Tories put toes on Linux bandwagon

Well it's a start

While just as in the tone of the article there will be alot of cynicism about cost reductions anything that opens up the powers that be to open source has to be good

With so many other governments doing the same, you might say 'it's about time!'

But it does go beyond this specific announcement - the announcement could also have an effect on other corporate and gov initiatives.

Who knows it could even filter into EDUCATION!

That would be something....................

Pie in the where?

Not exactly a great achievement to spot the bleedin' obvious though is it...?

Support Support Support

So we have are software form Emo and Boris it runs like a dream then we srick it on an industrial sized infrastructure. Problem is Emo only ever tested it on his mac VM player running a test harness for 50 connections (because he never expected it to get so big and no one will give him backing to test it properly as it's free) so he has no idea whether it will work which means we now have to employ specialist consultants to help re engineer the thing at !K per day but not to worry because its not like anybodys life depends on it;( not as though any of the contracts are critical.

Get with the program guys next you'll be suggesting we run it on OS2.

El Reg please write a BOFH spoof about this shower

Easy tiger ...

This reads as:

* read the press release;

* haven't read anything else;

* must be shit.

... who knows, you might be right.

Personally I think 'open source' and 'free software' being on the agenda of any political party other than the Greens is a *good* thing.

The current state of ICT procurement in government is foobar.

Of course it won't work

Ever split an order up so it goes in under your purchasing power? Dell's web site even lets you do this automatically now.

It will involve the contracts going to the same big firms - small Linux based consultancies can't pay big enough bribes. EDS etc will simply split the contract up to a number of subsidiaries.

In addition, a lot of the 20Bn wasted on It projects is because everything gets tacked onto this nice new big budget, every manager's company car, every admin staff, every bit of rewiring or office refurb. These are all going to still be spent, it will just take more effort to hide them on 1000 different projects - but we can always hire more managers an accountants to do this.

Smaller projects discourage 'grand vision' projects

It has to be said that, if you commit to smaller projects designed to co-exist it makes it far more difficult to come up with overblown meta architectures and over complex infrastructures typical of this government's IT strategy.

The article is right to suggest that the National Programme for IT would be poorly served by 12 separate project managers and specs. However, if you've committed to smaller, achievable projects, you wouldn't try to design something like the National Programme for IT as your final solution.

If you discover that road bridges with impossibly long spans cannot safely be built using long beams, choosing to build out of small blocks doesn't preclude building bridges - it just means you have to cut your cloth to suit the more conservative material.

Missing the obvious?

Having a good idea of the requirements before they start these billion-pound projects would be a good start. Too many government projects start with "we'll employ a team of external consultants to work out the requirements, and another team of external consultants to answer the first team's questions".

Why not?

<quote>Is this true? Would the disastrous National Programme for IT...work better with 12 separate project managers and specs?</quote>

I seem to be able to make our own in-house application share data with 3rd party applications developed independently through published APIs and the odd conference call. IT.Gov is bigger, but otherwise, where's the difference?

And as for any lame "our software can't even do an export to CSV for a civil servant flunky to upload into yours" - then surely a definite criteria for selection must be the availability of an API that a techie can read and believe - not sweet smelling bull#### around a boardroom table.

Certainly the idea of mulitple vendors competing for projects rather than an incumbent racking up the expenses bill must deliver some benefit.

Smaller projects are a good idea

They are right to go for smaller projects- if they are claiming to be market-oriented then rather than, for example, establishing a national Police IT system, they could be establishing a national data interchange specification that describes exactly what data other police forces or agencies need to be able to obtain from any given Police Force IT system and then allow the police forces to do whatever they need to in order to make sure their system is compliant with it. This gives the opportunity for smaller companies to specialise in creating software to comply with that standard and potentially sell it to many regional forces, or allows police forces to build something that works with existing software to do the same job.

As long as it looks the same from outside, the implementation can be absolutely black-box.

Govt has no clue how to do IT projects,...

- They never have the cojones to hold vendors to contract (I saw one Army Colonel who tried, so Big Blue went above his head and had him "re-assigned").

- Institutional memory on previous cockups is extremely short

- Most IT effort is spent building empires, not solutions

Open standards

Open standards are more important than the specific type of licence here.

Different systems, from different suppliers being able to work properly with each other would increase competition and lower costs. That has got to be a good thing.

The press release says "create a level playing field for open source software".

It doesn't actually mandate it.

Excellent

Not only should it speed the downfall of the protected software monopolies (M$ et al), increase compeition, reduce cost and deliver increased functionality, but it should ensure that many smaller and often more innovative firms get a slice of the pie. Our economy stands to benefit far more from such an approach than by offering huge, bloated IT contracts to huge, bloated IT multinationals (almost none of which are UK based).

