One of the major specifications for an NHS or MoD IT project is that the goal posts are constantly on the move, never having been located in the first place.
The projects are designed to make very large amounts of money for the various parties involved but there never is any intention to actually move the solution into production. If, God forbid it ever made production it would never be agreed as to what the SLA was or who supported it
After many years of IT budget spend the penny will drop that the solution is no longer appropriate, the project will be binned and a new tender process will start and the same old vendors will submit their tenders and the process continues, ad infinitum
There is no need for code obfuscation since it will be have been written obfuscated by design.
Another three pendula (?) that constantly swing are :
To outsource or to insource : currently outsourcing to India is the flavour of the month
To go Open Source or to go propriety : this depends on the currently enlightenment of this months CTO
To go distributed or go mainframe : mainframe has it this month so IBM shares it is for me but it will be Oracle / Sun shares for next year
Normally the pattern is : We need to spend more money so let's change to whatever we are not currently doing...
The world of big business IT is hilarious from this perspective but it does keep people in employment I guess!
