481–490 of 688 posts
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Somebody had written this with exact purpose to give this contract to Deloitte. I would be very surprised if there wasn't bribery involved.
Geez, I thought the whole idea is that 'government is the problem. We need to let the private sector handle all these things.' Making the CDC look bad appears to have been part of that program last year. Shame the price has been so high.
I think government is just sitting on the extreme end of bloated bureaucracy, with everthing defense related taking the cake.
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There was some hubbub in Sweden a while back about the armed forces putting up a _really_ specific job ad, like it was tailored to one person. Well, it turned out it was, because the person posting the add forgot to take out the phrase “Make sure Björn meets these requirements” in the middle of the ad.
It’s an open secret in France that many, maybe most (?) calls for new teaching/research positions in university labs are designed to be won by someone already attached to the lab (like a doctoral student for example, or someone with a temporary contract). In French it’s called being "fléché", as in attributed for someone. It’s of course totally contrary to the rules. (It’s most of the time somehow well intentioned, f…
When the French government puts out an EU wide bid for something (As is the rule in the EU), the bid will be won by a French company. Every. Single. Time. And it's not by accident.
Finland, on the other hand, is playing things stupid.
We've had cases where a city's laundry services was won by an Estonian company(!) because they were the cheapest. They actually shipped all laundry 300km+ south, over the bay and to Estonia. Wash it and send it back. For some reason the people handling the bid were all suprised_pikachu.png when it turned out the arrangement didn't work AT ALL.
That's all down to knowing how to write the bid so that the winner will also be the best.
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For your next laptop, car, etc. try doing what you think the government ought to do here. Write down the requirements, give them to a neutral third party who doesn’t doesn’t use computers/drive, and ask them to figure out the cheapest thing that meets the requirements. Commit yourself to buying only that. See how it goes for you.
But that's how I procure anything and everything. I go to geizhals.eu, select the category, select my requirements based on comparative testing from test.de, sort by cheapest total, and click buy. Every single piece of electronics I own was bought that way. How else would you buy stuff without being influenced by some subconscious bias caused by some stupid ad?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was some hubbub in Sweden a while back about the armed forces putting up a _really_ specific job ad, like it was tailored to one person. Well, it turned out it was, because the person posting the add forgot to take out the phrase “Make sure Björn meets these requirements” in the middle of the ad.
It’s an open secret in France that many, maybe most (?) calls for new teaching/research positions in university labs are designed to be won by someone already attached to the lab (like a doctoral student for example, or someone with a temporary contract). In French it’s called being "fléché", as in attributed for someone. It’s of course totally contrary to the rules. (It’s most of the time somehow well intentioned, f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For your next laptop, car, etc. try doing what you think the government ought to do here. Write down the requirements, give them to a neutral third party who doesn’t doesn’t use computers/drive, and ask them to figure out the cheapest thing that meets the requirements. Commit yourself to buying only that. See how it goes for you.
I don't understand the analogy. Why would I give the requirements for making a website to someone who doesn't make websites? The government should do whatever anyone who wants a website does, hire someone to make a website. What's the issue?
This is how hospital software is handled (at least in Finland). The one making the decisions is the head doctor in the hospital, because they have the most power.
They know fuck-all about software and fuck-all about the day to day work of the nurses and doctors who need to use the product every day.
And this is pretty much how we ended up giving Epic Systems 774 million for their MUMPS-flavoured piece of shit rebranded as "Apotti". And the project - started in 2015 - isn't even done, nor bug-free yet. The American model of everything being cost first didn't fit the Finnish model of medicine - to the surprise of no-one outside of the organisation.
It was so bad that other cities refused to use it and went with their own solutions instead of using Apotti.
I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?
These contracts are generally bloated, but if you've never seen how a $10M+ contract for things like this works you're probably thinking about it wrong. The actual development piece is a pretty small portion of the overall work. The bulk of it is figuring out all the requirements, wrangling legacy systems and data into some kind of shape that can either be interfaced with or imported, documentation, support (includin…
It’s probably exactly that. I always strongly wonder if you wouldn’t get a better result if you gave a pair of 22 year olds 1M and a year to develop and figure out all the same things.
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I don't understand the analogy. Why would I give the requirements for making a website to someone who doesn't make websites? The government should do whatever anyone who wants a website does, hire someone to make a website. What's the issue?
I think this is what usually happens and what causes many public projects to fail: the customer has no competent staff that can a) write requirements or b) evaluate tenders. They're often incompetent enough to even hire someone competent to do those things. The government should maybe have a dedicated unit that assists other units with procurement of IT solutions. Where the staff gets very well compensated when a pro…
They already exist. Mysterious why CDC didn't use them. Maybe they are hollowed out after the Trump years. I know I wouldn't have stuck around.
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This guy gets it. Development is literally the simplest part of the problem set. The intersection of domain expertise, contracting/procurement creativity, and technical evaluation is the tough part to wrangle. Getting to the point where development can start is 95% of the battle in my experience. Not to trivialize the actual development portion of the project, but most missteps happen early, dooming projects before a…
Now think of the problem in reverse, from the government's side. Why are they contracting it out when all of the most difficult aspects involve integrating with government systems, policies and personnel - things that government already knows how to do? "Because we don't have the expertise to do software development." The comments in this thread, which I fully agree with by the way, just cement my belief that if gove…
This is basically true for any organisation.
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This guy gets it. Development is literally the simplest part of the problem set. The intersection of domain expertise, contracting/procurement creativity, and technical evaluation is the tough part to wrangle. Getting to the point where development can start is 95% of the battle in my experience. Not to trivialize the actual development portion of the project, but most missteps happen early, dooming projects before a…
Now think of the problem in reverse, from the government's side. Why are they contracting it out when all of the most difficult aspects involve integrating with government systems, policies and personnel - things that government already knows how to do? "Because we don't have the expertise to do software development." The comments in this thread, which I fully agree with by the way, just cement my belief that if gove…