back to article Ministry of Justice dreams of £1bn mega IT framework

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has begun to sound out the market for an IT services framework that would be one of the biggest deals in government and effectively duplicate arrangements elsewhere in Whitehall. It has published a pre-tender notice in the Official Journal of the European Union asking for supplier feedback on the …

COMMENTS

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  1. Tony S
    WTF?

    Have we been here before?

    My immediate reaction is that this is going to be another white elephant.

    As far as I can see, no-one at the MoJ (or any other government department) has shown that they have even the slightest idea of what they are doing in terms of determining the requirements, setting out the project, managing the implementation or purchasing anything more expensive than a pencil.

    Make no mistake, this is NOT an IT project. it is a BUSINESS project; it will require business change (and we all know what the civil service think about change). I really hope that I am wrong, but I can't believe that this will be anything else other than a colossal waste of money.

    Someone, somewhere surely must be able to take these people by the scruff of the neck and stop this before it gets started.

    1. GeorgeTuk

      Optional!

      I agree, its like rather than fairly incremental upgrades and changes the commercial world does we end up with doing massive projects all in one go.

      Its a recipe for disaster.

  2. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    There have been revolutions and riots for a lot less. Tread carefully now. The crazy mob is aware.

    Who dreams up these government procurement/money generation/work creation schemes and scams? Is there a head honcho or is it a loose ad hoc arrangement within a selective collective and conservative cabal of wannabe toffs and Steve Jobs seekers?

    The world and his dog would like to know, because they are pretty unimpressed with current shows which are being pimped and pumped by media as a necessary distraction and attraction diverting attention away from the failed global master plan .... buying up the world with paper and then calling it debt to be repaid by those without money, which has been magically invented and gifted to bankers and close friends in their closed system of colossal remuneration for nothing produced except hardship and worry.

  3. Gerrit Hoekstra
    Stop

    NOOooooo!

    All previous attempts at this have failed dismally. Why then try again, this time at even greater cost to the poor tax payer who will, to add insult to injury, divest himself to some incompetent and incomprehensible, bullshitting, offshore conglomerate?

    1. Ben Holmes
      Meh

      If you listen carefully, you can just about hear BAe Systems, Detica, Serco, Capita et al slavering to get a piece of the pie.

  4. GeorgeTuk
    Go

    I see no issue with this...

    ...it will be all fine, the correct tech, on budget and on time too.

    Such as the history of government IT projects I have full faith.

    The above may contain sarcasm.

  5. Nev
    FAIL

    Will they ever learn...?

    This just in: More money to be spunked away on late-delivered, non-functioning, over-priced pie-in-the-sky government IT system.

  6. micheal
    FAIL

    Roll Up, Roll Up!!!!

    the list-X pork barell is open for consumption!!!!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well, what could possibly go wrong eh?

    My solution, maintain a blacklst of IT staff, who fail to deliver for the client, and don't let any company that employs them work on a government related project again.

    I reckon one or two hundred "Executive principal consultants" would end life pretty much unemployable, as Mozart did, (as a pauper but without the talent,) before staff at Crapita, thick-EDS, or Twatos realised that there was a personal cost to deliberately fixing solutions in a way that is suboptimal, to create more work.

    (Legal disclaimer : Not that I'm saying this happens, of course, it's just anecdotal.)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      as much as the consultants/vendors are some what at fault (under pricing to get the deal etc) the main problem is normally government projects like this are run by morons on the government side who have no idea what their department actually does and can't make up their minds and make broad statements like "I want the search to be like google image search" so once the vendors/consultants provide a solution the business goes "we don't want this it doesn't work" by which time the original moron in charge has been replaced twice. So costs spiral as a never ending too and throw of "so here's what we did according to your lame ass spec" and then "this isn't what we want, we want it like this, we don't care that this is what we asked for in our specs"

  8. drifta
    Devil

    FITS

    love the fact the the acronym for this is FITS, seems appropriate.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    MONEY SAVING IS IT?

    At the beginning of the year the Government claimed it wanted small businesses to have access to Government contracts.

    The Ministry of Justice has got rid of small businesses and suppliers by employing a National facilities management company that does everything in house. The same one that lost the contract for security escorts to an AMERICAN firm.

    So much for helping small businesses, and this new IT project just shows the waste involved.

  10. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    Chopping the Home Office in to 2 bits doesn't seem to have curbed their enthusiasm

    for this sort of b***ocks.

    I'd like to get the senior civil servants who think this s**t up (or their brain dead "masters") to write out

    "Massive govt IT projects have a long history of failure to deliver either the cost, staffing or operational benefits they are touted as offering and are almost invariably late and over budget"

    1000 times in pencil.

    Remember Britards, it's *your* cash they will be splashing.

  11. John A Blackley

    I predict......

    ...that after spending twice the stated budget and having installed exactly zero equipment, the project will be cancelled - at which point the GoD (Government of the Day) will have to fork out 50% more of the stated budget to avoid being sued by the contractors.

    WARNING: The above is for entertainment purposes only.

  12. Coofer Cat

    9 months

    I once worked with someone how said "you can't have a project here that lasts longer than 9 months". The idea was that it forced projects to be quick - otherwise they got out of date before they were delivered and cost too much,etc etc.

    Could We The People mandate something similar for governments? That would stop them spending a billion quid on a pile of crap, and force them to do reasonable sized increments instead.

    Either way, this will go the same was as the poll tax, passports, ID cards, the NHS computer system and countless others. Governments can't do IT (well, they can't do procurement at all, but it's most obvious in IT).

  13. M7S
    Black Helicopters

    Would this be the precursor to the "Justice Machine" as seen in Blake's 7?

    (That didn't go well for him as I recall)

    Go on, you know the Government would if they could.

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