On Monday, Richard Granger, a 37-year-old management consultant takes up his post as Britain's highest-paid civil servant. He's on £250,000 a year - more than his boss, the National Health Service's chief executive Nigel Crisp (about £150,000) and more than his boss Tony Blair (£163,000).
Don't envy Granger, yet. His post, director general of NHS IT, was created to take the rap for running the world's biggest and most complex single IT project, on a terrifyingly short timetable.
Details of the national implementation programme, as the project is called, are still trickling in from the health department. But the central aim is clear: to replace the Babel of IT, on which today's NHS relies, with a handful of standard, interconnected systems.
The plan faces scepticism, and not just from the usual clinical suspects. A central component - the sharing of records between the NHS and local councils' social services departments - will alarm privacy campaigners. Existing NHS suppliers are up in arms about the prospect of being driven out of business.
Even when broken down into individual components, the programme's size and complexity boggle the mind. An outline specification published last month for one element, the integrated care records service, runs to 175 pages.
By 2005, if all goes well, integrated records will start to replace hundreds of IT systems storing patients' details in hospitals, GP's surgeries and social services departments.
When we move through our "patient's journey" - from GP appointment to surgery to home care - our information will follow us. The system will do a huge number of other things, including notifying all NHS and care organisations when a patient dies. Bereaved families will no longer receive letters addressed to dead loved ones, reminding them their appointment is due.
That's if it all works, and the omens are not good. The most recent public sector IT fiasco, the Criminal Records Bureau, was swamped by the need to handle a few thousand inquiries a day. According to the specification document, an integrated care records service for the NHS would have to to handle around 30m transactions a day - around the clock.
In the government's eyes, the only people capable of creating such a service are the very largest "systems integration" firms such as CSC, EDS and IBM. So another part of the programme aims to replace the current NHS IT cottage industry, in which hospitals and GP's surgeries buy their own systems, with a national deal with a few industry giants.
These "prime service providers" will take on contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds to run administrative systems, as well as new services such as electronic appointment booking and integrated records.
For the big players, it's a massive opportunity. Companies such as EDS, which last month lost one third of its stock value because of the downturn in the US, see the NHS's billions as a lifeline.
For smaller specialist companies, the picture is less rosy. IT companies are already warning of a planning blight because hospitals and the new primary care trusts are postponing IT developments until the new national picture emerges. Those with specialists skills, such as hooking up intensive-care monitors and X-ray machines to web servers, are hawking their wares around the potential providers.
However, the uncertainty is unlikely to last long. The NHS programme is being rushed through at a pace that puts such projects as the West Coast railway line to shame. D-day is April 1 next year, when new funding promised by the chancellor becomes available and the new systems start to be installed.
With the prime minister's backing, only two things could stop the programme. One is a full-scale war; the other is the Treasury's office of government commerce, which, anxious to avoid the mother of all public-sector IT fiascos, will be going through Granger's spreadsheets and project plans with a fine-toothed comb.
