A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

It changed when IBM started laying off their domestic American staff in preference to offshored resources, especially from India.

I worked there in the late 1990's. I was in research division (writing Notes applications) and they were doing better after the downturn in the early 90s. They spent billions on research (some hardware research like chips/ some software research). The little nub that think pads use was invented in that building. Global Services (the consulting arm) was the rising division.

The talk inside was the new CEO (Gerstner[1]) was leveraging IBM's size rather than the previous plan to break it into pieces and was somewhat successful at it.

I left to go back to grad school. And I think the new management went back to the "this is too big and unmanageable, its worth more broken up" mindset.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_V._Gerstner_Jr.

There's a dimension left out here on the Phoenix disaster: It wasn't really IBM's fault at all.

The Canadian public service is really complex. There are multiple unions with multiple overlapping collective bargaining agreements, where the public service is allocated to different classes. These classes are paid specific rates, with retroactive pay being common for changing classes. The majority of the problems with Phoenix have been employees moving from their classes and being paid the correct amount. It has also adversely affected non-unionized positions.

My understanding is that the Harper government (Prime Minister until 2015), who was responsible for the negotiation and for laying out the requirements, was trying to save a money and not responibly create a pay system. Two major factors that jump out at me:

1) Requirements did not call for training. The system was implemented and IBM was not required to train any operators on how the system functions, which is important because all new staff were hired to run the system and,

2) Due to the need for cost saving measures (the government was trying really hard to balance the budget, as the election was coming up), the previous payroll staff were terminated and a new payroll centre was opened in Miramichi, which is a small town in the middle of nowhere.

So, on top of new software, the government lost all of its institutional knowledge regarding payroll and how things are supposed to work. It's actually hard to say how much of this is IBM's fault and how much is the governments, because the government doesn't know how to fix it. No one knows how Phoenix works and no one knows how it is supposed to work. It's just a big mess with no end in sight.

Could IBM have done a better job? Probably, but garbage in, garbage out.

For further reading, the Auditor-General's report: http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201711_01...

From my experience it's mainly that governments don't have a lot of experts on staff so a lot of decision making gets outsourced too. I worked on a gov contract a long time ago and it was pretty obvious that there were several higher ups in government who added their own conflicting requirements to the list. Everybody in the trenches saw that they made things incredibly complex for no good reason but nobody pushed back. The main contractor was happy to sell many, many more hours and inside government there was nobody who had the ability to screen requirements for consistency and feasibility before giving them to the contractor.

It's like dealing with any other service business like contracts, lawyers, wedding photographers or others. If you don't give them clear guidance the result will most likely be an expensive disaster.

As someone who works in same space, I can say this is happening because unrealistic expectations of customers are not challenged by bidding Vendors because they fear losing the project. This in turns happens because customer tries to outsmart vendors by pressing them for reducing the timelines to absolute impossible. If any vendor tries to play by the rules, they are thrown out. Smart vendors respond by crafting the contract smarty. Skipping training is one such example. It was crucial but ....

In the end project is either canceled or goes over budged or barely manage to deliver anything.