DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
Email and the internet appear publicly for the first time at the Internet Computer Communications Conference.
1972
Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol) established.
(Transmission 1974TCP/IP
introduced to allow individual domain names.
DNS (Domain Name Server)
1984 T 1993 released by CERN. W 1991 orld Wide Web
he White House and the United Nations came online.
Micr 1998osoft Windows 98 was released, with integrated internet support.
T 1997 reached 20 million.
he number of nodes on the internet
At the time Toyota was considered a far more successful company than Ford, and yet it spent half as much per car on IT. The American company had used IT for everything, but the Japanese had been selective, preferring to use, for example, coloured plastic discs where there was no perceived benefit of IT. The other interesting aspect of the lecturer’s research concerned the large government IT project failures, what caused them, and how they can be avoided. A key message was ‘Don’t do a massive rollout until a pilot-scale release has proved effective.’ It seems obvious really. Since then, the Government has embarked on a centralised patient record system that cost £10 bn (£3.6 bn over budget), which was the largest non-military system in the world. After seven years, only 13 out of 169 Trusts had received the full system, Barts lost thousands of patient records, and the Milton Keynes Trust wrote a cautionary letter about inefficacy and advised others not to use it. It was abandoned in 2013.3
The way data is generated and managed I’ve previously expressed my thoughts on the way that data is generated and managed. Back in 2018, when ‘we’ve got a portal’ was all the rage, I was asked to present a paper on the subject of ‘Making the most of data for the benefit of public health’ at the Water Management Society conference.4
I harangued the audience as
Figure 1: An early timeline.
Fast forward to the mid-1980s, and we had acid
Below: Figure 2. The digital maturity of Estates Departments.
Below right: Figure 3. The need for a DT strategy.
house music, which was accompanied by artwork based on fractals. At this time I became aware of a branch of science called the ‘maths of fractals’. For these not familiar with fractals, think of a fern, which has leaves on stems, which then divides into smaller leaves, and so on, in a spiral pattern. Nature is full of fractal structures. This was a time when my digital head really began to hurt. Some researchers took photos of classical statues in a formal garden, from a distance. They then enlarged the photos to reveal as much detail as possible, until they pixellated. They then took these digital photo files and applied the maths of fractals to them to predict more detail that might be present. When they re-visited the garden and examined the statues, sure enough all the predicted detail was present. This report coincided with a time when poor quality images of serious crime suspects were being sent to the FBI for digital enhancement, presumably using similar technology. Today we take for granted the manipulation of images by our smartphones.
Study for an MBA My next sojourn into the academic world was to study for an MBA, as a mid-life crisis alternative to a sports car or motorbike. The course featured a module entitled ‘Strategic IT’. The lecturer contrasted Ford and Toyota.
politely as I could on two of my pet hates – ‘abuse of spreadsheets’, and ‘portals as a haystack of PDFs’. The point of spreadsheets to me is to perform calculations, study trends, and plot graphs, etc but the data entry tends to be so poor that such operations are impossible without time-consuming data cleaning. My crude, but oft-quoted, phrase is ‘Don’t let anyone vomit into a spreadsheet.’ A more polite version is ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’, but in my experience it’s ‘rubbish in, nothing out’. Meanwhile, we have supplier portals where data are held as PDFs. Most of the time I find clients cannot even find their data, and of course cannot manipulate it. However, should something go wrong, as one ends up in court the supplier will be able to say ‘Oh yes, Your Honour, we provided those data in our portal, and gave our customer access’, thereby hanging you out to dry. Both of these examples concern a data science term, ‘dead data’ – defined as ‘data that is no longer useful’. It is commonly said that PDFs are ‘where data goes to die’. PDFs are designed to preserve visual layout, rather than the underlying data structure. One of the most frustrating examples for me is
laboratory testing data. For decades, laboratories have used LIMS (Laboratory Information Management Systems); basically large databases to track the samples they process, and the associated test results. More often than not, the output of the LIMS is a PDF test certificate,
34 Health Estate Journal March 2025
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