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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

#191

Post by daniellarusso »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #36
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…

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 agree with this, and have seen it first-hand.

Worse, I have seen not enough people run for open council positions, so anybody willing to fill out the paperwork can ‘win’ without anyone in town voting.

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

#192

Post by johndoe42377 »

Sweden is famous for its bone-headed bureaucracy and living by strict rules.

Government in Sweden just cannot be wrong, be it immigration policies, gender policies or anything they do. If you disagree with them you are not progressive enough.

One more thing. While government is migrant-welcoming (at least on paper) the population is extremely nationalist, not like in Japan, but not too far from it.

Otherwise it is a very nice country.

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

#194

Post by progre »

tephra wrote: post #172
progre wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tieto, Nova Software and Unikum are well known players in the edu-it space with Tieto beeing the big one (they are in a lot of other industries as well). Normally they are in direct competition with each other.

The best quote pertaining to Tieto that I'll never forget is when they one the contract to build a new system dealing with something around people with cancer in Luleå. One person on IRC simply stated: "Well now I'm really glad that I don't have cancer _and_ lives in Luleå".

I've worked quite a bit doing migrations and integrations against one of their products. The database schema is... interesting. This thing obviously started as a Sweden-only product, so the database schema for the Swedish version has Swedish column names (first mistake here). When they wanted to build a version for the larger Nordic market they decided to translate the column names to English (well, ok...). But since they already had a lot of customer installations using the Swedish version they have maintained 2 parallell database versions, essentially identical - except for all column names - for something like 20 years now. For this product they have also maintained a home grown version of Visual Basic for automation tasks within the system. Essentially VB6 except lots of bugs and quirks that are so old that if they fix them now, literally millions of man-hours will be required to migrate the existing automations that rely on those quirks.

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

#195

Post by scooble »

jordanbeiber wrote: post #71
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…

Projects are necessary for things that are built to last and not change much during their lifetime: - a bridge - airplanes - most houses - etc Hardware comes to mind - it’s all hardware on the list, basically. Software (outside certain realms ofc) like this? I’ve been, like many others here, doing this software thing for 20+ years now. Big and small, I’ve basically never seen anything spawned from a project-driven or…

I suspect that one cause of this is the fact that these contracts need to be rendered for, which means stipulating the requirements at the beginning so bids can be produced. So a change of approach would necessitate a change in how how contracts are awarded.

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

#196

Post by magicalhippo »

_0ffh wrote: post #145
magicalhippo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hired as a coder on a fun project like that. It wasn't a big project, I was the sole coder. What had been sold in was basically a Drupal install with some customization. I made sure they wrote a decent specification before I accepted the job. I delivered on time and we had the first test with the client. Everything went very well, and the client seemed happy. On the client side, the project was then moved from…

Many appropriately paid weeks, I sincerely hope for you!?

Since the specifications were sufficiently clear, the client could indeed see rather easily that the solution they wanted was not what was agreed upon.

Had I not insisted on such detailed specs though, it would likely have been a lot harder to get them to pay up.

So yeah, worked out fine for me, but taught me a valuable lesson.

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

#197

Post by lampe3 »

Lionga wrote: post #165
lampe3 wrote: post #148

Germans: what? you guys have an app? Believe me its way worse here in Germany. I would consider this a luxury problem...

What? You guys build airports withouth 14 years of delay and 500% of the planned cost? German government is the european leader in corruption , even covid was used by many of them to get kickbacks for masks for elders and wasted 2 Billion € there. And like the corrupt "Flintenuschi" Ursula von der Leyen they get promoted to President of the European Commission for that if they manage to delete all evidence from their…

Not only airports :D

- Stuttgart 21

- elbphilharmonie, Hamburg

- Mobile Internet

- Everything that has to do with the Deutsche Bahn :D

- more stuff...

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

#198

Post by say_it_as_it_is »

raverbashing wrote: post #155
alkonaut wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seems like a good data journalism project. Follow the money.

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

#199

Post by hutzlibu »

utrechtsouth wrote: post #126
hutzlibu wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, having skilled people with the right to make decisions solves almost everything. But who decides who is skilled enough? Then we are quickly in the realm of politics ..

> But who decides who is skilled enough? Trial and error using a free market place.

When we are talking about centralized government institutions - then we kind of left the free market place.

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

#200

Post by cerved »

hpkuarg wrote: post #28

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

Hanlon's razor. The problem with Swedish public financed IT, is a) the requirement by anti corruption legislation to choose the cheapest solution b) the lack of competence by the people in charge of writing public tendors
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