Whitehall is doing it again – ignoring the low-hanging fruit to make a precarious climb in search of perfection (Analysis: Is the government’s fast broadband delivery strategy starting to fall apart?)

Even in rural areas, most customers are fairly close to distribution boxes, and upgrading these with a fibre to the exchange would greatly enhance the speed for every customer. OK, not super-fast, but an upgrade from 2Mbit/s to 8Mbit/s would be a big boon to rural businesses.

In my case, I get 2.2Mbit/s over a 3km run to the exchange, but the box is only 200m away. Upgrading the connection to a couple of boxes would give fast service to every ADSL user in the village, surely a better investment than offering super-fast service to the few subscribers willing to pay a premium. 

Just as NHS Connecting for Health ignored the cheaper option of building interfaces between systems that already worked, so the current initiative ignores a simple approach to reducing the urban/rural divide.

Eric Bodger

It comes as no real surprise that MPs have heavily criticised the Department of Health (DoH) for the failings of the NHS IT programme (Parliament slams DoH’s handling of NPfIT). Indeed, there have been three fundamental issues from the outset that have contributed to its flaws.

First, there was next to no engagement with the stakeholders or potential end-users as to what goals the DoH was aiming to achieve from the project. Secondly, as a consequence of this, the suppliers had insufficient direction as to precisely what end goal was required and being aimed for. Finally, the project has expanded so much that it has become unmanageable.

The three faults of the NHS programme could have been readily countered were an agile development methodology applied from the start.

Agile intrinsically requires a regular detailed engagement with the end-users, such that progress can be constantly assessed according to the specific need. Because of this process of ongoing assessment and revision, projects where requirements are unclear stand a greater chance of success as the accuracy of the end goal is constantly examined and even changed if deemed appropriate. Provided the end result delivers real business value, it will be rightly deemed a success, even though it may not match the originally intended goal. Sometimes a project may take a little longer to complete, but that is much better than a total and costly failure.

Andrew Wilcox, IPL

I, like Carers UK, am very concerned about passing on personal medical information to outside agencies.

People with mental illness, HIV/Aids or other stigmatised conditions will be wary of this process. Discrimination against those patients may be reinforced. I would urge the Department of Health to fully explore these issues and set up a wider consultation with users of healthcare services and their carers before any implementation.

Jaya Kathrecha