[Gllug] Bio visa applications may be outsourced

[Nix]

On Tue, 28 Jun 2005, Christopher Hunter stated:
> On Tuesday 28 Jun 2005 10:36, Chris Bell wrote:
> There have been NO "government" IT initiatives that have ever worked under 
> the current bunch of criminals.

You seem to have a few unnecessary words on the end of that sentence.

If you remove everything after `worked', it's just as true.

> As long as Blair persists in using the "software" from his new best
> friend (Bill Gates) and "consultancy services" from EDS, nothing will
> work.

Nah, that's not the government's problem. Their problem is that the
systems' specs change constantly under political pressure, there's the
most *insane* feature-creep (feature-tsunami?), there's a myriad bosses
all of whom have conflicting requirements and most of whom have no clue
whatsoever in any area (management in the public sector being famously
appalling), and there's a huge pile of badly-documented legacy systems
from several different warring Whitehall kingdoms to integrate. The
combination of nasty technical and nasty political/interpersonal horrors
produces project after project that will never work, but which is forced
to limp on for far too long because otherwise people would lose face.

*Nobody* competent will work in that sort of environment for a second
longer than necessary, at least not near the top --- so the govt has to
hire people like EDS, instead. The results are invariably disastrous.


(Still, at least this problem isn't UK-specific, although we seem to do
it with great frequency.)


[in this post I've been channelling my mother, who's made really quite a
 lot of money dashing in to government IT contracts when they started to
 fall to pieces to try to project-manage something, *anything* out of the
 resulting mess.]

-- 
`I lost interest in "blade servers" when I found they didn't throw knives
 at people who weren't supposed to be in your machine room.'
    --- Anthony de Boer
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