UK.gov IDs identity vendors

EDS!!??!!

You cannot be serious. After all the failures, other government agencies threatening to sue. What the fcuk is going on here? OMG.

Someone in the labour party must be making a nice little earner out of this.

Get ready for tax hikes when it all goes titsup.com

You have got to be kidding

What is it with this governments tolerance of pisspoor IT suppliers. Expect the usual "Press Release" (crap business spin and guff about added value, solution driven solutions, etc) followed by system failure a few years down the line.

Money for old rope

Given that Gordon Brown is likely to lose the next General Election and the opposition has promised to scrap the NIR, the chance of any of these companies actually having to get the NIR *working* is minimal.

Black Helicopter. Because they want to watch everything you do.

I've been working too hard....

I swear when I first read this I thought it said D. La Rue! I was wondering what the jumped up, cabaret cum TV artiste, was doing running an IT services company!

Shortlist of 5

... for five principal contracts. Though it is a slightly different set of 5 from the one they had at Christmas. And it is totally obscure what they are supposed to be doing, but the price of the contracts is known already. Isn't competitive procurement a marvel?

Oh my...

Having worked for one of these, and talking with ex-colleagues working for another, I'm less than thrilled.

In fact, on track record I suspect this short-list should be the projects death knell.

Please, kill it quickly... it's going over-budget.

RFC for the profit.

@Paolo, @Simon.W

EDS withdrew from the NHS bidding process once it had a chance to look in detail at the contract on offer and the clarity (or lack thereof) of requirements.

I appreciate the point that you are both making. Please nominate one or more large IT suppliers capable of funding (revenue is recognised downstream, remember), delivering and supporting this size of system and see if you can come up with any that haven't had bad press in the last couple of years.

By all means order your list, smallest cock-up at the top, and make certain that the cock-up in question was solely the suppliers fault and not driven by changing customer requirements, acceleration of the delivery timeframe or refusal to delay roll-out after changes have been requested.

And, if you look at the Conservatives record you won't see much difference in the suppliers used, except that PWC were out of favour.

I don't know which is worse:

Paying for the white elephant and seeing all that money just plain wasted, or actually having the insidious surveillance database come to fruition.

On further consideration, it's all bad because we'll get a crappy implemetaion that will cost the earth and cause more problems than no system or a working one, ala CSA or Farmer subsidy systems...

Paris, cos even she knows better than to trust those "big names" with something this full of feature-creep and bullshit.

IBM's history

My previous comment appears to have not made it out of the moderation queue. If you doubt what I said about IBM do some basic research:

http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/

"But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company's custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor."

As I say - IBM have prior experience of cataloguing populations for nefarious purposes.

or is it?

A cunning plan by a NOID plant...face it, its well fucked now ;-))

IBM?

Will Mr. Hollerith comment, one wonders?

Where is all this money coming from?

Banks are crumbling, the house market's in free fall, oil is sucking up all my free spending, Nulabour (and I'm no economist here), are mismanaging the economy - yet, they still appear to have billions to spend on this project.

I really think the Illuminati have taken over the reigns...

Pure fantasy.

CSC AGAIN?JUST DON'T

Oh dear! CSC will more than likely off shore the work even when there told not too. I think were going to face an epidemic of identity fraud. You heard it first here. CSC has and will ignore there client as the company is heavily profit driven. Security and ethics don't come into play with this company. Watch out government if you choose this supplier you will be rather embarrassed when you have to explain why our (The British Public) details ended up on the black market.