[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

On 05/11/10 21:17, John Edwards wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 08:14:48PM +0000, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
>    
>> On 05/11/10 17:25, Christopher Hunter wrote:
>>      
>>> As an aside - it is notable that NO labour government IT project has
>>> EVER worked properly, to budget and on time.  The Fire Brigade IT
>>> disaster followed the NHS one (the FB affair was quite effectively
>>> hushed-up, but a little research will reveal the whole ghastly mess),
>>> and every other government IT project has been an abject failure,
>>> without exception.
>>>        
>> Given that your desktop choices were DOS6, Win3.1 and OS2 (hooked up, if
>> you were lucky, to a 28k modem) when labour came into power last you may
>> as well say no serious UK GOVERNMENT IT project has EVER worked
>> properly.
>>      
> <snip>
>
> Very good point on the generality of government IT troubles, but you
> are a few years off on the technical details.
>
> The Labour Party came to power in the UK in 1997. Windows 95, NT 4,
> Mac OS 8 and RedHat 4.2 were all around then and they all had workable
> GUIs that are not too different to what most people use today (RedHat
> excepted unless you built early releases of KDE).
>
> ISDN with channel bonding was available and widely used by businesses
> that needed Internet access (most didn't), with T1 or E1 bundles
> offering up to 2 Mbit/s (up and down). Beyond that there was ATM or
> X25 frame relay. The University JANET network had a 155 Mbit/s
> backbone. The larger metropolitian government departments had good
> bandwidth available, but rural and satellite offices did not. And
> there lies one of the main technical problems (there are of course
> lots of non-technical problems). Lots of schools were already
> connected to the Internet through a BT/government program, though
> kids may not have had easy access to it.
>
> Most people didn't have computers or Internet access, but most didn't
> need it. And those that did were not quite in the stone age.
>
>
>    


Fair point, I was confusing the year Blair became labour leader with the 
year labour got into power.

Still, I'm sure any party would have made the same mistakes in those 
heady days, everyone was giddy with excitement over the advent of cheap 
usable PCs and the web, not to mention VR, FMV, 3D games and cheap 
colour printing. Suddenly surrounded by all that super high technology 
the notion of something as mundane as a national patient records 
database must have seemed quite achievable nay trivial to your average 
IT layperson (e.g. politician) in the late 90s. Of course a decade or so 
later it's quite clear the devil was is in the details!

Having said that one of the first Soft Eng lectures I attended circa 
1994 pointed out that only 1 in 10 large scale software projects ever 
made it into production, somebody probably ought to have pointed that 
out to the powers that be before they flushed quite so many billions 
down the drain :/

Roger

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