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IBM's reputation at risk in wake of census bungle

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

#31

Post by pkaye »

pyvpx wrote: post #26
mrweasel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd wager there were other complexities purely from the govt side. That is true for oh so many government IT projects. The part that I still struggle to comprehend is "Why on earth aren't the IT companies, like IBM, telling governments that what they're asking isn't actually possible?" The Danish government have an insane amount of failed IT projects. Most of them fails do to the complexity of laws, rules and requir…

IBM is best at writing iron clad contracts that mean precisely that -- no matter the outcome, they get paid.

Until eventually their past customers get smart and stop working with them. Because of lowest bid contracts, the gov't will be an exception unfortunately.

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

#33

Post by ethbro »

Smerity wrote: post #30

An interesting thing to note that is that Australia selected IBM to run the digital Census (which, surprise, failed horribly) whilst one of their states, Queensland, has an explicit IBM ban due to an ongoing $1.2 billion dollar contract debacle[1]. As an Australian, I hope we can move far away from such contractors. The amount of waste is insane. It reminds me strongly of the initial Healthcare.gov contracting failur…

I think the Healthcare.gov comparison is interesting, because to my knowledge it's the exact opposite situation.

On Healthcare.gov, there was no primary contractor who had authority to manage the other contractors building various pieces. Solution: hire an IBM.

On the Australian census in the article, it seems like they only contracted IBM to both manage and build the project.

My takeaway is that you can get a decent result in large software projects, but (1) hire a party whose sole role it is to manage / conduct ongoing audits of work, (2) set the contract such that the managing party has a mildly adversarial relationship with the implementing parties, & (3) cover off cost overruns in the initial contract.

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

#34

Post by ethbro »

caseysoftware wrote: post #13
Spooky23 wrote: post #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…

I'd wager there were other complexities purely from the govt side. When healthcare.gov launched and crashed, it was uncovered that the final definition of the laws and rules were still coming weeks before the launch and had changed dozens of times throughout. From a purely technical perspective, there's no way to know if something "works" if it hasn't been defined or - worse! - is constantly being redefined on the fl…

As someone who has worked with the US insurance industry, you cannot imagine the amount of crap they have to put up with from Congress.

Last minute changes to a law with a looming implementation deadline so that someone can score political points = everyone is non-compliant for some period

You can't rewrite 30-year old COBOL-backed business processes overnight.

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

#35

Post by sliverstorm »

seibelj wrote: post #15

A few years ago I worked on a project where my company was contracted to build a small piece of a much larger system by IBM. IBM was managing many different contractors. We needed a way to "securely" show a picture, aka not using the pre-installed image showing app. So IBM spent tens of thousands of dollars to build a new Android app that displayed a picture passed to it via an intent. I told our product guy that I c…

Presumably that kind of process rigor is necessary in massive, high-scope projects, and the fallout we see is chiefly from the inability to apply a more lightweight process for tiny projects?

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

#37

Post by devishard »

IBM's reputation is utterly nonsensical. I've worked for a company bought by IBM and for companies that used IBM's products/services and they've never been anything other than mediocre, sometimes outright bad, with costs that are astronomical.

My recommendation is that if you ever think about using an IBM product, hire a developer instead. You'll pay less money for a developer than you would pay for an IBM product, and after they're done implementing a the product better whatever unreliable enterprise clusterfuck IBM would shoehorn into your "solution", you have a developer who can work on other things.

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

#38

Post by jpgvm »

If anything it's just cementing their reputation as a complete joke.

Corp sector in Australia is on the tail end ridding themselves of IBM nonsense after a decade of utter incompetence.

Unfortunately the gov sector catches on slowly.

Sadly a lot of places don't learn though and just replace IBM with TCS/TechM which is somehow even worse.

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

#39

Post by bazqux2 »

sliverstorm wrote: post #35
seibelj wrote: post #15

A few years ago I worked on a project where my company was contracted to build a small piece of a much larger system by IBM. IBM was managing many different contractors. We needed a way to "securely" show a picture, aka not using the pre-installed image showing app. So IBM spent tens of thousands of dollars to build a new Android app that displayed a picture passed to it via an intent. I told our product guy that I c…

Presumably that kind of process rigor is necessary in massive, high-scope projects, and the fallout we see is chiefly from the inability to apply a more lightweight process for tiny projects?

It's counter productive for big projects as well. The Too Big To Fail attitudes to process cover all manor of sins and corruptions to the point the projects is guaranteed to fail. See the Joint Strike Fighter for the worlds single most expensive example of this.

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

#40

Post by Smerity »

ethbro wrote: post #33
Smerity wrote: post #30

An interesting thing to note that is that Australia selected IBM to run the digital Census (which, surprise, failed horribly) whilst one of their states, Queensland, has an explicit IBM ban due to an ongoing $1.2 billion dollar contract debacle[1]. As an Australian, I hope we can move far away from such contractors. The amount of waste is insane. It reminds me strongly of the initial Healthcare.gov contracting failur…

I think the Healthcare.gov comparison is interesting, because to my knowledge it's the exact opposite situation. On Healthcare.gov, there was no primary contractor who had authority to manage the other contractors building various pieces. Solution: hire an IBM. On the Australian census in the article, it seems like they only contracted IBM to both manage and build the project. My takeaway is that you can get a decent…

I may be wrong but from what I read the solution for Healthcare.gov didn't involve a primary contractor, it involved changing policies to reflect start-ups[1].

The Healthcare.gov debacle and resulting "start-up culture" resulted in the US Digital Service, which terms themselves as "a startup at the White House".

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-se...

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