Rant Alert

As a former civil servant I have had significant dealings with EDS among other service providers. The contracts always without fail went to the lowest bidder. Classic Peanut paying monkey buying situation. Considering we were running (and I am reliably informed the dept. still is running) software copyrighted in 1981 (older than me) on machines developed in 1989 (but not implemented until 1994) you would have thought these IT companies would have had a decent knowledge base to work from when fixing problems. No. Incorrect information. One notable telephone call operative (supposedly an IT expert) when I was reporting a fault directed me to go to control panel. In DOS. Strangely C:/Windows/ControlPanel didn't work. I ended up just restarting the mainframe of my own volition.

Having seen this issue from both sides of the fence, it seems to me that when these contracts are negotiated it's a matter of big business stamping all over the Government departments.

I used to work at the court service and it was obvious whoever had negotiated the contract with EDS didn't have the first idea about IT.

For example, moving a dumb terminal from one desk to another cost about £350.

All the systems were slow and eventually when the office I was working in got it's new infrastructure the implementation didn't allow for simple things like putting permissions on server directories. Oh, that's another £350 per directory, per change.

No wonder the finances of this country are in such a mess with massive overspends like this on Gov IT projects. When Gov is not involved, things seem to go much more smoothly.

It's a controversial idea, but why not just specify that development needs to be open sourced - at least internally. That does _not_ necessarily mean free software - but that the Government then owns the right to the code that has so far been produced so that another supplier can pick up the mantle and continue with the project - or at least separate the wheat from the chaff.

That'd stop the big businesses coming in and taking the proverbial.

I used to work for Accenture and my experience with this big contracts is that everything is nailed down at the negotation stage and then as soon as you start the scope changes constantly and leads to massive over runs and a product that doesn't work. Basically when any new poloitician comes in they want to stamp there mark on the project and change the scope to what they think it should be, they lose their job the next one comes in and does the same then there is a general election and the entire government get in on the act.

They should leave alone and let the actual departments set the scope not some inexperienced pseudo elected lacky who has no idea about the problem they are trying to solve

Joke alert because all goverment IT contracts are a joke

@AC: Totally agree with you. But you also need to take into account the fact that the likes of Accenture, EDS and co tend to seriously over-engineer everything they do so that even the smallest project requires a team of 20 for 1 year before it even starts.

@Andrew: No need for that. What you do is you request the code to be kept in escrow. If the project is a success, all fine; if not, the customer gets the code. This is typically done when the supplier is a small company that has a high risk of going out of business but could be done with anybody in theory.

The main problem is that all parties tend to think that the more complex and convoluted a solution is, the better. "If it's complex it must be good!" KISS is something they've never heard of and that is so alien to their way of working they wouldn't recognise its value when they see it.

@Bernard - agree very strongly with this, its been seen time and again.

The government agencies I have worked with are somewhat overstaffed and have managed to hide true IT costs within other people's salaries. So moving a PC from one desk to another costs "nothing" to them.

The lack of understanding about requirements baselines, testing strategy, quality planning, NFRs, and through-life cost gives the expected results. Lots of spreadsheets and Access "applications" which hang together by a thread, are unmaintainable and unreliable. Time-bombs waiting to go off when the next bit of major legislation appears or when Bob (who originally developed it) disappears leaving no documentation (or no source code...if he was sacked).

Generally, public sector clients can't make decisions, but can always provide 20 people at meetings where at least 15 of them don't say a word. They won't challenge/discuss anything with their superiors during project workshops - there is a weird deference for seniority even when they are wrong - very little exchange of ideas.

Paris: because only she can cheer me up about this.

old IT farts are not always biologically old (the whole industry is still young as such things go), but we are quite useful when five-nines uptime is required. qualify as one myself (will be 40 soon, have 20+ years of experience), and the new kids have no clue.

first thing i do is teach them BSD and the like (penguins also allowed), and they smile as if they got a new toy. routinely running locked-down, low-end machines (p3 and the like) as parts of core infrastructure, for years, without downtime or reboots, always boggles the mind of those used to the desktop life ("have you rebooted today?").

nothing wrong with IBM Big Iron. even their old stuff still does a bang-up job on availability (if it's down, the shiny features don't really matter, do they?), and runs *n*xen perfectly well.

thereg needs a geezer icon, but i'll settle for the Blue Boffin.

Aahh !

I can remember it took two of us to lift a Post Office Datel 200 Baud Modem and we used punch cards on the Essex County Council Mainframe in Assembly Language !

They havn't got a clue these days.