Erm, the NHS contracts were awarded to some of the biggest players in the IT industry, including Accenture, CSC, Atos Origin, Fujitsu and BT…
As a review of the fiasco stated
https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/...-disaster.html
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Understanding the problem
"Top-down" projects are much more likely to fail than "bottom-up" projects, and NPfIT was top-down project par excellence. I identify a top-down project as one done for political reasons: and this can be both genuinely Political with a capital P in the public sector or a "vanity" or CEO-inspired project in the private sector. The history of public sector ICT and outsourcing is littered with politically-inspired projects that failed.
The motivation to commence NPfIT came from Cabinet level and it's hard to argue against the fact that many of its aims were entirely laudable. But there is a big gap between laudability and deliverability. The decision to commence any project - let alone one which will transform a fundamental building block of a nation's healthcare system - must be made by the right people who really know about the issues involved. It's unfortunate for civil servants and the departments they run that they have to carry the can for projects devised by ministers that often only make sense on the political drawing board and are almost impossible to translate into reality.
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In the Libra Magistrates system, Fujitsu were awarded the contract
https://www.softwareadvisoryservice....ject-failures/
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Libra System for Magistrates
The initial bid for the Libra project to provide a national system for 385 magistrates was £146 million from Fujitsu. However, before a final deal was even signed, Fujitsu raised the price to £184 million after the company’s board said it wasn’t able to support the charging basis on which the bid was submitted. They had not taken all the costs into account and “made some inappropriate… revenue assumptions”, according to the National Audit Office. Ten months later, Fujitsu asked for a higher price yet again, as their forecasts showed a deficit of £39 million over the life of the deal.
Ernst and Young advised the Lord Chancellor’s Department that Fujitsu’s financial model was unreliable. However, at this point the project was too important to let the supplier default. 18 months into the contract, the deal was renegotiated, increasing payments to Fujitsu to £319 million. Even so, Fujitsu still faced losses of up to £200 million. The next quote proposed by Fujitsu for £389 million was rejected by the department. The department ended up signing a contract with STL instead to provide Libra’s core software. However, Fujitsu still received most of the money, gaining tens of million pounds, despite not being contracted to deliver the software.
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The problem with most of these failures is that they’re seen as "technology" projects, when in fact they’re Business projects with a technology base - if you don’t understand and agree detailed businessrequirements, you’ll never deliver what is required.