With ministers now pondering what to do with the £12bn programme to computerise the NHS in England, it's worth trying to separate the truth from the spin about what five years of work have achieved.

As usual, it's a more mixed picture than the "IT fiasco" stories make out. While the ill-conceived scheme to standardise acute hospitals' software has been a disaster, there are welcome signs of progress elsewhere.

I've commented previously on the programme's success in jollying the NHS along to replace film X-rays with digital imaging.
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Photoshop, as seen through Johnny Cash

John Nack writes about the the development of Photoshop and compares it to a Johnny Cash recording One Piece At a Time singing about the building of a Cadillac from 20 years’ worth of evolving, mismatched parts. John Nack says: “I’ve gotta say, I know the feeling.”

He goes on to say “In fact, I sometimes joke that looking at some parts of the app is like counting the rings in a tree: you can gauge when certain features arrived by the dimensions & style of the dialog.”

But later in his post he says “The good news is that we’ve been plotting the solutions for a number of years, chipping away at the problem. Good stuff comes to the surface in bits and pieces, but we haven’t quite turned the corner–yet.”

Read his entire post at Photoshop, as seen through Johnny Cash