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IBM's reputation at risk in wake of census bungle

smh.com.au

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Re: IBM's reputation at risk in wake of census bungle

#7
In my mind, this kind of fuck up seems consistent with IBM's (and other mega vendor) reputation when it comes to this kind of contract.

It's more reflective of poor procurement discipline than anything else -- whomever put out the bid let lobbyists or high level people do their thing without appropriate governance or penalty. It's a relatively small contract, and without clear penalties for poor performance this type of large contractor will do as little as possible.

Re: IBM's reputation at risk in wake of census bungle

#8
post #4
post #2

$9.6m AUS sounds like peanuts for this — something is surely wrong here.

Peanuts? So how much should they have paid for a capable solution then?

I don't know how much, but that barely seems like enough to pay for the hardware to deal with 10+ million visitors in one evening. (Apparently they aren't allowed to use cloud infrastructure for data safety / privacy reasons.)

Re: IBM's reputation at risk in wake of census bungle

#9
post #6

The funniest thing about the census debacle is that enough people mistook census for Sensis (a moderately well known brand that publishes our Yellow Pages) in large enough quantities that sensis.com.au completely fell over.

Interesting. Sensis runs on AWS.

Re: IBM's reputation at risk in wake of census bungle

#10
post #8
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peanuts? So how much should they have paid for a capable solution then?

I don't know how much, but that barely seems like enough to pay for the hardware to deal with 10+ million visitors in one evening. (Apparently they aren't allowed to use cloud infrastructure for data safety / privacy reasons.)

Only if you use some "hip" and bloated web framework/platform. Tell software could handle that without breaking a sweat on minimal hardware.
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