Week 90: Hail Mary
I went to see Hail Mary on Monday at the cinema. It’s a space film about an against-the-odds quest to save humanity, based on a book by the same author as The Martian. I enjoyed it. You should go see it if you like that sort of thing.
Sometimes working in digital for the NHS feels like a Hail Mary activity. Trying to fix an organisation saddled with decades of technical debt and unfathomable complexity. Against a backdrop of continual organisational restructuring, some big dominant suppliers and shifting political priorities.
We even share some of the same language as space flight, with our mission patches and go/no-go calls.
But unlike the movies, our tale is not one of solo heroic acts. Instead it’s a story of collaboration and smart, multi-discipline teams doing the steady work of building and shipping software, designed around our user. Not enterprise architecture or generic data platforms but specific digital services for specific needs.
This is radical in its own way. We’re working in the open, releasing the source code, and sharing our learning as we go.
For the NHS, by the NHS.
It’s a Hail Mary endeavour but it might just work.