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Don't ask me why, but something tells me there was a bit more to the actual Victoria Police project than just the image-scanning component. But the title makes for good clickbait, at least.
Any project in a heavily regulated environment is not measurable that way. The cost comes from compliance, audits, paperwork. Trials, PoCs, etc. You also need to prove security and a long term lifecycle for the solution. Those open source packages - are they being updated? Who validates patches? etc etc. Those are moats, once you're able to deliver the above, you're set for a long time. Good luck!
So just add 20 bean-counters to your team and you can bid for the other state contracts :-)
I feel like there's a killing to be made in "bidding for government contracts as a service". Plus you'd be doing A Good Thing (at least in theory) Obviously complicated requirements exist but I think there's a way of embracing this with some skilled workers I think that the digital service is trying this a bit
Any project in a heavily regulated environment is not measurable that way. The cost comes from compliance, audits, paperwork. Trials, PoCs, etc. You also need to prove security and a long term lifecycle for the solution. Those open source packages - are they being updated? Who validates patches? etc etc. Those are moats, once you're able to deliver the above, you're set for a long time. Good luck!
At a quick glance, this thing is going to need power, probably from the car battery. You don't want it to catch fire and kill the occupants, so there's going to be R&D in power supplies, material etc, along with regulation and testing.
I feel like there's a killing to be made in "bidding for government contracts as a service". Plus you'd be doing A Good Thing (at least in theory) Obviously complicated requirements exist but I think there's a way of embracing this with some skilled workers I think that the digital service is trying this a bit
In much (all?) of Australia all government tenders have to be publicly advertised so this is something you could definitely look in to if you were interested. In particular, Victoria's listing is at : https://www.tenders.vic.gov.au/tenders/index.do
> It found public servants were too afraid to make major changes to IT procurement and were not talking with other departments to avoid duplication.
> "A fear of external scrutiny of decisions — such as through Senate estimates and audits — leads to a low-risk appetite and a culture where it is 'not OK to fail'," the report said.
> "This means that old and familiar ICT solutions are preferred to newer and more innovative, but perceivably riskier, solutions."
Nobody in the APS gets fired for hiring IBM, and nobody in IBM gets fired for screwing up major government projects. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and...
A mistake like this can and has destroyed lives.
http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-18-695bgk/
> Police officer John Edwards was patrolling a quiet neighborhood in Bellaire, Texas when he saw an SUV driven by two young African-American men. It was just before 2am on December 31, 2008. Edwards followed the SUV and ran the license plate number. His computer indicated that the SUV was stolen, and Edwards drew his gun and told the two men to get down on the ground. It wasn’t until later that he realized he’d typed the wrong license plate number into his computer. He was off by one digit. By the time he realized his mistake, one of the men had already been shot in the chest at close range.
Any project in a heavily regulated environment is not measurable that way. The cost comes from compliance, audits, paperwork. Trials, PoCs, etc. You also need to prove security and a long term lifecycle for the solution. Those open source packages - are they being updated? Who validates patches? etc etc. Those are moats, once you're able to deliver the above, you're set for a long time. Good luck!
You're very right. At a quick glance, this thing is going to need power, probably from the car battery. You don't want it to catch fire and kill the occupants, so there's going to be R&D in power supplies, material etc, along with regulation and testing.
> Although, the solution would occasionally have issues with particular letters. A mistake like this can and has destroyed lives. http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-18-695bgk/ > Police officer John Edwards was patrolling a quiet neighborhood in Bellaire, Texas when he saw an SUV driven by two young African-American men. It was just before 2am on December 31, 2008. Edwards followed the SUV and ran the license plate num…
> Although, the solution would occasionally have issues with particular letters. A mistake like this can and has destroyed lives. http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-18-695bgk/ > Police officer John Edwards was patrolling a quiet neighborhood in Bellaire, Texas when he saw an SUV driven by two young African-American men. It was just before 2am on December 31, 2008. Edwards followed the SUV and ran the license plate num…
Oh, wait.
I had hoped I'd made it clear enough, but by no means am I recommending something I cobbled together in an hour on the couch be rolled out as a competitor to BlueNet. I mean shit, I'm web scraping their database and using compressed footage from cheap dashcams. The algorithm is also untrained.
I was, on the other hand, hoping to promote healthy discussion and pose some good questions related to IT procurement here in Australia. There needs to be a happy medium between what I've wired up and an $86M solution.
For a full disclaimer, many many years ago I did work on various Victoria Police IT projects in a previous company. While our projects were delivered on time and on budget, we did hear some horror stories about what the multinational consulting firms were charging.