[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[Philip Hands]

On Sat, 06 Nov 2010 10:35:31 +0000, Jason Clifford <jason at ukfsn.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-11-06 at 09:31 +0000, John Hearns wrote:
> > Shoot the 9 software developers involved in the failed projects.
> 
> Government IT contracts are almost always assigned to one of a handful
> of large consultancy businesses. Each of those companies has failed to
> deliver on time or on budget multiple times.
> 
> To be fair however we do need to note that no government IT contract is
> simple.
...

I'd say that the complexity is the fundamental flaw that leads to the
eventual failure.

Our civil servants seem to be in love with central databases of
sufficient complexity that they are pretty much unimplementable to start
with, and by the time drifting requirements have their fun, totally
unimplementable.

Government should instead concentrate on standardising data interchange
formats, such as specifying the format that all health systems in the
country be capable of import/exporting and let individual organisations
buy whatever they like, as long as the vendor provides something that is
capable of interacting with the (preferably Free Software) reference
system(s).

That way there's no need for a vast country-wide contract that can only
be assigned to the usual suspects.  Instead, you get competition and
different regional organisations can go to the people that provided
value for money to their neighbours, thus flushing the dross out of the
industry.

Wales seem to have learnt this lesson:

  http://www.leshatton.org/Documents/how-to-build-successful-complex-software-systems.pdf

presumably because they're skint in Wales.

The quickest way to teach this lesson would be to cut central government
IT budgets by 90%, and if that doesn't work, do it again.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND
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