adoption curve dot net

If you’re plugged into UK news, you may have heard some back-and-forth over the last couple of days about the ever-rising cost of the IT projects within the National Health Service – depending on which source you’re following, the cost is variously £15bn, £20bn or even £30bn over the 10 year lifetime of the project. That’s more than it cost to dig the Channel Tunnel.

Not that this is coming as a surprise to anyone – the normal budgeting process for IT projects in the UK public sector seems to be think of a number, double it and then add a nought to get the final cost – which is irrelevant anyway, because the project gets cancelled two-thirds of the way in before any actual use takes place. Anyone remember the runaway catastrophe that was Read Codes?

I can think of several reasons for this, not least the approach being taken by some consultant acquaintances of mine – to hear them talk about the NHS IT programme, you’d think that it had started raining banknotes. There certainly seems to be a rerun of the Millennium bonanza taking place in certain sectors of the industry.

But it seems that the main problem is simply that it’s the type of monolithic supertanker of a programme that’s doomed to fail because it’s just too damn big. Certainly some of the intentions are laudable – electronic patient records for example, or on-line booking of hospital appointments – but the impression that’s being create by much of the press coverage is of a programme that’s taken on a life of it’s own through the sheer scale of the undertaking.

Which is ironic, given that the prevailing trend in technology at the moment seems to be “small pieces, loosely joined”. Rather than vast, complex, all-singing, all-dancing applications, we’re instead looking at a world of discrete applications performing specific functions, glued together by standards-based services and APIs. Instead of the HokeyCokey 2000 system being the single behemoth of functionality, it’s about specific tools being deployed for specific purposes.

And what’s also intriguing is that the real breakthroughs seem to be coming not from the corporations with their million-dollar R&D budgets, but small groups of hackers who are in it for the challenge rather than the reward. Steve Bowbrick goes as far as suggesting that we should hand over to the job of the NHS systems to the same people who brought us MySQL and Linux. And it’s a very valid point – after all, it’s difficult to see how it could be possible to do a worse job for more…

Euan Semple:

What I want for Christmas ….

…. is an RSS feed with all the TV or Radio programmes watched or listened to by the people on my blogroll each day. In the same way that I trust them to filter the web effectively for me this would allow me to be automatically fed the best broadcast content from around the world.

Problem is, we’re all so busy reading the contents of our blogroll that we haven’t got the time to be watching TV or listening to the radio (unless you count what’s streaming in the background)…

Harumph. Today went something like this:

am: spend a happy half hour rhapsodising over acquaintance’s brand new Powerbook – another one rescued from the Dark Side…

pm: sulk because the new Google Desktop is Windows-only and only searches M$-format files…

Courtesy of Alex Barnett (an Online Customer Experience Manager at Microsoft, whatever one of those might be), here’s a useful matrix comparison of email and RSS for direct marketing purposes, with links to relevant articles.

He makes an interesting point – that the debate needs to move away from RSS-versus-email and towards where RSS can fit into the marketing mix. It’s a pragmatic approach, to be sure, but I think it misses one key point – that customer adoption of RSS is miniscule, compared to email. While it’s good to be prepared, there’s a danger here of preparing prematurely. In our conversations with clients and others, the proportion of those who are aware of weblogs is very small, and the proportion who are aware of RSS (or webfeeds as we should now be calling them) is even smaller.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of activity in providing webfeeds – and if organisations like the BBC are providing feeds, then mass adoption is certainly possible. But currently it’s very much a bleeding-edge activity to be actively subscribing to and reading webfeeds, and our impression is that at least partly due to the lack of reading tools on the average desktop.

If you’re in a corporate environment, then it’s unlikely that you have the ability – either physically or ‘legally’ – to install webfeed-reading software; and the larger the corporate environment, the more conservative IT functions tend to be in rolling out new applications. So unless you’ve installed a webfeed reader personally, it’s likely to be a phenomenon that not yet reached you.

So what’s it going to take to make webfeeds hit the mainstream? Is it the provision of a mass-market webfeed reader (i.e. webfeed capability being included in the next iteration of Outlook?) Or will it be a more gradual process?