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A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

foliovision.com

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Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#191

Post by foliovision »

linkmotif wrote: post #53

I really didn't understand this piece. Did anyone else struggle to follow it from sentence to sentence? Did this article really compare FreshBooks to the payroll needs of the Government of Canada? Whatt??

Freshbooks has built from scratch two SAAS which have handled over $60 billion worth of invoices and expenses for over 10 million users.

I'm suggesting that Mike McDerment could build and lead a team who would successfully build a payroll system for the Government of Canada for far less than a billion dollars.

IBM has not built a working payroll system (despite starting with Oracle's Peoplesoft for that money). I suspect my company (or some of our best competitors) could build a working payroll system for about $50 million based on our success on smaller projects. Our specialty however is in publishing systems and online video. I'm specifically recommending Freshbooks as McDerment has a background in creating accounting and billing systems and scaling them.

Additionally, as a Canadian, McDerment is already familiar with many of the variables to do with Canadian tax and employment legislation and geography. Any foreigner would need three to six months to assimilate Canada specific information.

I also don't suggest that IBM could not have built this payroll system satisfactorily. Based on failed projects in Canada, Australia, Pennsylvania and Slovenia, big promises, poor delivery, unlimited billing and zero liability on government projects appears to be strategic policy (links to each of those projects appear in a new preface to my article). Such behaviour has made Big Blue billions.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#192

Post by foliovision »

bastawhiz wrote: post #134

If you're struggling to read the text like I am, setting the `font-weight` to 400 (instead of 300) makes the page infinitely more readable.

Thanks for the input. Personally my own bugbear in terms of web readability is contrast ratios in "modern" web design. I didn't realise that font-weight could give people such issues. I'll think about changing font-weight soon as good design is about making information more readable and not less.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#193

Post by foliovision »

danmaz74 wrote: post #92
Naga wrote: post #36

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 Ph…

> There's a dimension left out here on the Phoenix disaster: It wasn't really IBM's fault at all. I respectfully disagree. IBM management either knew what they were contracting was a recipe for disaster, or they were incompetent. In both cases, as they were supposed to be the billion-dollar expert on the matter, they bear great responsibility for this failure. And at an industry level, companies that promise the impo…

Exactly. Based on IBM's track record around the world (I know of IBM payroll projects for Canada, Australia, Pennsylvania which have failed while New Zealand and Slovenia have been mentioned in comments), I'd say failing on low ball government payroll projects and then taking the government to the cleaners is strategic at IBM.

IBM have made billions doing so. Bad publicity is just a good start.

The really interesting point is that if this business plan is shown to be strategic (if I were Canada, Australia or Pennsylvania I'd be looking at full discovery of all email records), IBM would then be vulnerable to civil suit for fraud.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#194

Post by foliovision »

drieddust wrote: post #40
Naga wrote: post #36

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 Ph…

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…

A responsible vendor then declines to take the project (smart decision) or executes anyway. We've been in the situation a few times where what started as an attractive project with a reasonable budget turned out to be an underestimate and we barely earned back our salary expenditures on the project.

Those companies did continue to do business with us though and we've normally earned back our losses and more on future projects.

That's what honest vendors do. That's not what IBM did.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#195

Post by foliovision »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #65
Naga wrote: post #36

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 Ph…

I concur. What I'm hearing is that the Canadian Federal payroll is extremely complex (like all government payrolls, I suppose). The Harper gov't justified the system by laying off everyone who knew the old payroll system. The software developed by IBM was so complex, that it required the expertise of the people who got laid off to operate it. The novices who took over didn't know how to make the software work, and ch…

IBM has failed to build these state level systems successfully around the world (Canada, Australia, Pennsylvania, Slovenia, New Zealand). IBM should know how to go about building them right or IBM should not be in this business.

The first $200 million of cost overruns I'm willing to pin on the Government of Canada. The subsequent billion dollars and the failure of the system to work at all is the vendor's fault.

