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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

#221

Post by dragonwriter »

Rule35 wrote: post #220
908B64B197 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be even worse! Can you imagine the headlines where it's a private company that tells the government what they need to buy AND sells it? Horrible conflict of interest. The best solution would be for government IT to simply be competitive with the private sector for talent acquisition. That would probably mean that most senior software engineers will end-up being above the mayor's paygrade however.

Can you imagine the scandal if you fully specified a product and they built it and it wasn't even fit for task. Your contractor says "They never said it had to fly, they just sent us 5999 pages of specs about the logo, the color of the seat, the tray-table latch mechanism, etc." You'd look even dumber because you proved you don't understand your own business. No organization should expand outside its desired core com…

> Hire one company to write the spec and the product. Hire two others, small firms, one in the problem space (tax, airlines, etc) to check the business requirements and one in the software space to make sure spec/dev/test processes are adequate.

Your projects will never succeed this way, but you’ll have plenty of people to blame for the failures.

Which is why it's already common for government IT projects to use a close variant of this approach, but usually separating out requirement writing to a firm notionally expert at doing that in the problem space instead of having it checked by sich a firm.

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

#222

Post by 908B64B197 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #219
908B64B197 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they know what needs to be done it'd literally be faster for them to code it themselves. They would need to hire software engineers and, quite frankly, most municipal governments aren't capable of adequately compensating these positions.

> They would need to hire software engineers and, quite frankly, most municipal governments aren't capable of adequately compensating these positions. Of course they are, because they already are compensating them plus contract management overhead on both sides of the contracting arrangements (which are usually made even greater because they have different contractors for different phases of an effort), plus contract…

> Of course they are, because they already are compensating them plus contract management overhead on both sides of the contracting arrangements (which are usually made even greater because they have different contractors for different phases of an effort), plus contractor profits.

They have the budget for it, that's sure. But more often than not the municipal workforce is heavily unionized and has paygrades that are below market rates.

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

#223

Post by dragonwriter »

908B64B197 wrote: post #222
dragonwriter wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They would need to hire software engineers and, quite frankly, most municipal governments aren't capable of adequately compensating these positions. Of course they are, because they already are compensating them plus contract management overhead on both sides of the contracting arrangements (which are usually made even greater because they have different contractors for different phases of an effort), plus contract…

> Of course they are, because they already are compensating them plus contract management overhead on both sides of the contracting arrangements (which are usually made even greater because they have different contractors for different phases of an effort), plus contractor profits. They have the budget for it, that's sure. But more often than not the municipal workforce is heavily unionized and has paygrades that are…

> They have the budget for it, that's sure. But more often than not the municipal workforce is heavily unionized and has paygrades that are below market rates.

That (the below market rates) is part of the setup to promote outsourcing. A heavily unionized workforce doesn't make it harder to for an organization to increase tech role pay to market rates if it wants to, it makes it fight harder to avoid to doing so.

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

#224

Post by 908B64B197 »

bjoli wrote: post #114
908B64B197 wrote: post #4

> One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security. ... And the fine, levied by bureaucrats paid with taxpayer's money was paid with... Taxpayer's money. “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” ― Ronald Reagan

This is unrelated, but how in the world can he be held in such high regard in the US? Over here (Europe) he was widely regarded as a clown during his presidency, and the whole Iran/contra deal, together with the pardons by Bush senior, didn't really do his legacy any favours. Just a week ago a friend of mine (who does not share my views, and is generally positive of Reaganomics) said something along the lines of: "no…

Something I'm curious about is what was the inflow/outflow of highly qualified professionals during that period between the USA and Europe.

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

#225

Post by hutzlibu »

utrechtsouth wrote: post #213
hutzlibu wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the mandatory governments solution trying to block it.

It's not mandatory. Actually it's likely illegal.

I just read the twitter post. And from there it sounded like the app is mandatory, because everyone in school had to use them and it was the only solution - and a bad one. So parents made a better on on their own - client - but they still need the sever - so the government contractors change the server-client communication to block the competition.

So it is in effect government mandatory at the moment. And pretty stupid and yes - hopefully illegal.

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

#226

Post by Rule35 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #221
Rule35 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine the scandal if you fully specified a product and they built it and it wasn't even fit for task. Your contractor says "They never said it had to fly, they just sent us 5999 pages of specs about the logo, the color of the seat, the tray-table latch mechanism, etc." You'd look even dumber because you proved you don't understand your own business. No organization should expand outside its desired core com…

> Hire one company to write the spec and the product. Hire two others, small firms, one in the problem space (tax, airlines, etc) to check the business requirements and one in the software space to make sure spec/dev/test processes are adequate. Your projects will never succeed this way, but you’ll have plenty of people to blame for the failures. Which is why it's already common for government IT projects to use a cl…

> Your projects will never succeed this way, but you’ll have plenty of people to blame for the failures.

