[Gllug] Government IT projects and wasted money

[Jon Fautley]

On 15 Jun 2011, at 18:29, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have worked on a number of government IT projects.
> I find the biggest waste of money is due to stuff being classified.
> For example, I work on project A, and take 2 years to get from project
> start to delivered project.
> I then move to Project B, that is really aiming to achieve exactly
> what project A has just done, but because of the project being
> "classified", we cannot copy anything from project A, but instead
> re-do everything and take another 2 years to deliver it.
> Of course, Project A never knows about Project B because of its
> classification as SECRET, so how do difference government departments
> even know if they are duplicating work or not.

That's one of the big arguments for the Government outsourcing as much as possible to the private sector.

The grand idea is that by passing the work to the private sector, existing work can be reused, and the government can leverage the skills and resources not typically available to them for the reasons you listed above.

Unfortunately, what sounds like a good idea in practise rarely is due to the ineptitude of Government procurement, contracts, etc. It's also far too easy for the private sector to rip off the government :(

Cheers,

Jon

--
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug