The NHS is going through another seismic reorganisation and the future of the IT agency, NHS Connecting for Health (CFH), is under question. Nobody seems to know where it will fit in the ‘future state’ or even whether it has any kind of role at all. Setting aside the half-arsed way that the government has gone about this reorganisation and the woolly-minded thinking that underpins it (I know, that’s setting a lot aside), a question has arisen about the re-branding of the organisation in order to ditch what is perceived to have become a discredited brand.
This is not new. Part of the legacy of Christine Connelly’s time as Department of Health CIO is that of brand confusion. CC was keen to incorporate NHS CFH into what she termed the DH Informatics Directorate, but found that she couldn’t because the lion’s share of the organisation’s staff are NHS employees. Although CFH is an ‘executive agency’ of the DH, in practice it operates as an NHS body and not as part of DH. So when it came down to it, the Technology Office happily rebranded itself as DHID, but the rest of the organisation remained as CFH in the absence of a clear steer from above.
A large part of wanting to subsume CFH into DHID was connected to the perception that the CFH brand had become contaminated, and on this score, there is considerable ‘form’. Historically, the Information Management Group (IMG) brand had been ditched for similar reasons and the NHS Information Authority (NHSIA) set up to replace some of its functions. The bolt-gun was applied to the metaphorical head of the IA for similar reasons as what was then NPfIT (National Programme for IT) came into being. Even CFH was cooked up in part because the NPfIT brand was starting to look rather tatty after only a couple of years in existence.
Now I want to make it very clear, I hate the name NHS Connecting for Health. Part of that hatred stems from the supposed origin of the name in a competition run at the time which supposedly evaluated a number of options. I don’t believe there was ever a real competition, and this was just a smoke-screen to make CFH employees feel they were all contributing to naming the new baby. I think the name was actually concocted at the highest levels with the very political intention of 1) avoiding any overt reference to information or IT lest it turn off NHS managers and clinicians; 2) get over the idea that we’re working to connect the NHS and what a jolly good idea that is. Frankly this is patronising tosh and anybody with half a brain in the wider service will see it for what it is, and very soon make the connection that CFH is about IT.
On top of that, it’s very true that the brand has become contaminated and that CFH has a very poor reputation across the NHS and with the national media – both specialist and generalist.
So why wouldn’t a rebranding help? Well for a start, the organisation does not have any kind of plan to address its manifold shortcomings, although the even bigger challenge is to carve out a viable niche for itself in the new NHS. So no idea what its role and purpose is, and no plan to tackle its shortcomings, which means no chance that this particular leopard will be changing its spots any time soon. That being the case, a rebranding right now would only serve to generate more cynicism in the service about the IT agency and lead to another contaminated brand that will need ditching in a year or two’s time. To bastardise Shakespeare: ‘a turd by any other name…’.
So what to do? I think the example to follow has to be Skoda. Not that long ago, this was a contaminated brand too – a national joke in this country and elsewhere, despite the firm’s enviable record in rallying and proud history of innovation and engineering skills from way back. So would it have helped to rename the company Adoks back in 1988, or would comedians have just tweaked the punch line to their crap car jokes? Probably the latter.
So instead, they set about changing the company: becoming part of the VW Group and rebuilding it around a couple of basic but well engineered products- the Fabia and Octavia – using VW technical platforms. It’s taken a long time, but twenty years later, nobody is telling Skoda jokes anymore unless they want to look out of date. And there are plenty of their cars on British and other European roads. Czech-mate I’d say.
So CFH should follow their lead – concentrating on a focused set of reliable products and services which it can use to build a new image based on a track record of successful delivery. Then in five years time, when perceptions of the organisation have been changed by actions rather than words, that is the time to consider changing the brand.
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