There is a growing recognition of the need for enterprise-wide integration of information management. Technically this is becoming much easier, with growing numbers of data sets defined and exchanged as messages to meet the various business requirements, largely independent of computing platforms, architectures or standards in use by the communicating systems. However there is still only one national health information system in operation world-wide, in New Zealand, despite efforts to move in that direction in various other countries.

A number of key success factors in the implementation of such systems have been identified: these must be adequately addressed for any chance of a successful outcome. This paper outlines some of the principal factors that have been identified and outlines the experience gained from this New Zealand project [1,2] of how these can be managed successfully.