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Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

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Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#181

Post by giobox »

goodroot wrote: post #77

As a Canadian who has worked at IBM, I'm not surprised that this didn't find success. In IBMs defense, I don't believe our public sector has the experience or aptitude required to act as a supporting interface for a job of this scale. With that being said, IBM isn't a successful technology company with a proven record building good software products. They were an unwise choice from the get-go. IBM is a successful fin…

> In IBMs defense, I don't believe our public sector has the experience or aptitude required to act as a supporting interface for a job of this scale.

How in any way is this "In IBMs defense"? We should think it OK that they pursued and committed to a large government contract that in reality they were not qualified to complete? The sentence reads more as a condemnation.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#182

Post by canhe »

cgio wrote: post #166
chime wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on similar things on a smaller scale but higher up the chain, I can tell you the list of possible issues is a mile long. Everything from lack of leadership and conflicting goals to ever-changing scopes and insufficient resources is a candidate for the big blame. A lot of people, organizations, and systems have to work well together to succeed. As techies, we think the technical solution is the most supe…

I would have gone for the 8 hrs option. Polluting the ui with redundant information and flow on impact to reporting potentially. The impact of saving some hrs might end up amounting to even more. Also, testing and lifecycle of this approach could be worse. And a sign of how we sometimes get carried away by tge tech definition. Why call it 1 or more tickets rather than any tickets?

Well actually...

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#183

Post by ikeboy »

goodroot wrote: post #77

As a Canadian who has worked at IBM, I'm not surprised that this didn't find success. In IBMs defense, I don't believe our public sector has the experience or aptitude required to act as a supporting interface for a job of this scale. With that being said, IBM isn't a successful technology company with a proven record building good software products. They were an unwise choice from the get-go. IBM is a successful fin…

Maybe it's time to start firing people for choosing IBM.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#184

Post by toomanybeersies »

cletus wrote: post #168
Narkov wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or in Queensland with the $1.5b health payroll failure. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-...

Ha, funny story about that. My brother-in-law's uncle is a doctor (specialist) in Queensland. A couple of years ago he told us a story about this. Because of the massive screwups a bunch of private practitioners like himself weren't getting paid by the state government for work they did for the public health system. It reached the point where a lot of doctors were simply not going to provide nonessential services if…

A similar thing happened in New Zealand when the Ministry of Education rolled out their new Novopay payroll software.

Teachers were getting overpaid, and then collection services would be sicked on them to recover the excess pay, often without contact first to simply ask for the money.

Meanwhile, there was no compensation for teachers who were underpaid.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#185

Post by chime »

cgio wrote: post #166
chime wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on similar things on a smaller scale but higher up the chain, I can tell you the list of possible issues is a mile long. Everything from lack of leadership and conflicting goals to ever-changing scopes and insufficient resources is a candidate for the big blame. A lot of people, organizations, and systems have to work well together to succeed. As techies, we think the technical solution is the most supe…

I would have gone for the 8 hrs option. Polluting the ui with redundant information and flow on impact to reporting potentially. The impact of saving some hrs might end up amounting to even more. Also, testing and lifecycle of this approach could be worse. And a sign of how we sometimes get carried away by tge tech definition. Why call it 1 or more tickets rather than any tickets?

That's the point I was trying to make. This was something where we could've bikeshedded for weeks with numerous interdepartmental meetings and spent way more hours than necessary to try to come to the optimal solution. Instead since both the user and I had the power to come to the final decision together, we picked this option.

If it works, then we spent less time on the business problem than I've spent writing my two comments here. If it doesn't work, we go back and decide if 8 hours to fix osTicket is worth it or not. Or maybe we find an osTicket consultant to do it for us. Or we find a hosted, mobile-friendly alternative to replace osTicket. Or we integrate this feature into our existing ERP system.

There are a million ways to do anything. Nobody has the time to do any of them in the real-world when we all have hundreds of things to do on a daily basis. The right/optimal/correct solution isn't often the most appropriate solution and vice-versa. People willing to take risks and defend their stances on difficult decisions can get work done. Otherwise you get 'Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM'.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#186

Post by samstave »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #180
wahern wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apropos HN, he then says, officials set out to fix Indiana's poorly-performing welfare system by inserting an untested, theoretical experiment, and substitute personal caseworkers with computers and phone calls ("remote eligibility"). This is now admitted to be an error, and there is nothing in this case, or the Court's power, that can be done to correct it, or remedy the lost taxpayer money or personal suffering of…

ML based welfare eligibility screening seems a few short steps from Kafka. I'm not sure if that's what they were doing, but it seems like something that somebody would think is a great idea.

The ONLY person who would think all that is a good idea are the engineers who were able to update their linkedin with "implemented ML based solution to replace human resources with computer resources to streamline the welfare system for the state of X"

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#188

Post by azernik »

greenshackle3 wrote: post #169
mseebach wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could serve 80% of the payroll burden with software that cost $10m. 90% coverage costs $100m. 98% costs $1,000m. And 100% costs $∞ I read something in a trade journal probably probably about 15 years ago, that really stuck with me: When businesses buy big software solutions (I think the article was about ERP systems), they should prepare to adjust and change their processes (within reason, of course) and not ju…

Having worked on ERP software for medium businesses, that sounds spot-on to me; in my experience the biggest challenge was not so much technical as getting clients to change their processes so they can be systematized in a sane way. There is a lot of resistance from employees not willing to change the way they work. Even seemingly simple things like standardizing language / glossary between departments so we can have…

Same for me, working on MRP-ish software for small businesses.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#189

Post by funkymike »

da02 wrote: post #128
kabdib wrote: post #28

Was not surprised to see Oracle and PeopleSoft involved. I hope they get the crap sued out of them. That stuff is toxic, and I pity any organization that Oracle got its claws into using that junk.

Back in 1999, I was in the elevator and I heard the admin. staff say PeopleSoft (the software) doesn't do anything. This was @ Polytechnic Uni. in Brooklyn. This conflicted with the school's public message where (officially) adopting PeopleSoft was a big step in the right direction. I always wondered if PeopleSoft improved since. I guess not?

My employer recently switched from PeopleSoft to Oracle for HR stuff. So now instead of the system itself being slow to respond, it is plenty responsive when I put in for time off. However, if I fill out the form too quickly it rejects the input as invalid. They can't even get form input validation to work correctly.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#190

Post by funkymike »

uhhhhhhh wrote: post #177
xienze wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That stuff is toxic, and I pity any organization that Oracle got its claws into using that junk. In my experience, no one is really duped by these big companies. The people writing the checks generally start their search with magic quadrant leaders and then further narrow it down to the biggest players because "we can't trust our business to some no-name." It's really a situation that companies willingly put themse…

The only defense I've seen for that is "You want the company to be big enough to sue when they screw it up"

Which is necessary of course because you can be sure they'll screw it up.
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