Anyone for Cranberries?

I've just read the latest Intellect report on NHS IT - NHS Information Evolution - all 16 pages of it.  It's not quite as off the mark and wrong-headed as I'd feared when I read the headlines in E-Health Insider.  All that nonsense about learning from Lastminute.com.

But it's not great either.  The biggest problem is that it's breathtakingly superficial in its analysis and happy to make recommendations with little in the way of justification.  It's not that the ideas it puts forward are bad, they just lack logical foundations and hence coherence.

As far as I can see, the author plugs the gaps where some serious analysis and discussion ought to be with filler based on the premise 'everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?'. 

It's a good question, but a document underpinned by genuine intellect would have sought to answer it before trying to formulate recommendations rooted in that analysis.

I've never bought into the view of people like the Guardian's 'Patient From Hell' blogger Dick Vinegar that the failure of the NHS to espouse the latest technology is down to an unholy alliance of conservative doctors and bureaucrats, all too satisfied with the status quo.  That's just the simplistic narrative of journalism where some bogeyman must be to blame.

After all, the vast majority of the people busily not jumping on the new media bandwagon in their working lives are well on board at home. 

No, it must be something more far reaching to constrain progress so extensively and consistently. It must be something inherent in the way the business works, or doesn't work: in the fundamental way that things are organised and arranged.

The Intellect report fails to take the lid off any of that, presumably because the authors don't have enough knowledge or experience of the byzantine political and managerial landscape that constitute the NHS business, and which forms the essential backdrop of any serious attempt to formulate IT policy and strategy.

Obviously, that lack of knowledge didn't stop Richard Grainger, Christine Connelly or Katie Davis.  Oh, then again, perhaps that's exactly what it did.