Article doesn't actually tell us what it is, beyond a traditional CMS.
More important, what is in it. A large difficulty with content management systems are the data types; pairing down or normalizing metadata while trying to map old to new.
The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It
31–40 of 92 posts
Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny you mention that. My first thought was, "wow, that's a lot of money." But then I thought, "but how much is it really?" I actually have no idea how much it should cost for them to do what they were trying to do though I suspect it is probably a fraction of that $150MM.
For a more concrete perspective, if you assume that a good developer costs about $150,000/year, then this is one hundred years of development time for a team of 10 good developers, which is quite a lot. I don't know just what this thing was supposed to do, so I don't know what the scope is.
To 10 developers add a few dozens of Business Analysts and Managers. Outsource some work to India. Oracle licenses and IBM fees. That will easily get you over 100M.
Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It
#33Nowhere near as much as the £12Bn the NHS spent on an impossible moving-spec IT system that they also scrapped(1). Oh wait, it's a tenth of the amount. (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health
A tenth of 12B would be 1.2B. This is a hundredth.
Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It
#34I'm surprised more public projects don't run as bounty-style "build x and get $1 million" type systems. Rather than picking who's going to do what (or worse, building all in-house), having many different small times competing for one pot seems like it might be a better way to get a good starting foundation. Or perhaps that's a crazy idea for something as big as this.
Do you think any decent consultancy is going to be willing to invest millions of £ into building a system where they will most likely be able to recover none of it?
OTOH , more uk government code is being released as open source. So in theory any developer could study the source and offer to fix bugs/add features and give a more accurate estimate. This might increase competition.
Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It
#35I'm surprised more public projects don't run as bounty-style "build x and get $1 million" type systems. Rather than picking who's going to do what (or worse, building all in-house), having many different small times competing for one pot seems like it might be a better way to get a good starting foundation. Or perhaps that's a crazy idea for something as big as this.
It might not lead to savings though. Suppose that the normal contract price is $1,000,000. If you have a bunch of small firms try to build the system, each on only gets the reward with probability p = Prob(they succeed and they get picked out of all the successful firms). A firm would only participate if the reward were greater than $1,000,000/p.
Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It
#36Note that the content in this CMS is hours and hours of raw video footage rather than the usual snippets of text.
Duely noted, but I don't think it ought to make a difference in the price tag unless the CMS was doing conversion and distribution.
...which it was. One of the big features was the ability to edit video in a lower bitrate (i.e. faster to work with) then send it off to a server to process on the full HD video. Great idea, but apparently it was a total mess to work with.
Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It
#37I'm surprised more public projects don't run as bounty-style "build x and get $1 million" type systems. Rather than picking who's going to do what (or worse, building all in-house), having many different small times competing for one pot seems like it might be a better way to get a good starting foundation. Or perhaps that's a crazy idea for something as big as this.
Because the best aren't going to put good work into a project that will probably just get thrown away.
If you entered a bounty project with two hundred other entries (all of which have systems similar to yours), would you put hundreds of hours and all of your effort into the project in spite of the fact that there's only a 0.5% chance you'll get paid? Not if you want to stay in business.
The size of the project is barely even relevant, take a look at bounty programs that are up now for areas like design (99designs, etc) and how they are chastised for pumping out bad products from designers who are only putting a fraction of effort into the projects.
This type of system sounds great for those looking for cheap labor, but in practice it falls apart.
Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It
#38Real headline: Publicly funded broadcaster makes same mistake most large private enterprises make in more or less the same way. It seems to me that months or years of auditing and hearings and cries for heads to roll are probably wasted. Just like a private company a few mangers should probably get tossed or reassigned and the second version of the same project should get started to address the businesses needs the f…
>Publicly funded broadcaster makes same mistake most large private enterprises make in more or less the same way. Actually large private enterprises don't usually make this kind of mistake. This is a typical big government project. Software development is hard. Building large, complex, poorly defined software systems is hard. //EDIT I should clarify that. I don't think a private enterprise would engage in a project t…
Actually large private enterprises don't usually make this kind of mistake.
https://www.google.com/search?q=lawsuit+failed+erp+implement...
4M hits, but lots of dups:
https://www.google.com/search?q=lawsuit+failed+crm+implement...
Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a more concrete perspective, if you assume that a good developer costs about $150,000/year, then this is one hundred years of development time for a team of 10 good developers, which is quite a lot. I don't know just what this thing was supposed to do, so I don't know what the scope is.
no one working for the BBC in the UK would make that sort of money as a developer
I don't know about that. I've seen a few tech jobs around the £70-80k mark at the BBC, which is about $120k. Throw in the additional benefits and it's probably not far off.
Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Actually large private enterprises don't usually make this kind of mistake. This is a typical big government project. Your last two points contradict your first two. There's nothing unique about a government's ability to make terrible decisions. I'd say one difference is that private enterprises typically go under if the mistake is big enough, and they have no great interest in telling the public about their mistak…
I just don't think a large enterprise would engage in an internal $100 million project to build a CMS. I'm not saying private enterprises can't fail or don't fail. They just wouldn't fail in this specific way at that magnitude.
Massive write-offs for failed projects and acquisitions are pretty common in large enterprises.