"Get the requirements right before chosing a partner and technology!!!!!!"

But how would Microsoft and BT and their stooges ever get any money from that?

Great idea!

"Would the disastrous National Programme for IT, currently spending £12.7bn, work better with 120 separate project managers and specs?"

Yes, of course it bloody would! That would mean NPfIT had about one tenth the number of specs, and about one hundredth the number of project managers, that is does currently. This would undoubtedly cause the whole thing to go considerably more smoothly - so much so that we might even get around to smoothly abandoning the whole thing in 2013, a couple of years ahead of schedule.

The main requirement for government IT...

Fire.

Cleansing Fire.

@Here we go....

> 3/ Time and time and time again, projects are handed out to the same tired group of companies that consistently screw up and cost a pile of money.

Well they should have given the contract to BT then. All our Intranet stuff works hunky-dory, tickety-boo & all-systems-go!

What's that you say, 'BT are implementing the NHS IT upgrade?'

OK, Fail!

Tories with good IT idea. Kill me now!

This is an excellent idea. Define standards (communications/data formats etc) and let companies complete to produce solutions that are sold to the individual trusts. The hopeless stuff will soon be weeded out and instead of a one-off monolith doomed to be out of date before deployed, then we could have a dynamic market. Government should pay for a reference solution for the actual formats and let the companies sort out the features to provide.

It just hurts that the Tories have come up with this!

If you had to choose one...

"Smaller IT projects mean less risk of failure."

Sure, there are plenty of reasons why IT projects fail, but if you had to choose one way of making failure almost inevitable, it's planning a multi-year IT megaproject. After the technology choices (typically those from proprietary solution vendors sucking from the teat of the civil service) become obsolete after a couple of years and the nasty dilemma of either reworking everything or just ploughing on regardless is encountered - it's extra, unplanned work either way - deadlines will slip, features will fall away, people will jump overboard, cancellation is frequently inevitable.

So, I don't think the Tories are talking nonsense on this (admittedly rare) occasion.

Last man out please switch off the lights

Except that the last man will probably not know where the switch is because the switch project was separate to the light project.

Open source? Well, I've no objection there. I use it personally and it has even been creeping into some of the works kit. My biggest problem, one which some folk have touched on here, is that the whole government (sic) of IT is being done using rhetoric, politics and sheer flim-flam. The question is, inevitably, what are you going to use it for? The whole history of computing under various governments has been littered with the result of poorly conceived policies and ideas at which there has been much money and effort flung into what turns out to be an embarrassment for whichever party was in power.

Instead of throwing spin at us, therefore, why not give us a concrete plan? What do you want to do, what are the options and what are the best ways of achieving that goal. This would serve the country far better than promises about how you intend to set up projects and what source you are likely to use.

You can't get the requirements right

Requirements change as the system is developed. A large part of that is unavoidable because some many problems are impossible to understand until you invest a lot of time into solving them.

People who want software development to proceed along a well defined path ... follow that path to failure.

---

Also there needs to be a healthy feedback between the available technology and the design. Design choices influence technology choices. Technology choices then make some things easy to implement others very difficult. The design them is shifted to leverage the unique characteristics of the chosen technology.

Anyway breaking things down into small loosely coupled projects ... makes a lot of sense. Some will fail, some will exceed expectations. Even if as some say it will be subdivisions of the same companies .... those subdivisions will be competing against each other.

Also when you break things up into smaller parts ... well it suddenly becomes more obvious when certain features/capabilities cost far more than they are worth.

@martin

Here's how you cut up NPfIT into 100m chunks:

1) Common data format. Find one.

2) Write or procure sw to use #1

3) Write or procure internal exchange processes within the same area

4) Create a secure VPN for NHS use

5) Extend #3 along #4.

It's all so Eee-asy.

Asus have demonstrated that a lot of people will cheerfully use Linux and Open Office.

They also, alas, demonstrate how to get things wrong. Despite a physical UK keyboard, they don't supply a UK dictionary.

The Linux enthusiasts often criticise Xandros,and they have reason to criticise the Linux supplied with the Eee.

Guess what: Microsoft get things wrong too.

Open Source is working.

Torys get it right for once

Seems they have listened to people who know how to deliver projects on time and on budget.

-Project size, complexity and risk correlations were known about in the 80's but no one bothered to read the research as it didn't look good on the CV.

- Why pay M$ when you can get what you need for free - and the support is better too. If you need features adding, a small amount of money spent on it works wonders - eg Amazon & HTML::Mason

Open source can work - But......

