This is sad. IBM used to be the watch word for "It just works!" I started at IBM many years ago. When I went to my 1st ISP (back in the early 90s) and things broke I was like "what do you mean it broke? How is this okay?" It was quite a shock to move from a company where we had systems with 20+ years of uptime to having reboot the USENET server every 5 days.
Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
221–230 of 333 posts
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#222We only send our BEST people!!
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sales and Engineering - very different competencies. Companies like IBM are NOT technology companies. They are sales-culture oriented, and their product HAPPENS TO BE technology. In fact you could argue, the only way to win big enterprise contracts in the first place, is to be a sales-culture company. But after selling the deal, their workers have to solve a difficult engineering and organizational management problem…
I agree with some of your points but I don't think that deconstructioning the pieces of the project is a panacea. What frequently occurs when that happens is that you get distributed work along with distributed responsibility. Then whenever anything goes wrong or needs to change, there is no one who can make it happen. You get team A who needs team B to make a new api, but they won't do it till they get a new device…
Not a panacea, but if you imagine - every effort is begun with a built in base probability of failure (battle won or lost before it's fought kind of thing) - that a smaller effort reduces likelihood of failure cause you have less unknown variables.
Breaking things up, not necessarily with the teams, but with time. Milestones, separate the projects over time. Also, the shorter deadlines I've found help keep focused. Longer than a couple months - things can languish.
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#224Reminiscent of the state of Indiana's lawsuit against IBM for allegedly botching a project to automate the state's welfare system — lots of finger-pointing on both sides; the trial court's 65-page decision started out with the words, "Neither party deserves to win this case" [0]. The case has been up to the Indiana Supreme Court already [1]; on remand last summer, the trial court found that IBM is liable for USD $128…
And Pennsylvania suing IBM: http://fortune.com/2017/03/10/pennsylvania-ibm-lawsuit-tom-w...
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
“Our” in this case clearly refers to Canadians, not IBM. Do you know what public sector means?
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Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Stuff like this reminds me of "Star Wars: A New Hope", where people noticed how the storm troopers kept missing Hans Solo despite having so many hi-tech rifles firing at him. "How can they miss him? They are highly trained and so many of them firing at him at once." These IT anecdotes might explain why.
Machine learning aim assist project gone awry.
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#227Reminiscent of the state of Indiana's lawsuit against IBM for allegedly botching a project to automate the state's welfare system — lots of finger-pointing on both sides; the trial court's 65-page decision started out with the words, "Neither party deserves to win this case" [0]. The case has been up to the Indiana Supreme Court already [1]; on remand last summer, the trial court found that IBM is liable for USD $128…
Or Oregon v Oracle over their state healthcare exchange. http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/09/post_18...
Also US Defence's DEAMS - Accenture and Oracle.
15 years, $2.2billion and not finished.
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#228Reminiscent of the state of Indiana's lawsuit against IBM for allegedly botching a project to automate the state's welfare system — lots of finger-pointing on both sides; the trial court's 65-page decision started out with the words, "Neither party deserves to win this case" [0]. The case has been up to the Indiana Supreme Court already [1]; on remand last summer, the trial court found that IBM is liable for USD $128…
Sales and Engineering - very different competencies. Companies like IBM are NOT technology companies. They are sales-culture oriented, and their product HAPPENS TO BE technology. In fact you could argue, the only way to win big enterprise contracts in the first place, is to be a sales-culture company. But after selling the deal, their workers have to solve a difficult engineering and organizational management problem…
This cannot be stressed enough, IBM is basically the opening scene of the movie "boiler room"
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#229The real achievement here is managing to run up a bill of 1B CAD while still failing to deliver. I mean, I can think of a few projects that probably cost several million/yr but 100x? Astonishing.
There's an anecdote floating around about the consultant who heard of a billion-dollar government IT project who promptly offered to do it for 20 million. When asked how, they replied that they would sit on a beach for 5 years then pick up the phone and say, "We failed". Their contact got back in touch 5 years later and said, "I wish we'd given it to you".
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#230So, what makes a payroll system at this scale so difficult? On the face of it, there are salary employees and there are hourly employees. How many taxing bodies does Canada have? Federal, provincial, and municipal? Is that a few dozen or a few hundred? Is Canadian tax code crazy complicated that doesn't allow for a rules based system? I'm honestly curious as to how a "simple" payroll system can go so far off the rail…
http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard
Similarly,
Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective