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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

#81

Post by airhead969 »

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?

There are many "do everything" mega solutions like SAP. They're usually terrible because they try to do too much, require changing processes to fit the software, aren't specialized enough in each area for real-world use, or aren't customizable enough. They're often terrible pieces thrown together too quickly under a utopian belief that one app will rule them all and users will just adapt to unusable garbage.

There's nothing preventing a group from making a FOSS replacement of a government project made commercially, even if its goals aren't ideal.

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

#82

Post by aronatom »

a3n wrote: post #75

> You can understand why they arent keen to allow it to continue as its using BankID to authenticate. Would you install a 3rd party app to access your bank account? Isn't that how Mint works? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit_Mint

This 3rd party app in question ( mobilt bankid) is also used to access everything in Sweden ( taxes, banks, social security applications .. )

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

#83

Post by jordanbeiber »

jussij wrote: post #61
genuine_smiles wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ori…

Everyone struggles with big IT projects.

It’s also why Gene Kim & co wrote “The Phoenix Project” [1].

Everyone involved in software-building, non-tech industry should read it.

In the end it’s just lean turned agile software dev. Reduce waste.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine...

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

#84

Post by mannerheim »

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…

Yes, free software projects can stop being maintained. But proprietary products can go out of business. Or they might shut the service down (witness the Google Graveyard). At least with free software you can hire someone else to maintain it if it stops being maintained.

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

#85

Post by hugolundin »

a3n wrote: post #75

> You can understand why they arent keen to allow it to continue as its using BankID to authenticate. Would you install a 3rd party app to access your bank account? Isn't that how Mint works? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit_Mint

Additionally, that tweet is wrong. BankID is an authentication system, and won’t give the 3rd party access to your bank account

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

#86

Post by RupertEisenhart »

urvader wrote: post #74
mwidell wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Can't you ban the malicious Devs? They keep creating new GitHub accounts or what?

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

#87

Post by 6pac3rings »

jussij wrote: post #61
genuine_smiles wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ori…

Take a triple bottom line solution to the problem.

Take a look at how kmalloc_obj is going in DragonFly BSD.

Government IT challenges three technical team leads to get to solution like kmalloc_obj. Performance pays for 1st prize and the rest get less money. Cut the time horizon from start to finish for the piece work to 18-months. Spread the risk of total failure to zero.

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

#88

Post by current123123 »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #34
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.

Hilarious and potentially illegal.

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

#89

Post by hutzlibu »

peteretep wrote: post #53
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…

Also internal company politics. What would fix much of this, for many projects, is a very experienced product person with final say over every feature, reporting directly to the CEO / board, and outranking everyone else in terms of decision making.

Sure, having skilled people with the right to make decisions solves almost everything.

But who decides who is skilled enough? Then we are quickly in the realm of politics ..

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

#90

Post by magicalhippo »

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.

I was hired as a coder on a fun project like that.

It wasn't a big project, I was the sole coder. What had been sold in was basically a Drupal install with some customization. I made sure they wrote a decent specification before I accepted the job.

I delivered on time and we had the first test with the client. Everything went very well, and the client seemed happy.

On the client side, the project was then moved from the project group to those who'd actually be using it. And then came the question from the new manager:

Mgr: "This looks nice, but what about all the other sites?"

Us: "Other sites? The contract was only for one site."

Mgr: "Well, the whole point here was to have 17 sites with site-specific content written by site-specific users, managed centrally with a unified look as if it was one single site."

Us: "Err... that's not what the specification we agreed on says."

Mgr: "Well, as it stands this is useless to us."

And so the simple three day job turned into many weeks.

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