SPINE 2 – A Game Changer For NHS IT

I attended a presentation of SPINE2 from CfH at Intellect today. I think it’s the first thing from CfH to really excite me (at least in a positive way) since they were established. While I’m reminded of  ”The Second Coming of the Great Prophet Zarquon”, who fans of Douglas Adams will remember only managed to get this in just before the end of the universe.

I have been hearing reliable rumours for some time about skunkworks activity within in CfH to try and re-implement SPINE (at least as used, rather than as specified) using open source components and an agile development methodology, but today was the first official confirmation of this. It would seem that the initial skunkworks proved the concept and has been thrown away, a great example of the value of a “fail-fast” philosophy, and that this has been followed by a second phase of the project which appears to be close to delivering a production version of SPINE2. [...]