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.
This is the latest cock up, following distasters with the passport office and the CSA, amongst others. The Public Accounts Committee report [ http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmpubacc/434/4340... ] states that this is the biggest waste of public money yet.
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
"Dave Briggs" dwb27@cam.ac.uk wrote:
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.
This is the latest cock up, following distasters with the passport office and the CSA, amongst others. The Public Accounts Committee report [ http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmpubacc/434/4340... ] states that this is the biggest waste of public money yet.
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?! <<<<
Just a personal opinion that could be taken as a) ignorance or b) sour grapes:
I'm a professional Java programmer but have never worked on enterprise-level systems. Recently I've found it hard to get mainstream work, since most of the jobs offered are in investment banking (sic) or with other people who make a living out of skimming our money. The usual chicken-and-egg applies that if you've never worked with J2EE you won't get a job but if you don't have a job it's very hard to learn J2EE. And it's J2EE that's behind most of the large-scale web-based systems these days.
However, bitterness aside. From what I can deduce, the reason employers want J2EE skills isn't because they want creative, committed problem-solving types. No sir. J2EE is all about applying standard methods, plugging components together like so much Lego, with oodles of XML schemas. Imagination is not an asset in these areas. Indeed, in the only project I've ever worked on as part of a team of more than four people, questioning the rules and assumptions wasn't exactly encouraged and finally got me invited to leave the project. Which collapsed about a month later under the weight of its own internal contradictions.
Does this go any way to explain why large public projects have a habit of going tits up? I think it does. Most accountants think of programmers as a commodity. If you run out of nails you go out and buy another bag from the local hardware store. If you run out of programmers you go out and buy another bag from the local agency. Yep, that's about it.
Until managers start to think of programming as a art rather than as a learned skill, nothing will change.
I've mentioned it before but at http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r0/ is The Programmer's Stone, whose purpose is "to recapture, explore and celebrate the Art of Computer Programming". Here's just one paragraph:
------------------------- "Software engineering is in a terrible pickle. The so-called `Software Crisis' was identified in 1968, but despite thirty years of effort, with hundreds of supposedly fundamental new concepts published, the general state of the industry is horrific. Projects run massively over-budget or collapse entirely in unrecoverable heaps. Estimating is a black art, and too many projects solve the customers' problems of yesterday, not today. The technical quality of most code is dreadful, leading to robustness problems in service and high maintenance costs. And yet within the industry there exist individuals and groups who enjoy staggering, repeatable successes. There are many ways of measuring the usefulness of programmers, but some are rated as over a hundred times more useful than most, by several methods of counting. If only the whole of the industry performed as well as the tiny minority of excellent workers, the economic benefits would be immense. If it were possible to write sophisticated, reliable software quickly and cheaply, the intelligence of society would increase, as everything from car sharing to realistic social security regulations became possible." -------------------------
-- GT
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.
--
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
_______________________________________________ main@lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!
On Saturday 15 Nov 2003 11:37 am, Ashley wrote:
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) :
Poor management?! Never!
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."
A software contractor not understanding the requirements?! Never!
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've recently been involved in a project involving our company that involved ordering of products by SMS being promoted via accessories in retail outlets. Our side has been 90% technical, 10% regulatory (legal advice/approval), while the client has also involved another company for the marketing issues. Project manager our side has been me (developer, bad idea), project manager clients end has been a developer (bad idea), and I have no idea who's in charge of the marketing company. The three-way communications has been a nightmare.
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.
I have to say I think you are addressing the wrong point there. Regardless of what software they used and developed the underlying problem is that unless the management and software developers actually spent time doing the jobs the people receiving the project deliverables do, they cannot possibly have any idea what it would need to be a success. Understanding the needs is in most cases a critically flawed procedure because management never want to spend the time and money on it, then complain when it runs over-budget needing the third re-write before it is finished.
Unfortunately, the UK Government appear to be a complete disaster when it comes to handing out software projects.
I happen to have heard (read: not seen first-hand) enough outsourced projects that have delivered nothing like what was expected of them to have a very dim view of such contracts indeed. When a project is needed, the organisation really must hire the staff internally to do it, have them spend a lot of time working alongside the people to use it, then continue to work alongside them during development to get more experience and get feedback.
The idea of saving money by outsourcing saving money because you're not hiring the staff yourself appears to be a completely mad one.
I'm betting the number of failed or cost-ineffective projects exceeds the number of successful and reasonably within-budget projects at least 5-1.
My thoughts anyway.
James
On Sat, 15 Nov 2003 12:23:44 +0000 James Green jg@jmkg.net wrote:
On Saturday 15 Nov 2003 11:37 am, Ashley wrote:
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) :
Poor management?! Never!
Judges, Solicitors, Barristers, Civil Servants and IT managers!
This is easy to say but some work environments have eloquent intelligent people who are full of good ideas are commissioning the software, and their fore hard to prevent changing the requirements. They may even be brighter than the developers, and the managers put together.
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."--------
A software contractor not understanding the requirements?! Never!
No and many jump into things for vested interest.
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've recently been involved in a project involving our company that involved ordering of products by SMS being promoted via accessories in retail outlets. Our side has been 90% technical, 10% regulatory (legal advice/approval), while the client has also involved another company for the marketing issues. Project manager our side has been me (developer, bad idea), project manager clients end has been a developer (bad idea), and I have no idea who's in charge of the marketing company. The three-way communications has been a nightmare.
I bet.
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.
I have to say I think you are addressing the wrong point there. Regardless of what software they used and developed the underlying problem is that unless the management and software developers actually spent time doing the jobs the people receiving the project deliverables do, they cannot possibly have any idea what it would need to be a success. Understanding the needs is in most cases a critically flawed procedure because management never want to spend the time and money on it, then complain when it runs over-budget needing the third re-write before it is finished.
Unfortunately, the UK Government appear to be a complete disaster when it comes to handing out software projects.
Yes and Public Private Partnership (PPP) and Private Finance Initiative) PFI schemes (essentially the second is a re-branding exercise) just beg to go wrong as thous responsible financially for development are different from those financially responsible for support, and series provision.
I strongly disagree with the financial isolations of development, support, service provision, and maintenance, as I think PFI, PPP are essentially this isolation.
When there is no isolation between development, support, service provision, and maintenance I think we get to see the finest examples of production.
I happen to have heard (read: not seen first-hand) enough outsourced projects that have delivered nothing like what was expected of them to have a very dim view of such contracts indeed. When a project is needed, the organisation really must hire the staff internally to do it, have them spend a lot of time working alongside the people to use it, then continue to work alongside them during development to get more experience and get feedback.
I answered without reading the complete email. As you can see, we agree.
The idea of saving money by outsourcing saving money because you're not hiring the staff yourself appears to be a completely mad one.
I'm betting the number of failed or cost-ineffective projects exceeds the number of successful and reasonably within-budget projects at least 5-1.
My thoughts anyway.
James
I agree
Owen
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On 2003-11-11 16:31:45 +0000 Dave Briggs dwb27@cam.ac.uk wrote:
What do we think about this, and how could things be done properly? Would the use of open source software improve matters?
I don't know. It sounds like there are process problems involved too. Merely switching to free software licensing and open development models alone wouldn't correct this, but it may allow it to be spotted earlier.
On a side note, the AFFS is looking for a volunteer coordinator for its government-related activities. Some more on http://www.affs.org.uk/ -> Workgroups -> Government, or in the next newsletter for those of you who are members.
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Ashley -
Dave Briggs -
Graham Trott -
James Green -
MJ Ray -
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