Nigel Wilson from BJSS will be presenting a seminar at the Government ICT conference at the QEII on some fascinating work we have done on the NHS Spine II project, using Agile and DevOps techniques to deliver a critical piece of enterprise infrastructure over a variety of highly scalable open source technologies. Unfortunately I’m unable to go due to being at a critical stage of a client project, but it should be well worth attending. 

The session is titled Implementing Agile to Improve Systems Delivery and Maintenance and the abstract is as follows:

This session explores the key drivers and benefits of moving to an agile way of working as well as the potential obstacles to overcome, in order to deliver systems faster, better and cheaper. Born from our real world experience of working in the public sector, we’ll be explaining our risk-first delivery approach and demonstrating how agile and DevOps techniques can provide for the stable future care and maintenance of a system. For the first time, we will present a case study of working on the NHS Spine II project, which involved a complete technology refresh of ‘Spine’, the secure national application and underpinning infrastructure used by the NHS and how the adoption of agile methodologies impacted on the governance and procurement processes as well as vendor relationships.

After developing a high degree of cynicism about gov IT programmes from past involvement with them, I’m delighted that BJSS are working with the NHS to show there’s a more efficient way of spending our taxes.