www.greg-wright.co.uk

Why have IT? In any organisation IT must exist to serve the organization, however all too often this is forgotten. When this happens business practices become defined by IT and not by the needs of the business. In some organisations updates to the IT systems may become impractical or impossible, and business rules become defined by IT rather than the organisarion's IT modelling and changing with business rules. At this stage it becomes extremely difficult for the organisation to serve its customers. "Computer says No!".

A close friend, who works for the NHS, recently spent the weekend working on a report. By 9pm on Sunday the report was ready and was emailed off to the relevant manager as it was required by 9am on the Monday. The email bounced back immediately. The reason? The manager's email box was full. The reason? In that NHS trust email users are only allowed 36MBytes of data storage. This means that in order to keep receiving emails you have to continually clear down your existing emails. Now to put this onto perspective, if you register for a free Google email account you get over 7,000 MBytes of free email storage.

This is a totally ludicrous situation. To give NHS employees such a small amount of email storage space makes them slaves of the IT department. IT is not serving them, they are having to serve IT, and not (and this is the really annoying part) patients. The NHS is throwing away thousands of hours if its staff's time by not providing a functional robust reliable email service. The cost of such a service would be tiny compared with the saving.

This situation also leaves the NHS at considerable risk of terrorist attack since the only thing an attacker would need to do would be to generate a sufficient flow of emails to NHS employee mailboxes as to render them useless. It wouldn't take much!