Posts by PeterOR

Write-back to aging UK health systems lessens benefits of Palantir-based platform

Surprise! Old Systems Inflexible - Who Knew?

Most of the users of your services could have prevented you walking into this moronic trap!

Nothing in this aging mess of isolated systems appears to have gone back to fundamentals and enquired what is actually required to deliver a great service?

In one recent example, a family member was written to to attend an outpatient appointment. Included in the letter was the usual form that needed to completed before attending. Much of the information they already have, including the name, address and NHS number. Clue, it's on the cover letter! The other information? Yeah, they already had that on from previous encounters. But you have to fill it in...

Then it gets taken off you by the first department you see. On this particular day, we had to visit two other departments / clinics as part of the same patient investigations. Each requiring more paper form filling request much the same information previously provided. Enquiring why generally result in you being treated like a child who has asked one too many challenging questions.

It's all paper. It all needs printing, scanning, filing, storing, archiving and disposing (you hope they dispose of it.... But wouldn't be surprised).

Sticking anything on the front of systems that operate in that way is always going to be an expensive band aid.

And here's a thought. Instead of writing back, why not just write somewhere useful / accessable?

Watchdog fails to stop big vendor lock-in, say UK cloud market's smaller players

Silent Taxation

Once our core publicly funded services are inside any of these deals, exiting the arrangements are deliberately complex and expensive. Over time, the Mountain View lot will have strategies for increasing revenue £1 at a time based on a per licenced seat charging model. Kerching!

Worse, in the longterm our own broader economy suffers. Excluding smaller vendors by price them out of the market means those vendors are not 'economically available' to other end users that the Mountain View folks themselves are not directly interested in.

This stifles economic growth in our broader economy because this large section of the market cannot, on an individual basis, get to the pricing levels CSA is offering to the big spenders. Nor can the vendors afford to support their customers without directly charging them for their services because of the lack of margin in the core underlying services. This slows down adoption / innovation.

Fear not, Europe's Privacy Shield is Trump-proof – ex-FTC bigwig

It Will Happen?

It is possible that at some time an Executive Order will hole Privacy Shield below the water line. It may not be intentional, but that won't matter. One way of mitigating some of the risk may be to insist on compliance with EU data protection legislation in our procurements. For UK organisations, that means whatever regulation is relevant post Brexit. Any "in-flight" changes caused by changes in US legislation, intentional or otherwise, could trigger exit/data transfer costs to be carried by the supplier?