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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

#71

Post by jordanbeiber »

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…

Projects are necessary for things that are built to last and not change much during their lifetime:

- a bridge

- airplanes

- most houses

- etc

Hardware comes to mind - it’s all hardware on the list, basically.

Software (outside certain realms ofc) like this? I’ve been, like many others here, doing this software thing for 20+ years now.

Big and small, I’ve basically never seen anything spawned from a project-driven organization actually deliver great results.

Most software is supposed to change, indefinitely - that’s the point!

Everyone in this day and age should know that requirements change over even short periods of time, so why even bother trying to pin them down in detail up front - you’re going to do everyone involved a disservice.

There is something to this agile thing and a “project” is it’s anti-pattern.

Not mention how much a quick feedback loop will learn you about the operation side of things.

Operations and change, it’s all you can build for and that is best done one step at a time.

(This joke of a platform is spread across multiple (5?) vendors/partners no less. A couple of them probably started just for this, backed with vc funding. It’s most likely a glorious mess!)

End rant.

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

#72

Post by throw123123123 »

yoelo wrote: post #43
hpkuarg wrote: post #28

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

Corruption and inefficiency of this kind is a relatively new phenomenon, stemming from a regime of letting private contractors run the whole show. A fun fact is that Stockholm has one of the most expensive buildings in the world: Nya Karolinska, which has cost (converted from Swedish currency) around 2 billion dollars. The reason behind this is that construction was run as a public-private partnership. Meaning you sh…

All money spent by government goes into private hands. There are no "public hands"

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

#73

Post by jordanbeiber »

breakfastduck wrote: post #31
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.

Basically the story of most govt IT investments.

Have you worked at big companies outside tech?

Their IT budgets are often ginormous with very little to show for it. Consulting havens. Slow, if at all, moving project organizations.

It’s about size, budget models and competences.

Time for another rant:

Note that Sweden have implemented “new public management” NPM which basically pushes government agencies to govern like the ever oh so successful free market companies.

This has had many really bad side effects since the 90s and it’s right up the neoliberal alley.

In my book it’s just silly and something only professional politicians together with consultants can cook. But it’s a different story, really.

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

#74

Post by urvader »

mwidell wrote: post #48
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...

Maybe Öppna Skolplattformen should just change their code to identify the token by its contents, no matter the parameter name?

We did. We have a regex to catch all variants of spellings. But since our code is open they can easily select another variant. We could load our script dynamically but have chosen not to of security reasons. (And transparency).

(I’m the founder of this initiative)

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

#76

Post by jordanbeiber »

whatthesmack wrote: post #37
bsder wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Big companies are often horribly inefficient.

A decent democratic government at least over here in Scandinavia, try to make life on average as good as possible for the majority.

Funny you should mention pensions... Govt probably knows many or even most regular people are completely uninterested in pensions and/or “the market”. Many could need help or even be forced to set away money they otherwise wouldn’t.

This is where the Swedish govt put you money if you didn’t chose yourself:

https://www.ap7.se/

Did you fare better?

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

#77

Post by airhead969 »

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

That's how BDUF software consulting works. Design something unusable but make it cost as many billable hours as possible. That way, it has to be thrown away and it's job security for the consulting industry to keep a desperate customer throwing money at non-solutions.

A better approach is agile with customer's actual employees guiding small changes all along from the beginning, and customer's project managers/budgeting managers tracking progress, requirements, and costs.

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

#78

Post by jordanbeiber »

Twixes wrote: post #46
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

IMO the problem here is exactly that the project was outsourced. Outsourcing is likely to lead to crap products and with clueless public funding the costs end up astronomical relative to the quality of the result. In-house software expertise could result in better quality (this budget could definitely afford a lot of great engineers) and more controllable costs.

Project model -> outsourcing -> shitty software

The outsourcing is to be blamed on the project model.

I could staff up a small team and build this thing on a fraction of the budget, as proven by the “competing” initiative.

Many of us could!

You could even outsource some of the work to individual devs around the world.

What you can’t do is accomplish that under the weight of a PMO spawned project with a billion in budget.

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

#79

Post by jordanbeiber »

jamesblonde wrote: post #68
wmf wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stop…

Even if some of the kinks have been worked out this still cost us a billion sek and counting.

It’s like something from the early 2000 and it’s sad to see.

You can “feel the requirements” as you try to navigate pages.

It makes my techie heart ache... :)

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

#80

Post by mrweasel »

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.

The Danish government tried to getting a new tax collection system built. The specificatio was 6000 page, not including the tax law that needed to be implemented.

It facinates me that no one ever stopped to wonder if was actually possible to implement all that.

It failed horribly, costing billion of DKK in implementation cost and even more in taxes that couldn’t be collected.

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