Re: [LUG] NHS Webmail: £91M

[Simon Waters <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Adrian Midgley wrote:
> So what might the panel use to provide a webmail and POP3 access (say) for
> about 1 000 000 people from about 2-3 locations each.  (Oh, and a directory)
>
> And could you get it in under £91 e6 forthe first 10 years do you think?
>
> EDS are giving us, it is rumoured, a proprietary solution for that much.

Assuming that reads 91,000,000 GBP for all of ten years, or a 10
pound a year charge per user, I think people will struggle to do
this from scratch, depending what the detailed requirements are,
and predicted maintenance/expansion.

As such I'd be surprised if it remained in budget ;-)

Backend hardware and software are cheap, although I'd want to
know the security level required. 

What about audit trail, must I make a backup copy of every
message that is retrieval for audit purposes? Including the
"mistakes"?

Adrian's security tag budget assuming you need a million for a
million users, but with NHS staff turnover and the usual wastage
I'd predict at least 2 million over 10 years. Although of course
if I buy 2,000,000 of anything I don't pay retail (except maybe
transistors these days ;-).

RSA cards will want readers I suspect, you don't want people
typing in numbers everytime if you can avoid it, inefficient use
of staff resource.

You'd need to be able to handle a huge volume of resulting
enquiries, assuming you can offload things like user creation to
NHS personnel departments. The remote security cards were
notorious for creating extra calls due to clock drift and going
through washing machines, I think they are better these days.

The big outsourcer of {web|e}mail providers have done this
already many times, have their own networks, and multiple
suitably redundant mail servers. They have already addressed
scalability through self managed user sign up, or delegated per
site administrators. One even has the NIH as a customer.

Of course the biggest barrier to Eighth Layer providing this, is
the NHS would rarely deal direct with small suppliers. They want
a similar sized organisation, with similar ability to manage the
risks, and meet any subsequent or unexpected liabilities - which
means similar levels of overheads.

The devil as always is in the detail. As it could make the
difference between you having to take a phone calls every
minute, or someone else doing that. Most calls are cheap to
handle, but it can rapidly escalate to beyond that 5 GBP per
user you've budgeted to make a profit.

If they contracted me to advise, I'd get competitive quotes from
existing specialist e-mail outsource providers, who have
experience, and are spreading set-up costs over multiple
customers. 

I'd also try and negoiate the service features against price,
but most government purchasing doesn't work this way. They tend
to write the features and functions they want down, and write
off suppliers who can't meet (or don't claim they will meet)
100% of those requirements, they won't take a 50% price cut for
95% of requirements met style bid in most cases (even if the
remaining 5% is never provided by the eventual contract winner,
who just absorbs the penalty).

Also I'd budget 2 to 4 million for the inevitable legal and
contract disputes with the NHS before the project is finally
written off ;-)

What is more worrying is that you might contract POP3 or SMTP as
a mail service for 10 years for 1,000,000 people!! I'd want at
least X400, and IMAP type functions, and provision for
interoperability with future major messaging services and
facilities. Fax to e-mail gateways, maybe SMS notification,
WAP(?) access..... 

POP3 would look rather limited already, let alone in ten years
time.

Some of these enhancements you'd likely get, or get as value
added options, if you use an existing dedicated e-mail provider,
who has a clear financial interest in extending their service
above and beyond the value of the current contracts in place. I
may be underestimating the saving of scale EDS can provide, but
I don't think they are in the e-mail business in the same way.

Of course EDS might be subcontracting key components ;-)

Big projects have different dynamics to small project, they also
become a lot more political, an area of big projects that EDS is
good at in the UK. IBM seems to end up in a lot of high profile
embarassing failures. I'm not sure EDS are having less big
project failures (probably more given their success at bidding
for UK government business), but they definitely manage these
better.

Anyone who hasn't had a big project to which they have dedicated
months or years of their life, being referred to the legal
department of a large US company to close it down, and/or
minimise the expense of finding a compromise position, should be
banned from answering IMHO ;-)

Those who haven't worked with terabyte data stores, or providing
24x7x365 services, or other big systems, probably need a reality
check. Although with something like e-mail 24x7x365 isn't too
bad as it is easy to reduce it to maintaining a backend storage
system, and load balancing.  It is amazing how convenient it is
to be able to take a manufacturing computer system offline at
Christmas (normal stock take period) and upgrade it to versions
of the OS and database that will be supported by the vendor for
the coming 12 months, test (back out if needed), and then eat a
slightly cold turkey dinner.

For some people "Downtime" is just a column in Computer Weekly.

Similarly not sure Linux would be my OS of choice, I'd mitigate
the risk by using vendors with superb support, and extensive
experience of large systems, so HP, IBM, SUN. For a ten year
project Linux on IBM might be an option, I've rarely seen
support 10 years down the line for hardware or software from
anyone but IBM.

10 years - think Windows 3.1 as about the right sort of era,
Exeter Uni (and PRIME) were abandoning PR1MOS, Linux was a total
baby, IBM were still supporting IBM DOS 1 and computer hardware
built in the 1970's for the Met Office. People in the street
knew what ICL did still (except for Americans). Things
resembling web browsers and servers were replacing a diverse set
of different protocols and tools (WAIS, Gopher etc).

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