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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

#191

Post by mr_toad »

xienze wrote: post #144
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.

> 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…

And it’s rare for anyone to trial or test this software.

The people who have to use it, who are probably best informed to point out it’s strengths and weaknesses are usually the last to see it.

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

#192

Post by toomanybeersies »

manofstick wrote: post #70

New Zealand in the 90's was trying to have an integrated policing system designed by IBM which burnt a lot of money (in the order of 100 million) and was abandoned [0]. I was working with one of the companies that came along to replace one part of the system with a much smaller component that just handled that individual piece and vividly remember the meeting with the IBM team. They had no code to show me, but they h…

More recently, NZ had the Novopay debacle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novopay

The software itself, before fixing it, cost $182mm and covered payroll for 90,000 teachers. That's over $2000 per teacher. It cost another $45mm to fix it after this.

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

#193

Post by stjohnswarts »

Demoneeri wrote: post #61
jorblumesea wrote: post #49

The whole big 4 IT consulting industry needs to die a swift death. It's basically institutionalized corruption. Overbill the client, under deliver with shoddy products made overseas, get that vendor lock in and watch the money flow in. The cost savings are largely an illusion sold by false promises of a better world.

You are mistaken, I work for one of these. I have 12 years experience and I have only one failure to deliver and it was stopped in the design phase because it was too complex and the client wasn't ready.

Same experience with me. I have mostly only consulted with large companies. There are some companies that insist on solid code and design. There are others that just live from quarter to quarter and the whims of the CEO and just throw out whatever is done at the end of the quarter. Having a great lawyer team chomping at the bit for litigation helps their confidence in living from quarter to quarter.

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

#194

Post by adrianratnapala »

Narkov wrote: post #154
tootie wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Oregon v Oracle over their state healthcare exchange. http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/09/post_18...

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

I didn't know about that issue. Although your story also include:

> Since then, Queensland has initiated - and > comprehensively lost - attempts to recoup damages > from the failed project. A judge has ordered the > government to pay all IBM’s legal costs in the > failed suit.

Ouch. I know nothing about the rights and wrongs of that case, but many of these agencies wounds are self-inflicted.

I heard informally of one case where a federal department demanded a "big bang" change introducing multiple new systems all in one go, even though it was obvious (and IBM advised) that the thing be done incrementally. Of course the budget and timeline ended up blowing out.

I expect that sort of thing is quite common, and companies like IBM will be perfectly happy to take advantage of the blowouts.

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

#195

Post by giobox »

xienze wrote: post #144
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.

> 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…

I've yet to see any way to procure custom "Enterprise" software that isn't awful, and sadly I do believe duping is a huge part of it.

The duping starts long before the Oracles/IBMs/Whomever of the world ever reach a customer too - the "analyst" firm role is a huge problem with companies like Gartner/Forester who dream up the "Magic Quadrant" that people purchasing this stuff end up stuck relying on. I've seen in several roles the enormous gulf between what Gartner/Forester will claim about a leading player's capabilities vs the reality, which of course is a state of affairs large Enterprise software companies are all too keen to encourage.

I've never seen a sales consultant answer "no" to a question about capability in an enterprise software sale scenario, ever, across many RFPs. If your job explicitly targets you to bring in x millions of dollars of business a year, you answer "yes, of course" safe in the knowledge that when it does blow up it's someone else's problem and far away from you by that point.

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

#196

Post by theossuary »

samstave wrote: post #186
toomanybeersies wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I don't think any engineer would consider that a good idea. But if somebody tells you that's what you're working on for the next few years, make lemonade I guess.

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

#197

Post by theossuary »

forgotmysn wrote: post #143
happyopossum wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IBM isn't a successful technology company with a proven record building good products. Whoa, what? Sure, some of their achievements are in their past, but that claim really overlooks a ton of history.

Agreed, IBM has a long track record. Their recent history doesn't have a lot of W's though.

That's not true, IBM has way more Ws than Ls over it's history. Now the last few decades, that's a different story I think.

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

#198

Post by toomanybeersies »

To add to the list of failed (at least initially) payroll systems, we have New Zealand's Ministry of Education and their Novopay system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novopay

It cost $180mm and was borderline non-functional, and then cost another $40mm to fix to its now functional state.

The same company that did Novopay also did the payroll for NZ Post and had similar issues.

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

#199

Post by tigershark »

endorphone wrote: post #63

The Canadian government attempted to build a gun registry, originally predicting it to cost $12M, then $85M, then $1000M, then $2000M, and then it was scrapped. While it's easy to blame vendors like IBM, I have to imagine feature-creep and "what about"-isms lead to such monstrosities.

2B$ for a gun registry? Seriously???

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

#200

Post by mr_toad »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #3

The name is just too perfect: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine... To that point, I’m wondering if all IT initiatives codenamed “Phoenix” are doomed from the start, given that the implication is “let’s burn down everything we have that works, and rise anew from the ashes”...

I can literally do that with my DigitalOcean droplet. I can destroy the instance and run a bash script to provision a new, identical machine in around 3 minutes.

It’s a lot of hard work to get every little detail working automatically. Probably 10x as much as just manually setting things up from scratch. But in the long-term it can pay off.

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