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A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

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Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#61

Post by ksenzee »

mikro2nd wrote: post #21
scottLobster wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly too many people remember. Shows the power of branding. IBM has largely moved out of the consumer space, and occasionally their research labs come out with some cool new tech (Watson and such). In the common consciousness they were the Apple of their day who then ascended out of the market to bigger, cooler things. As a result most people, including non-technical business execs who make purchasing decisions, d…

> they were the Apple of their day What day was that? Back in the 70's with the Selectric typewriters? No, seriously, those were fucking fantastic machines!

My dad fixed those for a living. They really were great tech.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#62

Post by AzzieElbab »

IBM is a horrible vendor, but the author is obviously clueless about the levels of incompetence, irresponsibility and indecisiveness of the stakeholders on client side for this kind of projects. All governmens should simply always pick the cheapest vendor because 90% of their projects fail regardless of who the implementers are

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#63

Post by seemstoaddup »

na85 wrote: post #60
seemstoaddup wrote: post #59

This is an interesting narrative. However it cannot be the only one. Let us explore some alternatives and side notes. Who was responsible for picking IBM? Are they still working for the CA gov? Have they passed the hot potato to someone else? How were their technical skills and soft skills evaluated? Did they receive any donations for the contract? Where are the safety clauses in the contract? Is IBM the only benefac…

Because government contracts have to be transparent, the award process tends to be overly bureaucratic and algorithmic. There's no real mechanism with which the Canadian government could bar IBM from bidding, and they're obliged to take the best bid. Usually this is lowest cost per rated point, scored against a large matrix of must-haves and nice-to-haves that are assigned weights.

Sounds like the system is set up in such a way as to deliver a under-performing product. Especially if it optimizes for "lowest cost per rated point". Quality things require significant investment.

No wonder IBM has to go get developers outside of the US/CA/AU if they were the lowest bid.

Now it all fits together. Whenever i go to my states web services and they look odd. I now know why. That is changing though.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#64

Post by cromulent »

dredmorbius wrote: post #47
eitland wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anyone else remember the days when "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was true? You might pay a little extra, but it was never a total fail to use IBM products. I never though of it that way but rather as a CYA move.

And an integral component of a FUD strategy. Employed elsewhere (o hai msft) but originated, under that particular acronym, at IBM. The cconcept itself can be traced back at least as far as Sun Tzu.

I'm intrigued about the Sun Tzu history - could you expand a bit more?

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#65

Post by GnarfGnarf »

Naga wrote: post #36

There's a dimension left out here on the Phoenix disaster: It wasn't really IBM's fault at all. The Canadian public service is really complex. There are multiple unions with multiple overlapping collective bargaining agreements, where the public service is allocated to different classes. These classes are paid specific rates, with retroactive pay being common for changing classes. The majority of the problems with Ph…

I concur. What I'm hearing is that the Canadian Federal payroll is extremely complex (like all government payrolls, I suppose). The Harper gov't justified the system by laying off everyone who knew the old payroll system.

The software developed by IBM was so complex, that it required the expertise of the people who got laid off to operate it. The novices who took over didn't know how to make the software work, and chaos ensued.

The Canadian government is as much at fault as the developers on this one. (I speak as one who is paying for this fiasco :o).

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#66

Post by throw7 »

I'm hesitant to just blame IBM and call it the day. What about the U.S. healthcare.gov website? Do we also blame CGI Federal and Accenture?

There's probably blame on both sides, but it seems nowadays that "it needs to be a roaring dumpster fire until we do things the right way". Unfortunately, either no one _in_ government seems competent to know that right way or be empowered enough to fight for it (maybe they've all left).

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#67

Post by 794CD01 »

seemstoaddup wrote: post #63
na85 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because government contracts have to be transparent, the award process tends to be overly bureaucratic and algorithmic. There's no real mechanism with which the Canadian government could bar IBM from bidding, and they're obliged to take the best bid. Usually this is lowest cost per rated point, scored against a large matrix of must-haves and nice-to-haves that are assigned weights.

Sounds like the system is set up in such a way as to deliver a under-performing product. Especially if it optimizes for "lowest cost per rated point". Quality things require significant investment. No wonder IBM has to go get developers outside of the US/CA/AU if they were the lowest bid. Now it all fits together. Whenever i go to my states web services and they look odd. I now know why. That is changing though.

If you don't have an objective metric like that, these bureaucrats don't magically learn how to make good decisions. They just overpay their friends instead. These bidding systems are a symptom of bad decision makers, not their cause.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#68

Post by zokier »

bartread wrote: post #55

It's not just IBM: any of the larger enterprise consultancies should, at best, be regarded with suspicion. I well remember the EDS/UK Inland Revenue fiasco of the late nineties/early noughties, and there are plenty of other examples involving other big players.

If you think that all big consultancies fail so equally, then doesn't that hint strongly that maybe, just maybe, the issues are on the other side?

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#69

Post by lopmotr »

zafiro17 wrote: post #35

These stories of failure, but skew the reader simply because there are very few companies that can bid on and attempt to manage projects of this scale. This article could easily be written to focus on the failure of sweeping, enormous, poorly-thought out projects that suffer changing visions and scope, rotating project managers, and evolving systems ... that IBM happens to bid on and execute poorly. Small projects ar…

Sure. It's both to blame. I know plenty of small companies in other industries that refuse to do work that they expect to fail because they don't want to hurt their reputations. Those guys all probably didn't bid or dropped out when they saw it would fail.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#70

Post by otoburb »

toast0 wrote: post #41
Naga wrote: post #36

There's a dimension left out here on the Phoenix disaster: It wasn't really IBM's fault at all. The Canadian public service is really complex. There are multiple unions with multiple overlapping collective bargaining agreements, where the public service is allocated to different classes. These classes are paid specific rates, with retroactive pay being common for changing classes. The majority of the problems with Ph…

At some level, isn't IBM supposed to point out that training and transition are important for a large project and shouldn't be left out?

They most likely did raise this, but when asked to provide a more "competitive" bid, they axed training and who knows what else. This is common in large enterprise sales deals. For professional services deployment engagements, there is always the possibility of an amendment to the services scope (often referred to as a change order or change request).

If the project is estimated to take over a year to deploy, by then you're in a new budget cycle and the vendor has come to an agreement with the procurement department to charge for additional services as required in subsequent phases.

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