.....there needs to be a raised standard in technical support and project staff. This is the problem. When a large number of support staff (I used to work for EDS (cough cough)) work on MS products, many of them wouldn't know what hit them with Linux and other Open Source stuff.

I really can't be bothered over who is best Windows or *nux. But I think everyone will agree that *nix is a much more technical. The question is where will the likes of EDS, Siemens, Crap gemini get these staff from?

We have MCSE on £20k a year, but try and find a RHCE who's willing to work on less then £30k. Then, multiply that by 100's of staff on large Govn projects.

Sorry, but MS wins, afterall the Govn. probably only pays a few £ per license (The DWP had over 30,000 MS W2k Licenses not being used in 2005 and never realised it.)

Its nothing to do with the software costs

What a FARCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

These software projects go over budget and fail. REGARDLESS of the software costs. The software costs are normally insignificant to the cost of consultants, and the staff etc.

1) Spec your requirements correctly

2) use appropriate tools and software

3) buy in expertise where necessary

4) deliver the requirements

or the govement way

1) be vauge about requirements but promise the earth

2) be vague about the budget and end up spending shit loads more

3) buy in expertise from everywhere even if its not relevant and hope they agree that its all someone elses fault

4) retire

5) or get promoted to another degree of incompetance

6) or point the fingure at one of the large consultancies you contracted on really vague terms

7) get laughed at by their solicitors who are much better than civil servants

8) end up explaining to a select committee where the fck all this tax payers money is going

9) wish you had never started

Tories in unexpected outbreak of common sense!

Hmm, something's wrong with this picture, it, it... sounds thoroughly sensible, almost like they... they know what they're talking about. How deeply strange, it must be a fluke.

If I could trust the awful desperate pro-"life" c***s as far as I could throw them I'd be impressed.

It's a great idea but...

I doubt that the control management to make things work will exist in a cost cutting environment.

And fear that the end result will be:

- rather than chasing one organisation for its shortcomings some quango or committee meeting quarterly in the House will have to chase 120! organisations all saying "Not me guv! S'one ov them mate"

In an ideal world there would be no differences between appointing one large commitment or 120 smaller commitments.

The truth is (as we all know?) that 120 commitments in software without good project management is going to go extinct as a dinosaur but only rather swifter.

Rather naive

I think it is rather naive to think that using open source and cutting projects up into smaller projects will automagically fix all problems.

First of all, most of these projects are bespoke work and there won't be any 'existing' open- or closed-source solutions available.

Second of all, even though smaller projects make managing complexity easier, it won't be easy getting a working, complete solution on the rails that should have a large scope (I have seen systems that were built piecemeal by one company and even then there a problems with data-consistency and -compatibility between various parts and/or systems).

Penalty Clauses

To answer a couple of posts on penalty clauses, for large government projects they simply don't work. This is almost invariably down to the fact that the people speccing the system have no idea what they actually want from their system and thus underspec it, they then constantly add new bits to the project. Then when the project is late the supplier points to the spec, points to all the extra emails saying "Please add x,y and z" and passes the buck right back to the customer.

If you want to have a flexible spec then you need to start off the contract with that in mind, you have milestone payments for specific deliverables and make sure that everything that's added is properly costed a part of the project. Sadly, few companies seem to have grasped this idea.

@ AC 00:01

It makes sense.

Firm & tidy spec, firm & tidy response, firm & tidy result, firm & tidy invoice.

Sloppy & shabby spec, Sloppy & shabby response, Sloppy & shabby result, Sloppy & shabby invoice?

It seem to cascade from the original spec/managers all the way down.

Right direction, but...

All of these are good suggestions that will help. But as someone who has helped write government software, and bailed when they knew what was good for them, the biggest problem of writing software is the laws that it is coded around! The law is in inconceivably complex beast that isn't even understood when it is passed, and takes successive rheams of judges and court cases to determine its interpretation. And each successive government changes it every four years! In the law there can be no basis for software, as the latter requires strict and rigid interpretation of *very* simple rules in order to execute.

Software as it is today is inherently incompatible with law. Or should I say law is inherently incompatible with software, take your pick.

misonomers about open source

Open Source worked well for operating systems and single applications because the scope was limited and function required was specific. A corporate application is a multi-faceted entity with wide-ranging interfaces and data structures required. (Remember the last time you sought consensus internally on some requirements, and then imagine including the cleaner and the tea lady as well).

Sorry, but the "bazaar" approach does not apply here. This is just pollies throwing around buzzwords to sound "with it".