business processes running and work on the procurement of the new contract has inevitably been delayed."
NHS England decided to go to market for an HR and payroll system in a separate £2 billion ($2.48 billion) competition, which it launched in August 2021. That month, [16]NHS England missed a deadline in the procurement of the ISFE system .
In the meantime, [17]NHS England decided to go to market for a separate HR system and a new electronic staff records system in a procurement that could be worth up to £1.7 billion ($2.1 billion).
The ISFE runs on Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 and is expected to migrate to Oracle Fusion Cloud Financials. With the new system, NHS England anticipates a new cloud-based finance service that is capable of integrating the ERP platform with technologies and automated processes to exploit the "unique benefits of cloud-based services." ®
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[5] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/678a4a9869b9b76c761d0574/IPA_Annual_Report_2023-24.pdf
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[7] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/infrastructure-and-projects-authority-annual-report-2023-24
[8] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/infrastructure-and-projects-authority-annual-report-2021
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/15/nhs_sopra_steria_contract/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/04/cyberattack_on_nhs_hospitals_sees/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/04/ukgov_must_embrace_a_fastlearning/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/inc_ransom_alder_hey_childrens_hospital/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/28/wirral_nhs_cyber_incident/
[14] https://ted.europa.eu/en/notice/-/detail/530176-2018
[15] https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/008081-2021
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/02/nhs_erp_deadline/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/25/nhs_hr_payroll_procurement/
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: So they're moving from Oracle to Oracle...
It was always doomed, not simply because of Oracle, but because NHSE has been in continuous organisational upheaval for the past four years, thanks primarily to reorganisation kicked off by infamous wanker Matt Hancock. They've had to take on bits of Public Health England, they're trying to hive off work to the under-funded Integrated Care Boards, they've downsized, overdone it and re-recruited, now they're trying to downsize again "to reduce costs".
To be fair, we never hear of the thousands of NHS IT projects that are delivered on time and to budget.
Nobody ever hears of projects delivered on time and on budget. Unfortunately it seems nobody ever learns from those that weren't.
Because the absolute minimum I expect - and which is expected of me in my profession - is to deliver projects on time and to budget.
If it was vastly early and cheaper... hell, that's noteworthy.
If it was vastly late and far more expensive... that's noteworthy.
"We did what we correctly planned to do and it happened as expected within our given safety margins" is not news. It's just ordinary operation.
It's the absolute, bare minimum of competency to do that. Everything else is incompetence or over-achieving.
Is it Oracle?
Remember the old advertising slogan "Is it live, or is it Memorex?"
I feel that IT projects which are late and over-budget should have an equivalent:
"Is it late, or is it Oracle?"
Is anyone aware of project involving Oracle that was delivered on time and within budget?
Anyone?
Anyone?
Oracle
Only clicked on the article to find one word.
Found it.
There's ya problem.
Rinse and repeat.
In these columns we are becoming accustomed to yet another delayed Oracle project. Oracle get paid either way so they don't take a hit on their bottom line. They don't seem to "bat back" at the criticisms either so reputational damage is something they don't worry about.
Whilst the alternatives are few at this scale and the risk of moving to, say SAP, is far from small, how could this situation ever change? Oracle will just get richer by the day.
Councils, NHS and others just have to suck it up it seems.
Re: Rinse and repeat.
The actual work to try and make the out of the box system work for it's intended purpose is invariably carried out by an a Oracle "partner". That will be a third party with an interest in pushing more Oracle products as they get a nice fee from Oracle, but they are otherwise independent of Oracle. That means Oracle are insulated from the potential penalties in the contract to deliver a system (although the civil service and most private enterprises are terrible at writing penalty clauses that can effectively be enforced).
The frustration with this system is that it is intended to replace one that works. They usually get replaced because the core software is no longer supported by the vendor and the vendor makes it impossible to maintain or extend the system any further. So it's a rip and replace rather than evolving the existing system. Government needs to start getting serious about building systems based on open source foundations, and funding adequate ongoing development to keep them up to date.
In my experience, it's eminently possible to evolve a system based on an open source foundation for decades. The main system I work on is just that - 25 years old (a core "modular monolith" and several dozen smaller applications) with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It runs on the same foundation it started with, Java and PostgreSQL. The biggest change was replacing a custom IoC container with the Spring Framework then eventually Spring Boot, and it runs on the latest stable PostgreSQL.
The knowledge to build horizontally scalable, well layered and modular systems is hardly new, although it seems each successive generation has to learn some of the same mistakes (the hideous "microservices" architecture to give a recent example). Perhaps governments need to bring development back in house and foster knowledge transfer as each new generation of developers arrive.
Re: Rinse and repeat.
Perhaps governments need to bring development back in house and foster knowledge transfer as each new generation of developers arrive.
As a civil servant, I can only respond "Bwahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahahaaahaaaaa!"
Technically what you say is redolent with wisdom and experience, but in the political duopolies that run most anglophone countries, it can't work. Take the UK now. If Starmer's government decided to increase public sector IT development and put in the resources to build their systems from FOSS foundations, with proper documentation, proper product controls, and skilled and well paid permies, that would last only until even his government has a necessity to find a few quid to cut, eg to head off a government borrowing crisis. If that scenario is avoided, it's still curtains for in house development as soon as the proven charlatans who are currently His Majesty's Loyal Opposition next get into power. They have an ideological hatred of the public sector, and all the development and IP will be thrown away, skilled staff got rid of.
Government should be entirely about the big picture, the long term, and national strategies. But we all can see that it is fact short term, expedient, and the offices of politics are infested with the lowest calibre makeweights the country has to offer.
Quango
That triggered an automatic memory : [1]Jobs for the Boys .
Sorry, but Yes Minister has to be the best political satire that has ever been written.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751810/
Re: Quango
> Yes Minister has to be the best political satire that has ever been written.
Yes Minister has to be the best political documentary that has ever been written.
HR and Payroll
£2 billion? Is that a misprint?
How many IT staff - programmers/analysts - could they employ for that?
Or does that include new hardware?
But still - how bloody much?
So they're moving from Oracle to Oracle...
And expect everything to work ?
What a surprise !