We're discussing how it failed your way, so I'm not so sure you're presenting a better alternative.

The problem with your method is that two separate companies have deliverables that must be correct, whereas with mine only one does. And my way removes the back-and-forth which is a huge source of errors.

It's fundamentally impossible (absolutely, 100%) to write specs for a complex product before the product work begins.

So you can make it work your way, with a separate firm writing the specs, but you need to couple them with the dev firm and give up on the fantasy of up-front specs.

But that comes with its own problems and increased cost so imho you're better-off just letting one firm do it.

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

#228

Post by boogies »

odiroot wrote: post #140
bjoli wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unrelated, but how in the world can he be held in such high regard in the US? Over here (Europe) he was widely regarded as a clown during his presidency, and the whole Iran/contra deal, together with the pardons by Bush senior, didn't really do his legacy any favours. Just a week ago a friend of mine (who does not share my views, and is generally positive of Reaganomics) said something along the lines of: "no…

> Over here (Europe) he was widely regarded as a clown during his presidency Over here in Europe he is praised for liberating us from communism.

> When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can’t be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989. ~ Lech Walesa (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan#/media/File:Lech...)

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

#229

Post by dragonwriter »

Rule35 wrote: post #226
dragonwriter wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hire one company to write the spec and the product. Hire two others, small firms, one in the problem space (tax, airlines, etc) to check the business requirements and one in the software space to make sure spec/dev/test processes are adequate. Your projects will never succeed this way, but you’ll have plenty of people to blame for the failures. Which is why it's already common for government IT projects to use a cl…

> Your projects will never succeed this way, but you’ll have plenty of people to blame for the failures. We're discussing how it failed your way, so I'm not so sure you're presenting a better alternative. The problem with your method is that two separate companies have deliverables that must be correct, whereas with mine only one does. And my way removes the back-and-forth which is a huge source of errors. It's funda…

> We're discussing how it failed your way

You mean the guaranteed-to-fail-but-spreads-blame method that I mentioned is common and closely related to your proposed method which shares those traits? Because that's neither “my way” nor something I recommend as an alternative.

> The problem with your method is that two separate companies have deliverables that must be correct,

No, only the final delivery company’s one must be correct. The preceding one influences the likelihood of that, of course, just like the extra domain-expert contractor brought in to validate the requirements in your proposal. (Who, if the agency for which work is being done is bringing them is as a requirement “validation” expert because it assessed that it can't do that, is effectively defining the actual requirements, even if nominally they are just validating the other firms work on behalf of the customer.

> It's fundamentally impossible (absolutely, 100%) to write specs for a complex product before the product work begins.

Yes, you seem to understand a key part of the basic problem, but then describe a rearranging-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic solution that does nothing to address it.

> And my way removes the back-and-forth which is a huge source of errors.

No, it just changed to nominal role (but not really the functional role) of one of the three (customer, requirements crafter/validator, developer) parties to the back and forth.

My way is to recognize that if you are going to build and operate a complex IT-dependent business function, a prerequisite step to success is to own the IT capacity to govern the necessary system components, including their incremental development and adaptation to evolving business needs. And closely related to that is arrange the work into increments that (among other criteria) can be plausibly specced in advance but also where the setback isn't intolerable when an increment’s main output is information about where your understanding going into it was wrong.

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

#230

Post by cromka »

Covenant71 wrote: post #176
cromka wrote: post #51

"The city's local government, @Stockholmsstad, spent 1 billion Swedish crowns (100 million dollars)" "@Stockholmsstad are now acting like angry toddlers." I'd read between the lines. I don't think it's a hurt ego, not with these numbers. Someone is (continued) to be paid for this to be happening. This reeks corruption.

Most of the people responsible for starting the journey have left the local government. I think the big problems are - the fact that they have been fined for not handling personal information in a correct way combined with - not enough technical knowledge to know what their current solution enables - the scope of the problems with the system are so big that they do not know what to do and they feel like they get atta…

It's one thing to feel attacked, but they apparently actively try to undermine and derail the competing open source project. That's not mere defending, that's open hostility. So the obvious inclination, IMHO, is that the company behind the original code wants to continue to gain from the ongoing (and, ideally, perpetual) cost of maintenance. Naturally said software company itself cannot openly be the source of those obstructing software changes, so they have the officials to act on their behalf and request them. I hardly can think of any other scenario in this case.
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