MR ANDREW ROLLERSON

7 MARCH 2007

  Q340  Mr Williams: So there are no great challenges in the range of capability of IT there? There should be no great challenge at issue there?

  Mr Rollerson: In theory, no. In some areas the functionality is quite straightforward, but in other areas it is moving into places where the ground is soft, if I may say so, areas where, for example, clinical pathways are being designed and new clinical technologies are being introduced. Therefore, given that the area of concern is uncertain, there is a great deal more design work to be done and these typically have been left to the later phases of the contract.

  Q341  Mr Williams: You said it should not be IT-driven. Is it, and why should it not?

  Mr Rollerson: The history of the IT projects is that typically where they are left to an IT department they fail. The reason they fail is because the people who are expected to use the application in the end have not been engaged. I suppose, if I may turn it the other way around and talk about best practice in this case, best practice in the commercial world for many, many years has been that a business need is identified, the business solution is described and only part of that business solution will be technology. There will be restructuring, retraining, all sorts of things, redesigning of processes in order to deliver the business solution. The technology will then be delivered as part of that solution. The danger that I foresee in this situation is that we will be heading too far in the other direction, that the driver, if we are not careful, will become the technology itself.

  Q342  Mr Williams: That is where I was going next. You made the point it is essential trusts are engaged, are you suggesting that they have not been engaged, because time and again we have looked at IT failures and the failure has been in the preparation stage and the initial examination through the eyes of those who are going to use it of what they want and how they want it to work. What do you think?

  Mr Rollerson: There is a difficult balance to strike between the imperative of delivering something in time and within budget versus consulting a wide constituency of people and prolonging the entire thing through extended consultation. The challenge in this programme is that there are so many people to consult that one suspects nothing would ever be delivered if everybody who wanted to be consulted was consulted.

  Q343  Mr Williams: Are you satisfied in your own mind or worried about the level of consultation that was there? You said, "It is essential that the trusts are engaged", which to my mind suggests you were critically implying that they had not been involved.

  Mr Rollerson: I am concerned that the appropriate mechanism for consultation in order to achieve the objective has not yet been found.

  Q344  Mr Williams: Not yet?

  Mr Rollerson: Not yet.

  Q345  Mr Williams: It is a bit late, is it not? When should it have been done?

  Mr Rollerson: Arguably much earlier than it has been.

  Q346  Mr Williams: How much, because you were in at the early stage so you have got some idea of what was or was not going on?

  Mr Rollerson: Ideally, the mechanisms would have been set up when the programme itself was established in 2004 to have the consultation associated with the development of the application. The mitigating circumstances, such as they are, were that at that time all of the participants of the programme were learning including suppliers, CFH themselves and the NHS trusts as to how best to drive forward a programme of this scale and complexity. I frankly believe that this learning process is going to go on and on for the whole life of the programme. It would be naive to suggest that some ideal consultation mechanism could have been conceived at the very beginning and put in place that would have allowed the whole programme to sail forward unhindered.

  Q347  Mr Williams: You made some comment about—and I scribbled it down but I may have got it jumbled—the early techniques would be adequate. What did you mean by that?

  Mr Rollerson: I think I hinted at it before that there is a tendency to use simple techniques that we are all familiar with, such as project management techniques, whereas there are already available in the marketplace—this is not blue sky thinking—techniques such as value management, if you like, benefit that allow realisation, a programme to be driven by the value that is going to be created out of it and not through managing tasks.

  Q348  Mr Williams: Who should have taken the initiative in applying those, and would it be part of the role of the supplier to draw attention to those so that the buyer avoided some of the pitfalls?

  Mr Rollerson: I do believe that an open consultation between the supplier and the CFH is absolutely required.

  Q349  Mr Williams: Was there one?

  Mr Rollerson: Yes.

  Q350  Mr Williams: How was this missed?

  Mr Rollerson: I do not think it was missed in the sense that Fujitsu, and I can only obviously speak for Fujitsu, created a value management office specifically in order to work with the southern cluster to prioritise projects on the basis of the benefit that they would create, the risks involved and so on and so forth. Fujitsu worked with the cluster office to schedule projects so as to reflect this value creation.

  Q351  Mr Williams: You were involved, they described it as "in the early stages", trying to push your knowledge of what was going on, but you would have been involved at this very time when these crucial decisions were being made.

  Mr Rollerson: I was.

  Q352  Mr Williams: Did you at that time criticise the processes that were being applied?

  Mr Rollerson: I did not at that time because I believed what Fujitsu attempted to put in place and work with the cluster was actually, I believed the right way to go.

  Q353  Mr Williams: So you are not attributing blame?

  Mr Rollerson: Absolutely not.

  Q354  Mr Williams: Should I decide? Should the buyer have been more aware of what they needed to do if they wanted to get a good end product?

  Mr Rollerson: I think it is very easy, clearly, to be wise after the event.

  Q355  Mr Williams: That is what I am coming to.

  Mr Rollerson: An implementation programme of this scale and complexity continually runs into challenges and this was one of the aspects of the talk that I gave the other day, that there is a tendency to start shooting the alligators closest to the canoe in order to ensure that something at least is achieved, and this is the right thing to do provided that one does not lose sight of what one is trying to achieve overall. To extend the analogy, I suppose, if you are shooting alligators but fail to observe that you are about to go over a 300-foot waterfall, then you have essentially wasted your time by pursuing these immediate tactical goals, addressing tactical problems. In a programme this size you need to keep your eye on both.

  Q356  Chairman: Does the National Audit Office want to ask any questions?

  Sir John Bourn: We are grateful to hear the evidence and we have not got any questions, Chairman. Thank you.

  Q357  Chairman: Is there anything else that you wish to say?

  Mr Rollerson: No, thank you very much.

  Chairman: Thank you for appearing before us.