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In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

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Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#151

Post by NalNezumi »

alkonaut wrote: post #136
hpkuarg wrote: post #28

I wonder how Swedes maintain their reputation of having a well-run, corruption-free public sector?

Among other things, that we get angry in public when this happens. Hopefully that someone will see at least some consequence. That we are even surprised and upset about this I think is a good sign. I’m sure there are places where people would shrug even if the brother of the politician in question was running the firm that got the contract. Thankfully we have very little of that.

Do we though? There's a couple of government watchdogs that specifically track waste of taxpayer money, and sometimes underlying corruption. Those names (Slöso) are considered by both politicians and certain political leaning citizens as "right wing capitalist propaganda machines/special interest outlets".

I vividly remember how everyone shrugged of some small, local politician spending 50 Million SEK(5 Mil USD) on some project to "Cheer up the town square" ended up with 5 contractors, all friend of the local politician, that produced one 50 page report on how "dancing and talkin street lamps will cheer up the town square" was the final result. The politician denied to answer further question to reporters, insisting the project gave good insights, and no one gave a single crap

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#153

Post by raverbashing »

hutzlibu wrote: post #97
airhead969 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many "do everything" mega solutions like SAP. They're usually terrible because they try to do too much, require changing processes to fit the software, aren't specialized enough in each area for real-world use, or aren't customizable enough. They're often terrible pieces thrown together too quickly under a utopian belief that one app will rule them all and users will just adapt to unusable garbage. There's…

I don't really like to defend SAP, as I had to use it once just for putting in working hours and was horrified by the necessary steps to do so - but afaik SAP is not "terrible pieces quickly thrown together ". It is rather way overengineered. In such a way, that freshmen to SAP(out of university), get assigned to a project - but for one whole year are basically just have to walk along with the team, without contribut…

Yeah, very German

Though to be fair it got there because it was one of the first to kinda solve the problem in a more flexible way than having a system built from nothing

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#154

Post by bitterblotter »

snicksnak wrote: post #5

The changes are pretty ridiculous [1], apparently the gobernment's devs kept deliberately renaming a specific header by adding and increasing a number at the end, from `xsrf-token` up to `xsrf-token11` [0], clearly only with the intend to break their rival free market app. [0] https://twitter.com/oppnaskolplatt/status/137505230118290637... [1] https://github.com/kolplattformen/embedded-api/commit/b61122...

They should just fuzzy match the headers!! Just kidding. This is ridiculous

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#155

Post by raverbashing »

alkonaut wrote: post #138
renewiltord wrote: post #41

Government organizations are terrified about open source initiatives. There's something strange about it. You could volunteer to do all the work and they'll still oppose you at every turn. My hope is that we'll reach a stage where citizen participatory programming is normal for all. Where my dad could offer a PR to fix a typo on a government page casually as he browses it. I have a feeling we're not far off but you n…

It’s still “no one got fired for buying IBM” at play. I can see why you’d be defensive and make a project together with the firm that is the biggest player in software for the public sector (although their reputation is poor). What I don’t understand is why the project is a Big Bang release type thing. Or why the contract can’t have clauses about openness or interoperability? If the supplier is scared by that or char…

Yeah I think it's about time we start firing people who go for the big contractors and the big-bang projects

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#156

Post by owroomexorcist »

908B64B197 wrote: post #10
johngalt wrote: post #7

It's amazing how often giant IT projects like these go off the rails. Exploding costs and garbage implementations. If you start the sentence with: "A 5+ year government IT project that cost over 100 million-" I already know how the story ends. How do we improve this common scenario? What are the root causes? The common themes are: 1. Lack of technical project competence at the decision maker level. 2. Scope creep. Wh…

4. The requirements are often flat out wrong. The Phoenix payroll system comes to mind, the Canadian government tried to shift the blame to IBM, but have their hands tied since IBM delivered exactly what was in the contract. It's just that what the government decided to put in the contract has little to do with how they really do payroll.

And guess who just bought another expensive IBM solution for payment management?

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#157

Post by Lionga »

drno123 wrote: post #152

It is fascinating how those expensive IT companies that get enormous government contracts, with huge profit margins, always hire shitty programmers.

I dont think the programmers are the problem. The problem are companies getting government contracts are good at exactly that getting government contracts. That mostly involves doing bribes without them beeing official corruption.

They are horseshit at anything after that

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#158

Post by mrweasel »

roncohen wrote: post #128
mrweasel wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Danish government tried to getting a new tax collection system built. The specificatio was 6000 page, not including the tax law that needed to be implemented. It facinates me that no one ever stopped to wonder if was actually possible to implement all that. It failed horribly, costing billion of DKK in implementation cost and even more in taxes that couldn’t be collected.

The other problem here is that politicians are either oblivious or simple don't care about the cost associated with complexity in the laws. On top of that, the other unfortunate dynamic that exists is that politicians all work to get their little special case into new bills so they can point to that when their constituents ask how they influenced the new law. Taken together, the complexity of the law just accumulates…

I don't doubt that writing a new laws is complicated, but if I write code, and realise that I constantly need to tack on more code to handle special cases, then I will normally revisits my design. It is not my impression that politicians do the same with laws.

One major issue, at least with Danish law makers, is that they want to target special groups, but that would be discriminating, so instead they attempt to target the behaviour of those group. This of cause will affect a number of people who where not in the original target group, so they add on exceptions and and details to narrow down the law. Also there never seems to be any clean up in the laws.

If your laws/rule exploded from a few hundred pages to 30.000 pages, you should really revisit that thoughts behind that law.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#159

Post by Lionga »

anm89 wrote: post #47
AdrianB1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities are ran by politicians that in most cases are too incompetent to do anything better with their lives. When incompetent leaders make decisions, the incompetence is flowing to most, if not everything they do, including this kind of projects. There is no immediate fix for this situation, unless the decision would be made by some kind of city manager or board of experts that are recruited based on competence and h…

I'm sure people will be lining up to take these board positions when the punishment for project failure is prison. Maybe that's a little far, no?

Just make them responsible for the damages and it is no longer econimically viable to give projects to the bidder with the highest kickbacks but rather the ones that can acutally do the job.
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