What has happened is sheer incompetence in a field that has been mature for decades in how to do things reliably, even without grand "data science leader" titles.
A culture of rigour, discipline, and I will add of "getting things done", is sorely needed.
More generally, the track and trace system in the UK is poor. This has a lot to do with the above but also with lack of political courage and leadership.
Unfortunately it is difficult to suggest that the NHS might need to change, it is taboo subject.
Branding aside, AFAICS the track and trace programme has very little to do with the NHS.
One might suggest, however, that when setting up a scheme to deal with a public health matter and to create technologies to assist with that, hiring some experts on public health and technology might have been a good idea. It looks like a lot of the senior figures actually have a background in retail and the recruitment process was more like staffing a commercial call centre than a medical helpline.
(The article is not wrong about the data processing side either, of course. How these systems meet even basic data protection standards, never mind the more stringent requirements for processing sensitive data, is still a mystery to me.)
I'm afraid that what has happened is something unfortunately quite normal in UK and it's a part of the general work culture. That is, everyone is just doing part of their job and following the protocol, but nothing more. Something is outside of the protocol or task description? Not my problem. Shall I double check the number of rows in the excel with Covid data that I am supposed to send to my supervisor? Oh, come on, who cares.
You are expecting competence from an administration which dole out management positions to their cronies.
Why not call in Crapita or one of the leading consultancy firms to handle it? That will get you even better (worse you mean?) results at wildly inflated prices as well
They did indeed use Excel to process the data. They could have possibly used a more recent version of Excel but saved the data in the legacy file format anyway.
Hamming codes?
This comment is clearly written by someone with no real world experience of working in public sector IT. What I've outlined in the article is a basic solution that can be implemented by anyone.
A culture of rigour, discipline, and I will add of "getting things done", is sorely needed.
More generally, the track and trace system in the UK is poor. This has a lot to do with the above but also with lack of political courage and leadership.
Unfortunately it is difficult to suggest that the NHS might need to change, it is taboo subject.