Au revoir Christine

The news that Christine Connelly has resigned as the DH Chief Information Officer was met with a similar kind of weeping and waling that greeted Richard Granger’s exit more than three years ago.  At least CC had the decency to announce her departure in a more conventional way to Mr Granger’s ridiculous ‘transitioning off’ statement.  Although the formal word is that she is resigning, both the speed of her departure and the word on the bush telegraph seem to indicate that her continued input was not required by the powers that be.  For that you can read that Sir Dave did not want her on board in the Commissioning Board.

As for her legacy, it’s difficult to work out exactly what that will be.  On EHI I suggested that the Interoperability Toolkit or ITK was about the only significant thing, given that we still have failing LSPs and not much else to show for her three years at the helm.  I’d go further and suggest that there is even less of a sense of direction than there was when she took over.  This I attribute to her private sector background and her expectation that IT strategy would be driven from the top down with the DH taking responsibility for dictating the needs of the business. 

This ‘corporate’ view of how things ought to work with the DH acting as the head office of the NHS is still very prevalent within CFH, indeed the entire Delivery Framework is designed around this principle.  Unfortunately, the relationship between the DH and the NHS is far from that simple and ownership of IT projects, authority and accountability are far messier.  In my view this is key to both Richard Granger and Christine Connelly’s failure at the head of NHS IT, because without an appreciation of the complex relationships and power structures in the DH / NHS world, it’s impossible to come up with a strategy that has any chance of success.

In this, CC hardly got off the starting blocks as I expect she was waiting for a clear steer from the NHS board as to what the IT priorities should be in the context of the business priorities.  Positioning yourself as subordinate to the business in this way may win you brownie points in industry, but in DH /NHS world it makes you look clueless and like you don’t have an agenda.

Like everything else this is pure speculation, but that’s my guess as to why she’s making such an abrupt exit.