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So easy to pass judgement on critical software decisions from the outside, with absolutely no knowledge of how they work or their training, the pressure from Go

So easy to pass judgement on critical software decisions from the outside, with absolutely no knowledge of how they work or their training, the pressure from Government, the previous conditions that they found themselves in when a pandemic hit. Who are "they"? The Government? GDS? PHE? NHS England? NHS Digital? NHSx?

stoobs 6y ago
Yes, with direct previous experience and knowledge of large UK Government IT projects, how they were integrated and how staff were trained, I feel I'm well placed to comment harshly. "They" in this case was the UK Government, and part of the goal was creating secure backend systems specifically for the NHS as a data store, Public Health England would absolutely have access to it. Even the most basic of checks at the start of the project would have highlighted that Excel was not a proper solution for the application (Even if the developer(s?) had used the newer(?!?) XLSX format rather than XLS) - which highlights that there was no proper oversight as to how the system was constructed.