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Ships Turned Away As Aussie Customs' IT System Melts Down
An anonymous reader writes "Urgent shipments of medicine and goods for the holiday season have been turned away by customs officials due to a massive computer problem. The initial budget for the system upgrade was said to be A$80 million but has since blown out to A$250 million. Customs officials and the government have been forced to admit that they might actually have to revert to the old system if things don't improve. One cargo user said on national TV that he used to process 300 orders daily but the new system is so complex and unusable, he's happy if he can manage 100 orders per day. The system failure is expected to have a massive impact especially on the retail sector this Christmas."
This is news generally because of the rarity of this sort of thing. The only real issue I can think of is that our Health Minister has recently announced plans to immunise ALL Australians against bird flu. This could disrupt that (if it was realistic anyway). I guess this is all a part of ever increasing control.
I was actually part of a company a couple of years ago which put through a proposal to assist with tracking firearms imported into Australia. We were shocked at what we found when we consulted several customs offices.
There was no integrated network system between interstate customs offices.
Sure, they e-mailed each other and did some odd bits of communication, but there was nothing solid in place. Part of our proposal was to put in a system where if a shipment of firearms was sent from Melbourne to Sydney the Sydney office would actually know that one was going to arrive. A step up from their existing system at the time, where the firearms actually left Melbourne, turned up at the Sydney customs depot without prior knowledge and then processed!
Task Mangler
but why not use both systems... it'll like double the output until the get rid of the kinks.
Apparently the issue is that the data coming in (mainly from ships) is quite crufty, whereas the system expects nice clean data (GIGO anyone?).
Also, apparently a lot of these Brokers have a vested interest in the old system, as the new one will allow major importers (eg. supermarkets) to clear goods themselves, meaning less money for the brokers.
As for delays and ships being turned back- appears to be mainly FUD, with a little bit of lack of foresight and poor planning.
Seems like a change management failure to me.
One factor seldomly taken in account is the user's reluctance to the new system.
You may have a 100% working new system, with a 1000% improvement over the old system, but if users are not excited about the new system and they do not want to use it for whatever-the-reason (maybe just because he/she now has to learn new things), the new system is going to fail. Users will make sure it fails. I have seen that many times.
The rumour on the grapevine is that the problems don't entirely stem from the software. The data entry now requires details (you want what now?) and that makes it impossible to process cargo as quickly as before. The software is just a convenient scapegoat. The reality is that the old system allowed the data entry to be sloppy (and effectively useless).
Yes, petrol companies operate on Sundays. Refineries are so complex these days they can take weeks to switch off or on, so they operate constantly. I have heard of some older ones which have been modified and added to so much over the years that nobody actually knows how to switch them off safely - there are companies whose sole purpose is to go around figuring out the best way to switch plants off.
Close but not quite there.
Novell does not provide the directory service.
I've never heard NCR mentioned in the halls.
And it most definitely does not run on Solaris.
You may be surprised to learn the the Windows part of this whole thing has performed flawlessly.
And EDS had no part in the development of the system. They gave away the ICS dev a long time ago.
You may understand why I am being an anonymous coward.
I can second or third as the case may be. As a corporation, we have dozens of Novell, Microsoft, Cisco, etc certifed engineers. We also have hundreds of MCSA's, A+, and the rest of the grab bag. However many we have, with our new AD2003 roll, THe powers that be thought it best to contract the roadmap, as well as the initial implimentation to a few dozen contractors. So now we have an implementation being planning and rolled-out by our usual core folks, but being "overseen" by these contractors, which are not actually doing anything. They're in the meetings, but all of the assigned goals are being met by the regular employees. What a gig, Be contracted to hang out and oversee the work of people that don't need your help to begin with, man am I in the wrong job role!
Remember when as a contractor you had to perform or not get paid, no longer the way it goes it would seem....
A cluster farm of commodity PCs is easily capable of handling 3000 transactions per day, assuming that your system isn't run by morons. I'd tend to attribute these problems to more general IT/software development issues, like the customers designing a more complex business process that doesn't address thier current problems, lack of adequate testing and customer feedback, important people (like end users) being left out of the design and testing phases and, of course, the ever popular "new shiny" syndrome.
Used guns. A few years ago, the relative strength of our dollars made it possible to get a SIG P240 in .38 Special from Australia for about 850 Australian dollars. IIRC, that was about 500 American. At the time, the same gun in the U.S., if you could find one, would have easily topped a thousand dollars. Same story on a Hammerli 120, which is rare and pricy in the U.S. Those were my two failures.
To be fair, though, the ATF-related problems were serious, too. Theoretically, it's not that difficult, but the ATF has been such a pain in the ass to so many gun dealers over the years that those dealers are terribly gun-shy. (I say, that's a joke, son.) They aren't willing to do any out-of-the-ordinary paperwork and draw attention to themselves. The only one I found who would do the job (and I limited the search to my state since a concurrent state-to-state transfer adds exponentially to the complications) quoted a minimum of $350 to start the paperwork and wanted me to sign a contract saying that once they had the gun in hand they could sell it to me at any price they wanted, nevermind that I would have already paid the foreign dealer directly. No thanks. FFLs are limited forms of government-granted monopoly and come with all the problems that implies.
Slightly offtopic - If anyone has a production-class silhouette pistol made by Unique, any chambering, anywhere in the world, at anything approaching a reasonable price, then I'm buying. (French readers, I'm talking to you.) Please post back here.
A *single* commodity PC should be able to easily handle thousands of transactions per hour, depending on the complexity of course.