Chill out, biz barons... your new IT system might not look like the old one

$12.4m in contingency funds...

Thats too efficient!

Now if you public workers in West Virginia really want to know how to work an extra few $$$ into the IT budget, take a look at the projects for the UK Government.

Examples are often useful

"The state set 12,310 specific requirements for deliverers of the contract but realised, after awarding the contract to a single supplier, that some of the work it specified did not need done, the report said."

Is it possible to give an example of one, or more, of these unnecessary requirements? Have they been classified and grouped according to severity/silliness. What percentage of the total number of examples do they represent. Where did these requirements come from, in terms of who wanted them? Such examples would be useful and interesting.

Looking at this another way

The suppliers want to flog whatever they have and usually haven't considered the impact of all the changes to procedures/processes of their client or the costs entailed in such changes. Sensible clients will look past the marketing to assess the total cost of the available offers, including costs of training and changes to all affected procedures. Suppliers who have considered such impacts and have offers which seek to mitigate the effects are often those who win contracts, much to the surprise of the "sell it cheap and run away" suppliers.

How about a Baker's Dozen?

I was new to computing when I was given the job of implementing an invoicing and sales accounts system that replaced an existing hand-written invoicing and IBM-mechanical-machine (chh chhh chhh clunck wrrrr chhh chk chk ching! Remember those?) accounting system. The package we bought was pretty flexible and customizable, but, one free with every 12 bought? That had to go!

Buzzword Sentence of the Month

"This seems to be a classic example where the requirements set for a supplier were overly prescriptive, probably to the detriment of focusing on the desired outcomes, improving the business processes and the changes needed to achieve that, and making sure there is sufficient engagement of everyone in the business to achieve that change," Birdsey said.

Congratulations! You are now in the running for BSotM. I would suggest that in your next attempt, you also try to fit in 'stakeholders' and 'leverage' to improve your overall obfuscation rating.

Specify destination, not route

I'm reminded of the old quote apparently from Henry Ford, that if he'd asked his customers what they wanted they'd have said they wanted a faster horse. Probably an urban legend, but exactly the mentality that seems to prevail with tendering.

If you get a taxi, you don't usually say "Go along Hill Road, take the third left, carry on until you pass the supermarket then turn right" - you say you want to go to East Road. The taxi driver's supposed to know the route and anything relevant. The government, though, would phone up the taxi office and say it wanted a navy blue four-wheeled vehicle running on petrol with five seats and a CD player...

To quote a genuine example from a tender a few years ago: "This web application must be written in Visual Basic or .Net". It went on for pages like that, mandating NTLM authentication, two contradictory requirements for the top section of the pages (two documents specified totally different naming and logo requirements, something to do with an ongoing reorg that left it unclear quite which branding actually applied). They did fail to specify a requirement about URL structures which later caused problems, though.

(Oh, to cap it all, after setting up the architecture astronaut job on their hefty cluster of servers, it turned out to run faster on Amazon's smallest EC2 instance - even when that was over a WAN to Ireland, against using their on-site cluster over the LAN. Plus replacing a big chunk with PHP, because there was never actually a need for .Net involvement in the first place...)

Trevor Pott is a Bad Person and should be eaten by vendors - expert

I demand an operating system with the ability so easily see and navigate between applications that are open. Like multiple overlapping windows and some sort of like a taskbar? Maybe with some sort of hierarchical application discovery system. A menu? Also a way to promote frequently used applications to an easier-to-launch state. A quick launch of some variety?

Seems to be damned near impossible for modern operating system providers to deliver. Oh well, I'll keep on being "overly prescriptive" with my IT suppliers in an attempt to maintain a workflow that works for me, even if that means changing the suppliers in question.

Lack of empathy from Vendors / Solution Architects

Having worked on major transformation projects for telcos one issue I see is that the Enterprise Architects and Managers of the IT delivery teams can not empathize with the business users who have to use completed solution.

Their view tends to be that the current system is old and the business should just change their processes, because as high level technical people they know the business much better then the business does. The issue here is that the proposed new processes aren't suitable for the business to operate and when these issues are pointed out they are passed off as been just low level detail or the users will change. The EA's and technical team management doesn't ask itself ' if I was a user would this make sense.

I'm also amazed of how credence is given to the functionality the old system did. All the years of customization is simply brushed off as unnecessary work and they believe 'this time we are going to do it right' (despite not doing it right the last 6 times with the same methodology.) Its almost like they believe the functionality in the past was just added for the fun of it, not too solve a business problem.

So I say listen to the users, listen to there small issues and vendors and EA's should stop believing they know it all.