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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

#61

Post by jussij »

genuine_smiles wrote: post #54
908B64B197 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 4. The requirements are often flat out wrong. Isn't this basically a given? I find it hard to imagine that any organization could come up with good, complete requirements before they've had any software written.

Which is why most governments struggle with big IT projects.

Governments by their nature tend to approach everything from a legal perspective.

This then means the requirements of these big IT project end up being a mass of legal documents which try to describe what is being delivered by whom.

Then when the whole thing falls apart it ends up in the courts and the court then decides who promised what based on those original contract documents.

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

#63

Post by duxup »

xrd wrote: post #58

If open source advocates banded together and "sold" this story to local governments, there would never be these kinds of boondoggles. I'm reminded of the same thing that happened in Oregon. Oracle came in with a low ball price, then extracted hundreds of millions of dollars out of the state for a POS health care system. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html

Is open source really a place you would find what I imagine is an enterprise 'do everything' education related IT application?

I like the idea but that's not a product I think open source folks ventures to build much?

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

#64

Post by ryukafalz »

lucb1e wrote: post #14
bsder wrote: post #9

While I love the David vs Goliath here, I'm going to point out the thing that open source folks just love to fluff over: Who is going to maintain that app over time? Maintenance sucks and is expensive. I'm going through this right now with a security system for a non-profit. The old system is open source and works--but it's 10 years dead. So, they'd like to add these couple features. Who is going to develop that? Who…

Proprietary route: input: 5+ years and 100 million dollars output: crappy system maintenance: still necessary, hire anyone but probably the expensive guys from before The route that these parents demonstrated: input: a few months and presumably a whole lot less money output: something that seems to be well-liked maintenance: still necessary, hire anyone Regardless of "but who's going to maintain it", the benefits sho…

> maintenance: still necessary, hire anyone but probably the expensive guys from before

Don't forget: sometimes the copyright is still owned by the contractor that developed it, at which point the options are only "hire the expensive guys from before." Want to make a change and the vendor can't/won't? Oops, guess you're starting over from scratch! Or you don't make the change you wanted to and live with it as-is.

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

#65

Post by jck »

duxup wrote: post #63
xrd wrote: post #58

If open source advocates banded together and "sold" this story to local governments, there would never be these kinds of boondoggles. I'm reminded of the same thing that happened in Oregon. Oracle came in with a low ball price, then extracted hundreds of millions of dollars out of the state for a POS health care system. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html

Is open source really a place you would find what I imagine is an enterprise 'do everything' education related IT application? I like the idea but that's not a product I think open source folks ventures to build much?

I do not understand the nature of this "do everything education app", but there are excellent open source LMS apps like https://moodle.org/

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

#66

Post by askvictor »

The government's system sounds just like the "Ultranet" (as it was comically named) in Victoria, Australia a few years back which similarly aimed to be the one system to rule them all in government schools. Eventually went to the scrapheap (along with a few bureaucrats who were charged for corruption). During the tender process a few of us were toying with putting in a tender using Moodle, but glad we didn't waste our time as it was stitched up from the start.

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

#67

Post by Toutouxc »

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…

> Heck, you could probably get free work from the kids themselves. There's plenty of people in education who would want to do odd jobs on it.

> Now maybe pay up for a few senior devs and a PM.

> platform for the people by the people

I think you're overestimating the abilities of "kids" and non-professional devs and underestimating the complexity of running that kind of show (thus underestimating the ratio of professionals/community necessary to pull that off). Notice how most successful open-source projects are in fact supported by tech companies and worked on by professional devs on those companies' payrolls, and how, despite that, most open-source projects still end up kind of chaotic.

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

#68

Post by jamesblonde »

wmf wrote: post #60
hpkuarg wrote: post #28

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

This doesn't sound like corruption to me and does any government have good IT? Maybe Estonia?

Actually Swedish govt has really good IT. I use the actual app a lot with 3 kids in the school system here in Stockholm. It's not that bad, functional UI, but non-IT folks could easily have problems. Some stupid decisions - like a whole new app for reporting absences - where you get redirected there, but with SSO. I suspect the contractors here are the bad boys, but there should be somebody in Stockholmsstad who stops these ridiculous changes. Probably the project mgr in Stockholmsstad is not technically literate enough and is getting hoodwinked about this app being a security threat.

I hope this publicity changes things.

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

#69

Post by progre »

T-A wrote: post #23
trhway wrote: post #2

>The city's local government, spent 1 billion Swedish crowns (100 million dollars) over 7 years to build a massive do-everything school IT platform, which students, teachers and parents are forced to use. And their app is awful. Slow, buggy, almost unusable. One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security. where is juicy details like who did it? Oracle…

> where is juicy details like who did it? Oracle? IBM? ..? According to [1], no less than four contractors: Tieto, Ping Pong (apparently responsible for security), Unikum and Nova Software. [1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&u=https:/...

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.

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

#70

Post by progre »

renewiltord wrote: post #41

Government organizations are terrified about open source initiatives. There's something strange about it. You could volunteer to do all the work and they'll still oppose you at every turn. My hope is that we'll reach a stage where citizen participatory programming is normal for all. Where my dad could offer a PR to fix a typo on a government page casually as he browses it. I have a feeling we're not far off but you n…

I don't know, when our libraries procured new state wide library software (each city had it's own before) they went with Koha (open source). This means that they are not really paying for development, only installation integrations and support. This opened up the bidding to much smaller players and was much cheaper over all.
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