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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

#241

Post by adrianratnapala »

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…

As an employee of organisations I can tell you one reason for resistance: this sort of systematization ends up being endless meaningless churn.

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

#242

Post by grafporno »

tempestn wrote: post #220
CivBase wrote: post #80

Does anyone know what the real problem was here? > Some people were paid too much, others not at all. Those issues snowballed with the deluge of requests to fix incorrect paychecks. > IBM said it’s “fulfilling its obligations on the Phoenix contract, and the software is functioning as intended.” Okay, so the cost is coming from incorrect paycheck values, but the software is working correctly? Does that mean it's huma…

From the anecdotes I've heard, it sounds like the support staff is just wildly insufficient to handle all the issues that crop up with a major change like this. Initially the government switched over a trial group of (iirc) something like 40k employees. There were a bunch of problems with people not being paid or being paid the wrong amounts, but for some incomprehensible reason (perhaps they wanted to ditch the old…

> a trial group of (iirc) something like 40k employees

Oh boy.

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

#243

Post by kabdib »

mkstowegnv wrote: post #163
kabdib wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I last "dealt with" PeopleSoft, the standard operating procedure was: 1) Pay PeopleSoft/Oracle a metric f--kton of money. 2) A CD arrives in the mail. (This little envelope cost $800,000?) 3) Your PeopleSoft consultants show up, laugh at that CD (tossing it into the microwave) and pull out their own distros with a zillion customizations that they proceed to spray over your servers. You have no idea what they are…

I was privvy to discussions surrounding a search for a university president. One of the candidates dropped out when he heard that the university was replacing a perfectly functional home brewed accounting system with PS - it had brought his previous university to its knees and he didn't want to ever deal with it again.

That candidate showed remarkable common sense.

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

#244

Post by rahimnathwani »

dctoedt wrote: post #211
dpweb wrote: post #210

Earlier 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…

> 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. An EDS executive's alleged overpromising, in landing a big contract to build a CRM system for British Sky Broadcast…

"After the decision was handed down, Sky announced that it expected the damage award to be at least £200 million. Had it not been for the misrepresentation claims, the pure-contract damages presumably would have been capped at £30 million. The difference works out to about US$270 million."

Seems like a math error.

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

#245

Post by tootie »

giobox wrote: post #181
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.

I've worked in consulting on a much smaller scale. Like $1-30MM kinda deals. It was priority 1 to make sure the client knew exactly what we needed from them to get a successful outcome.

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

#246

Post by tootie »

erpellan wrote: post #229

The 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 yea…

CityTime was budgeted by City of New York for $63M and after spending $700M, a bunch of people ended up in jail.

https://www.wnyc.org/story/143601-citytime-cautionary-tale/

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

#248

Post by kev009 »

dpweb wrote: post #210
dctoedt wrote: post #38

Reminiscent 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…

I disagree, IBM is a multifaceted company.

These kinds of projects fall under what used to be called IBM Global Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Global_Services. It could be compared somewhat to EDS (HP), Accenture, Perot Systems (Dell) etc. I've never heard of over-delivery from any of these kinds of outsourcing arrangements, they always seem so obviously destined for boondoggle.

IBM proper, the one that makes mainframes and POWER and DB2 and a ton of operating systems and storage etc is very much a technology company. Some of their best products have the worst sales and marketing efforts. I'm working directly with the senior leadership of the POWER group right now and there are no salesmen in sight.. the technology will either sell itself or not. When we met in person the first time the GM told me "we can build any kind of computer you want" - meaning microarchitecture changes, SERDES configuration, new board layout, sheet metal, OS, application tweaks. Not a lot of companies can do that. There is hubris, less technology, and lack of technical value at FANG or most startups or whatever your benchmark is in comparison.

IBM Research is one of the only remaining great industrial research organizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research. Their results speak for themselves.

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

#249

Post by megy »

tootie wrote: post #245
giobox wrote: post #181

Earlier 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.

I've worked in consulting on a much smaller scale. Like $1-30MM kinda deals. It was priority 1 to make sure the client knew exactly what we needed from them to get a successful outcome.

Sure, me too. But this doesn't mean the management doesn't change, their requirements don't change, and idiots in consulting will bend over backwards to make them happy.

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

#250

Post by dragonwriter »

pixl97 wrote: post #206
AndyNemmity wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corruption is often brought up, and I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but any time I've been consulting, it's always general issues, personal issues, technical issues, refusing to change, all sorts of standard stuff. Not corruption. It's hard to implement even a minor thing in a large company.

Probably because you don't notice the corruption. That vendor that has lots of technical issues and the manager that is refusing to change. Well, they know each other and the vendor is giving kickbacks for dragging it out as long as possible.

Most of the corruption in government IT contracting is more subtle; its things like government managers developing relationships with contractors and favoring them subtly without kickbacks, simply because they are comfortable and feel better working with them. The people doing it probably mostly feel like they are actually doing a public good and working around red tape, because they genuinely believe that intangibles that wouldn't be weighed properly in the formal process do weigh in favor of the contractor being a better value.

OTOH, yes, the kind with actual kickbacks absolutely exists, too.

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