Britain’s longest-running farce, the computerisation of NHS patient data, is likely to have its run extended beyond the current closing date of 2015, according to the Public Accounts Committee.
The National Programme for IT - known to its fans in government and the computing industry as NfIT – has seen takings of £12bn over its record-breaking 62-year run, and audiences say it is still as uproariously shambolic as it ever was.
“I can’t imagine NfIT ever coming to an end,” said laughing data-coder Tim d’Orque. “It’s been running for generations of programming languages now, and it’s seen off government after government over the years. The jokes are absolutely timeless – look, this module was written in COBOL! When it came to the part where the minister in charge said it was the largest IT project in the history of the entire world, we just fell about laughing at the thought of comparing a simple database of 65 million records with, say, the US federal tax records system. And, in terms of complexity, a program like World of Warcraft makes NfIT look like 10 PRINT “BOLLOCKS”, 20 GOTO 10. Ha ha ha.”
The long-running comedy has, in the course of its dead-end run, featured many household names in starring roles of comical ineptness, including Siemens and British Telecom.
Smaller parts of the system have gone on tour around doctors’ surgeries up and down the country, with side-splitting scenes as harassed practice managers try to work out how to feed punch-cards into the cassette recorder.
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