Health informatics governance: researching deferred IS/IT mechanisms

The British National Health Service (NHS) is learning how to use IT and information systems (IS) for the benefit of patients and for clinical processes. Rather than adopt IT governance practices from the private sector, it is seeking to develop its own best practices because of the unique socialist principles of the organization and its history. It values are deeply rooted in socialism. The overall aim of the research proposed in this paper is to inform health informatics governance in its early stages of development in the NHS through researching deferred IT/IS methods, tools and techniques. Deferment is defined as enabling contextual, situated and semantic information design by action developers (so-called users). Deferment is proposed as relevant in the NHS because of the national and distributed structure of the organization. A deferred IT/IS infrastructure will be capable of catering for contextual and situated information needs of domain experts - clinicians.