If the Government of Canada is entirely impossible to work with, the vendor should have shut the project down at 200% of budget rather than run it to six times budget and still fail.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#196

Post by foliovision »

opportune wrote: post #99
otoburb wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They most likely did raise this, but when asked to provide a more "competitive" bid, they axed training and who knows what else. This is common in large enterprise sales deals. For professional services deployment engagements, there is always the possibility of an amendment to the services scope (often referred to as a change order or change request). If the project is estimated to take over a year to deploy, by then…

This is why it's not accurate to claim that "it's not IBM's fault." They are fully culpable for making a bid that didn't include necessary components of the project priced in.

Exactly. Based on their track record, IBM clearly knew what was going to happen and even anticipated the extra income as the project spiralled around the drain.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#197

Post by webninja »

“IBM instead sold the Canadian government someone else's software (Oracle's Peoplesoft) on a sweetheart contract which did not require delivery of a working solution. Then IBM failed to successfully implement while taking payment all the way along.”

So they outsourced the work to Oracle which is known to churn out garbage. Also just a lot of blame shifting between garbage-quality companies.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#198

Post by gargravarr »

marcosdumay wrote: post #144
user5994461 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why Oracle is in the list. The databases are very expensive but they work well.

When The Daily WTF was still maintained it reserved an entire section of the site for Oracle Database. It may rarely have catastrophic failures (although it's the second one I've seen most catastrophic failures, just after MySQL), but it is composed of one unreasonable choice after the other.

Having worked at a company that used an Oracle cluster considering of over £1 million in hardware alone (I was never brave enough to ask about the licensing for the actual DB), the complexity of the setup far outweighs anything I could get my head around, and the company employed several full-time DBAs who were constantly tweaking parameters to keep the system performing - it could not simply be left to its own devices, there were humans in the loop around the clock.

Despite this, there was still a semi-major outage every few months that required even more complex failover systems surrounding it (message queues etc.) to deal with the downtime. I was with the company for only a few months but it was long enough for this to occur. Does make me wonder what the company was paying all this money (hardware, software and DBAs) for if the system was still expected to fail regularly.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#199

Post by gargravarr »

blueside wrote: post #87
scottLobster wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly too many people remember. Shows the power of branding. IBM has largely moved out of the consumer space, and occasionally their research labs come out with some cool new tech (Watson and such). In the common consciousness they were the Apple of their day who then ascended out of the market to bigger, cooler things. As a result most people, including non-technical business execs who make purchasing decisions, d…

> some cool new tech (Watson and such) I'm afraid Watson is very far from a "cool new tech", many companies have described their experience with Watson as a money gouging disaster.

Its appearance on Jeopardy! made it seem cool especially to non-technical people, who are most likely to remember and be impressed by it.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#200

Post by linkmotif »

foliovision wrote: post #191
linkmotif wrote: post #53

I really didn't understand this piece. Did anyone else struggle to follow it from sentence to sentence? Did this article really compare FreshBooks to the payroll needs of the Government of Canada? Whatt??

Freshbooks has built from scratch two SAAS which have handled over $60 billion worth of invoices and expenses for over 10 million users. I'm suggesting that Mike McDerment could build and lead a team who would successfully build a payroll system for the Government of Canada for far less than a billion dollars. IBM has not built a working payroll system (despite starting with Oracle's Peoplesoft for that money). I sus…

> Freshbooks has built from scratch two SAAS which have handled over $60 billion worth of invoices and expenses for over 10 million users.

Right but those transactions have all been more or less the same type of vanilla invoicing. Unless something has really changed in Freshbooks, that’s an app that handles very specific relatively simple needs. The government of Canada is a giant entity that is most seriously orders of mangnitude different and complex than any usecase for FreshBooks, and that’s just the reality.

> I'm suggesting that Mike McDerment could build and lead a team who would successfully build a payroll system for the Government of Canada for far less than a billion dollars.

Maybe, but probably not. The real problem is probably that the business needs of the government of Canada are not well defined and the bureaucrats cannot define them. The comparison to FreshBooks is just so off because it’s totally upside down. FreshBooks was built and provides certain functionality. Building a payroll system for The government of Canada is an exercise in reverse engineering the Government of Canada. It’s an exercise in squaring hundreds of not thousands of different circles and making them fit into a box.

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