IBM New Zealand appears exposed to significant costs over a troubled national cloud-based health platform it was contracted to deliver in early 2015.
After failing to deliver within the required timeframes, the project was re-scoped in December, with Big Blue losing exclusive rights to offer the service to 12 participating District Health Boards (DHBs) and two regional health IT services agencies.
A series of official information requests and queries by Reseller News with Health Partnerships Ltd, the state-owned company running the project, reveal the project has since been re-scoped to allow multiple vendors to deliver services to the DHBs.
Contract negotiations with Datacom and Revera, both members of the government’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) panel, now allow those companies to supply the services in competition with IBM.
That is a problem for IBM because it appears to have carried the cost for building a platform specifically for that purpose, aiming to recoup those expenses as the DHBs and agencies adopted it as originally required.
Now DHBs can choose other vendors and the time-frame for them to make a choice and begin shifting to the cloud has also been relaxed.
As of April there was only one participant DHB using the National Infrastructure Platform (NIP) platform – or platforms – and it had opted for Datacom. That implementation was not complete.
“The remaining participants are in varying stages of discovery, design and planning to commence utilisation,” said Steve Fisher, general manager of communications and human resources at DHB-owned NZ Health Partnerships, which has succeeded the entity that managed the tender process, Crown-owned Health Benefits Ltd.
“DHBs are responsible for managing their own transition.”
An IBM spokesperson said the company continues to work closely with NZ Health Partnerships.
“Our Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform is available and fully certified by the Department of Internal Affairs. We are ready to help the District Health Boards migrate to a common IT infrastructure and to host the applications and systems that support the delivery of health care in New Zealand.”
The NIP project had been the subject of monitoring by the Treasury as one of the government’s major projects.
These show that the project as originally contracted to IBM was twice delayed after technical assessments – it was also put on amber/red alert, requiring urgent action for successful delivery.
The “monitoring delivery confidence assessment is amber/red due to the non-performance of the vendor”, the Ministry of Health is quoted as saying.
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