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Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

wmhartnett.com

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Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#21

Post by _delirium »

HotKFreshSwag wrote: post #8

Does anyone know what something similar would cost a large private corporation?

Probably not a very different price, and the end result might not be much better. Bespoke enterprise software is notoriously expensive, and the end results are often not good. Lots of reasons, many the same as with government: client has very particular needs, client has unclear specifications that are changed several times during the process, competition for the bid is weak, client doesn't have their internal shit together, client's existing systems that the new stuff must integrate with are poorly designed and/or bitrotting and/or broken, client's management/billing/procedures are so bureaucratic that you have to include some cost in the bid just to pay for that, etc.

I haven't done anything in that area myself, but from what I hear second-hand it's a gravy train once you've made a sale to a Fortune500 company. Sales is hard, but once you've made the sale, you can bill millions for years for all sorts of reasons, some of which are even legitimate (given what they're asking you to do).

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#22

Post by GFischer »

jevinskie wrote: post #6

I'm curious to see what caliber/capabilities HN thinks software that costs $33 million should offer. I have experience with cycle accurate emulators that cost $100k/floating license but never anything at the $33 million level!

Well, the company I work for has quotes from both CSC and Guidewire for their insurance packages (kind of an ERP for insurance companies), which would handle all of our processes, and they ran in the "tens of millions" category between licensing, implantation and other costs.

You can check http://www.guidewire.com/ or http://www.csc.com/ if you need a multimillion dollar insurance solution :)

Guidewire at least has hundreds of people working on their insurance suite, some of then I've written to sound very capable and I really like their development process. They even created their own language based on the JVM (Gosu).

http://guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com/

I'm sure CSC has some equally good people, but I haven't come across them :)

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#24

Post by debacle »

jevinskie wrote: post #6

I'm curious to see what caliber/capabilities HN thinks software that costs $33 million should offer. I have experience with cycle accurate emulators that cost $100k/floating license but never anything at the $33 million level!

300 man-years of development is crazy huge for almost any software project I can think of.

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#25

Post by cobrien »

I haven't researched the full contract award or pulled a copy of the original RFP, however, work on the Census FactFinder website was part of an $89.5mm contract awarded to IBM Federal in 2007 (for, potentially, 9 years) [1]. I wonder if the $33mm quoted in the FOIA request response is the total cost incurred to-date on that award (including services performed for the entire Statement of Work) rather than the actual cost of ONLY building/updating FactFinder.

I wouldn't be surprised if the $33mm price is correct ... but not 100% sure it is without spending more time looking around and, potentially, seeking further information through FOIA.

[1] http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22467.wss

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#26

Post by Tangaroa »

jevinskie wrote: post #6

I'm curious to see what caliber/capabilities HN thinks software that costs $33 million should offer. I have experience with cycle accurate emulators that cost $100k/floating license but never anything at the $33 million level!

For $33 million, I would expect not to see "American FactFinder requires an Internet Browser with Javascript enabled." I would expect them to be able afford a developer who knows how to create links with an "a" tag rather than using Javascript to duplicate a core browser feature. Given that this is a federal website, $33 million should be more than enough money to comply with disability guidelines that forbid such sloppy development practices on federal websites.

$33 million is 500 programmer man-years, minus a bit for overhead and profit. That should produce a lot of development.

I wonder if the $33 million cost includes the backend work done on the DADS II contract, or if that figure is just for the web frontend.

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#27

Post by JPKab »

GFischer wrote: post #22
jevinskie wrote: post #6

I'm curious to see what caliber/capabilities HN thinks software that costs $33 million should offer. I have experience with cycle accurate emulators that cost $100k/floating license but never anything at the $33 million level!

Well, the company I work for has quotes from both CSC and Guidewire for their insurance packages (kind of an ERP for insurance companies), which would handle all of our processes, and they ran in the "tens of millions" category between licensing, implantation and other costs. You can check http://www.guidewire.com/ or http://www.csc.com/ if you need a multimillion dollar insurance solution :) Guidewire at least has h…

CSC was the prime contractor for the Air Force's attempt at an ERP. 5 years and $1 billion later, there is no ERP to speak of.

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#28

Post by laironald »

This isn't surprising. I've done work in the federal government. Recently we built some products that did more, looked better and cost far less ($200k) than the other big name consultants. Our risk for further funding is that it didn't cost enough although most people love what we've done. The federal government IT market works on a contracting model, which means the people working under the system do things at a minimum OR do things to ensure that they'll receive further funding down the line. It's incredibly time consuming and difficult to nail one of these contracts (usually requires a combination of relationship building, slow moving people and lots and lots of politics) so once you get into that zone, the incentive for the contractor is to layer as much stuff into the contract as possible.

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#30

Post by danso »

Mizza wrote: post #2

Awesome! I wrote the original FOIA that he references in the beginning of this article, I'm extremely pleased that somebody else took the same initiative! Is there anything else about the government any of you guys want to know about? I'm getting pretty good at FOIA'ing now.

Wow. I remember when you first posted that original FOIA, how me (and others) were saying, we should FOIA EVERY APP...maybe someone did. But I hadn't seen a reference to the crappy OSHA app until this post.
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