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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

#31

Post by breakfastduck »

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.

Basically the story of most govt IT investments.

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

#33

Post by ilaksh »

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…

There should be laws the require the use of open distributed extensible protocols.

That means the government comes up with a way for the parties to collaborate and just enforces that. So the actual implementation is open to competition.

Things like communication protocols or extensible APIs or schemas for exchanging APIs.

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

#34

Post by ZephyrBlu »

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...

It's hilarious that this is actually happening.

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

#35

Post by detaro »

bsder wrote: post #30
oscardssmith wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about blender, vlc, and Firefox?

Firefox and Blender have significant commercial investment behind them to keep them maintained. And they both started out as proprietary. VLC I don't know about. The fact that there are so few successful, non-programming examples exactly demonstrates the point.

Blender has significant investment because users pay developers for its maintenance, yes.

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

#36

Post by AdrianB1 »

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 held accountable for the results (up to prison, if needed). The old story with "politicians pay with their mandate, they will not be reelected if they fail" is a story for toddlers, that is not a punishment on par with the damages they make, will the Stockholm mayor pay back 100 million dollars?

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

#37

Post by whatthesmack »

bsder wrote: post #12
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

[flagged]

That doesn't negate the truth conveyed by the quote... government is often horribly inefficient and many people don't want the so-called "help" the government forces upon those people.

I certainly know I could manage my retirement funds more efficiently than the government. I dislike all the "help" I see government doing when it often produces worse results than anarchy.

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

#38

Post by Cullinet »

dmurray wrote: post #26
lordnacho wrote: post #15

Perhaps the thing to do is to offer up the government project to an open source initiative. "We need a school comms platform. It needs to have messaging and scheduling. People need to be authenticated (duh)." Now ordinarily I'd say "WTF who would build that for free?" but by the looks of it someone has done substantial work for free already. Heck, you could probably get free work from the kids themselves. There's ple…

> Now ordinarily I'd say "WTF who would build that for free?" but by the looks of it someone has done substantial work for free already. There's a Cunningham's Law parallel here: the best way to get a good free open source system is to first build a terrible expensive proprietary one with shady business practices, and let the frustrated users do the rest.

I think you missed the part where large numbers of people are forced to use the bad system wasting time but only paid salaried time they're not too concerned about so that they'll spend even more of it complaining about the need for a replacement and extolling the virtues of any other system they'll never actually use, and the bit where you pay for lots of highly skilled experts to get the bad system running and doing the least of things for big organisations who think there's no alternative to spending huge budgets for employing the programmers who ultimately take all of this experience to exhort the open source developers what is really required for a successful and excellent replacement and become independent consultants paid by different big organisations to give advice on how the new open source software is going to solve all their problems and set up the teams and management required for adopting the new open software, whilst the open source developers listen to these voices and target unrealistically difficult features and architecture and never get around to noticing that the only thing that anyone actually wanted done was the few really basic tasks that just happened to be too difficult to implement in the original badly conceived product.

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

#39

Post by Cullinet »

core-questions wrote: post #16
lordnacho wrote: post #15

Perhaps the thing to do is to offer up the government project to an open source initiative. "We need a school comms platform. It needs to have messaging and scheduling. People need to be authenticated (duh)." Now ordinarily I'd say "WTF who would build that for free?" but by the looks of it someone has done substantial work for free already. Heck, you could probably get free work from the kids themselves. There's ple…

I love this idea, but it seems that in general bureaucracies are not agile or freethinking enough to be willing to risk doing something like this, even though in the long run it might be amazing. Imagine if an easy-to-administer system of this ilk was freely available and was picked up by school districts around the world; that would be an incredible pool of talent to work with. Especially if the product can be a lit…

bureaucracies are beautifully animated things to watch if you look for the incredible ways they'll self heal and react to negate any kind of threat to their preferred definition of their own integrity.

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

#40

Post by yoelo »

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...

The devs don't work for the Stockholm region nor the government. They are contractors. Stockholm is notorious for terrible fragmented outsourcing programs
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