In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway
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Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway
#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? IBM? ..?
> So a few parents decided, since the data is basically their data, to build their own better version. A couple of months later, @oppnaskolplatt was ready.
Bad precedent that must be squished ruthlessly. Otherwise next time they would decide to have their own better roads, police, government... that slippery slop of "we the people".
Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway
#3Government procurement is fundamentally broken, in the software world. The incentives of procurement seems to ensure that the worst software is produced, at a significantly greater cost than free alternatives. I blame this on the rise of administrative costs in the universities (which trickle into enterprise) and the inherent disagreeableness (with outsiders) amongst the price's law coalition.
Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway
#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
Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway
#5The 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...
Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway
#6> 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
Some would say that government services are regulating themselves.
Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway
#7It'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. Where the one true system has to do everything.
3. A 'one-pass' approach where everything is expected to be delivered as a working system at the end of the project.
Even fixing two of these gives us a solid shot at a successful project.
Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway
#8It'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…
D4. Not having the necessary data available through (good) APIs for everybody to use.
Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway
#9While 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 is going to pay for that? What happens 10 years from now?
So, they can pay money for a commercial solution which is "Somebody Else's Problem(tm)" or they can go with a bespoke system that becomes their problem.
Maintenance is a cost that open source never accounts for.
Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway
#10It'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.