What’s strange is that it worked so well for Stalin
The electrification of the Soviet Union — or “Connecting for Health”, as it is now known — appear to be in even more trouble than it was to begin with. Why anyone would think that anything like this would ever work is beyond me, and not simply because of the involvement of management consultants at the very top, but because the rest of the world now understands that it’s the market that delivers innovation, creativity, solutions. If there’s no market, there’s no progress…
Had there been a more competitive market we’d have had something better sooner.
[From Fujitsu to withdraw from the NPfIT - what happens now? (Tony Collins's IT Projects Blog)]
Quite.
There is no centralised approach that can possible deliver a working solution (as I know very well from my time at NATO) because it takes too long to deliver and because local circumstances vary so greatly. Surely it makes more sense to concentrate on interconnection and leave the decisions on which systems to use for what down at the local level, a decentralising approach that fits with what the rest of the world is doing. IT cannot fix the problem of over-centralisation, no matter how much you spend on it.