MI5 spymasters axe intel database upgrade, pour '£90m' down drain

Hopefully milestone based payments?

But I doubt it is.....

Deloitte FFS!

Deliverable : IT Cloudiness

Methodology : Advanced Nebulosity

KPIs : Successful implementation of foginess, opacity, smoke and possibly mirrors

Billable : £90 million (incl VAT payable in advance)

Strokes big fat pussy and laughs.

Emst Stavro Blofeld must be chuckling his head off at this one.

Better to deliver nothing...

.. take the cash, and take a fixed amount of flak, than deliver something that isnt't -exactly- what everybody said they wanted. Even though it contained 33280 contradictory requirements. The joys of big It projects where somebody else pays.

AC as I'm an AC.

I can pinpoint the intelligence vacuum fairly, filling said void, not so easy.

Ah yes.

I'd offer to help, but I wouldn't want to work for any organisation that wouldn't have me.

I'd like to say it's a true story, that someone going to work on the project said to me "Well I'm in programme management, so it doesn't really matter what the programme is." but that would be a lie.

Meanwhile up in Imphal Barracks, all the people who could actually implement something like this, aren't able to get their CV through the door, because you can only have DV clearance if you've already got it, or are the daughter of a friend of the counter terrorism head of the met, or a special close friend of a defence minister.

That's not high enough

“we don’t recognise the £90m figure”.

So how much more do they think it is?

Perhaps they should have used Mongo DB.

Mongo DB is web scale.

Additionally, they need a few secretaries to act as business analysts, and some "Performance testers" (because surprisingly, performance problems aren't self evident.)

Then what they need is a good old principal project manager at their supplier, who really knows how to trick the client into changing the requirements, because more requirements means more people on the day rate.

What could possibly go wrong? I mean, screw using your ability to listen in on worldwide communications to find people who don't screw up. Instead, take the view that big consultancies are big because they're good, not because they screw more money out of customers.

Ah yes, we don't have a new secret spy database

We didn't get it and we didn't pay for it.

We don't exist.

Of course.

The buck stops at the top of the tree and head of the service? Or is that to be implausibly denied?

The UK's Security Service drafted in consultants from Deloitte to assist in delivering the project, which has become the latest in a long line of failed multi-million pound UK government IT frauds.

There, fixed that for you, John. Haven't you yet twigged that that is the problem today. Far too many beating about the bush and being all coy and mealymouthed and deferential about serial incompetence in incumbent incompetents.

I wonder if A. Parker will be such a corker and continue working oversight in the traditional cock-up manner?

Makes Me Glad the Snoopers' Charter Has Been Scrapped

Wonder how much money that would've wasted! If it has been scrapped...

And the other half the story....

I would really, really like to get Deloitte's take on this. What they say happened, and why.

Was it a case of shifting-sands requirements? Did the MI5 project bosses even have a clue as to what they wanted? That's the killer with these applications that are not well defined - everyone can agree they want a new intelligence sharing database, but HOW it is to do that, and for WHOM, using what OPERATING PROCESS MODEL, and offering what SECURITY of what DOCUMENTS...ahhh, that is hard. And if it is not a well-defined, common business process (say keeping the books, or operating a call centre) then there is little "best practice" to crib from.

My guess is that MI5 leadership probably couldn't get their heads around any of those questions, or kept changing their minds in circles. I was recently working with a UK governmental agency that had a similar problem - because apparently once you take the profit motive away from an organisation, it is difficult for them to actually know what it is they are trying to DO, and optimise for it. Turf wars abound, and determining priorities and KPIs is near impossible - or at least getting leadership to agree on them. Again, because without profitability as a key metric, everything else can be argued qualitatively to death. "We need to do this as our top priority, but we also can't not do this other which is equally important...and in opposition." I left that project saying that we didn't need a systems design, we needed the top executives locked in a room for a few days to actually agree on what the organisation wanted to be and how it should be run, because everything we were going to design was bollocks without those decisions first. They might get to that conclusion in a few months...maybe.

I highly suspect that similar leadership/organisational issues are at the root cause of many UK government project failures...