Web Services in National Healthcare: The Impact of Public and Private Collaboration

The implementation of a national programme for information technology into the complex environment of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) system is only the first step in a system modernisation journey for this multifaceted organisation. This article reports the findings of a two-year research study on the decline of the ASP (application service provision) industry, from which the current move to Web services was born. It combines the case of the NHS with existing literature on disparate research perspectives to explore the effects of the ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome on an IS implementation journey. The article also suggests ways that project leaders can redirect such strong feelings about a new system to increase the chances for a successful outcome. Information systems (IS) is “an instantiation of information technology (IT), where the same information technology is instantiated in different ways” (Lee, 1999). A rich organizational and political process is required for a given set of IT to be instantiated, relying greatly upon the continual managing, maintaining, and changing of technology to sustain the instantiation. Within a rather diverse NHS environment, IS may include relational aspects like the effectiveness of system design, the timely delivery of such systems, an appropriately obtained usability training by all users, and future impact of IT in the organisational and entire society.