Here is my own perspective on this. From reading the Guardian article, the problem appeared to be in the management of the project, not in the work done by software engineers (engineers can only work with what they are given) : -------- The MPs' report found: "The department... ran a poor competition, attracting only one bidder, and it failed to take decisive action when ICL did not deliver what was required. For its part, ICL did not understand the department's requirements, took on excessive risk and underpriced its bid." --------
You will be surprised on the amount of 'administrative' overhead there is on these projects. With a project to "put all the nation's magistrates courts on one computer system", you are talking about a communication nightmare in attempting to understand and then recommend, and get approved, a solution that satisfies enough people involved in the project. I've only been involved in small scale projects of this type of work, and the amount of meetings required to make sure everyone gets their input drives you mad.
I think the advantage of basing the project on free/open source (with it's open and well-documented standards), would be that when ICL f**ked up, another company could have stepping in and worked on *what they had already done*, instead of starting from scratch again. However, this would be dependent on what type of contract was signed, etc.
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Ashley T. Howes PhD http://www.ashleyhowes.com
"when all the animals of this world are gone, man will die of loneliness"
----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave Briggs" dwb27@cam.ac.uk To: "alug" main@lists.alug.org.uk Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 4:31 PM Subject: [ALUG] Government wasting money on IT
Read a pretty shocking article on government waste of money on IT in the Guardian this morning.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1082416,00.html
Essentially, for those who can't be faffed to click the link, the government wanted to unify the Magistrates Courts across the country with one system. The tender which won was for £146 million. It has now risen to over £400 million, and the system still does not work.
...
What do we think about this, and how could things be done properly? Would the use of open source software improve matters? Why can't they recruit willing and able software engineers and do the job in house? From what I have hear from various sources, there are a lot of good IT people out of work at the moment. Surely they couldn't do any worse?!
Dave
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