Who Is Still Using IE6? the UK Government

strawberryshakes writes "The death knell for IE6 was sounded a couple of years ago, but seems like some people just can't let go. Many UK government departments are still using IE6, which is so old — 11 years old to be exact — it can't cope with social media — which the government is trying to get its staff to use more to engage with citizens."

Comments

Behind the Times

[Linsaran]

Good to see the US government isn't the only ones.

Re:but...

[Joce640k]

New PC, old OS. Microsoft did a really good job locking people into IE. So good that many people still haven't escaped.

Let go?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about "letting go" - I'm sure it's about the cost of upgrading thousands (tens of thousands?) of systems. Not just the licensing of the software, but also the cost of execution and management of the upgrade, and then the upgrade of all the applications, training on new versions, rewriting an ass ton of security and management policies, and years of churn getting the kinks out of thousands of systems, and the loss of productivity while switching over, and... (I'm sure with a couple more minutes thought I could come up with five other angles of cost).

The summary makes it seem like they're holding on for sentiment, and that they're shooting themselves in the foot by sticking with tried and true software. The summary hasn't given any voice to the enormity of the task (it's not a simple "derr, click the upgrade button stupid"), nor the idea that this is government money which can and arguably should be used in more critical areas of life.

Are slashdot editors really this shortsighted?

Re:Let go?

[Wulfrunner]

I recognize you! You work for the [insert government here] ITS department down the hall from my office. You and your just adequate, barely competent colleagues are the reason I'm stuck with a brand new, yet somehow still limping, T520 that takes four minutes to start. You are the reason I can't "exceed the level of my cluster". You are the barrier to innovation. The attitude you just espoused is the reason our monolithic organization is stuck in the stone age. How is it that you guys can take five years and one billion dollars to develop an application that is buggy, user un-friendly, doesn't do the job it's supposed to, and cripples the department it's supposed to be helping by eating their entire IT budget. You and your colleagues have never heard of Brooks' law, are complacent, risk averse, and unimaginative. I hate you.

Re:Let go?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't go blaming the IT departments so quickly. Blame the contractors, and those who purchase said contracts. While I can certainly point fingers at some terrible in-house public sector IT departments, they're not all bad, not by a long shot.

I'm posting AC for business confidentiality reasons: my company provides web software (business stuff, not the main site) for the UK National Institute of Health Research. They're our first (and only) public sector client. I had to liaise quite a lot with the previous supplier, with regards to migrating data out of the old system. I simply could not believe how awful it was. It seemed to be designed from the ground up to require maximum maintenance, and apparently there were 5 staff members at the contractor who worked full time on supporting the business logic. Not on updates or new features, just on keeping it working.

When we were negotiating the contact with them, they wanted a clause that said if we failed to provide them with any software at all, they got 50% of their money back. That shocked us. Just how bad is the public sector IT culture that they felt they'd only be entitled to half their money back if they got nothing for it?

The previous suppliers told us they wouldn't be able to provide the data extracts we required until several months after the go-live date, so we then entered into a big wrangle to let us get a copy of their database and do it ourselves. This was a wrangle because they wanted to protect the "trade secrets" or "intellectual property" of the data model itself. Which was awful btw; I ended up with a 35-page print out of it sellotaped together on the wall, manually drawing in lines where all the foreign keys ought to have been.

We got the migration done to the client's satisfaction in the end, but this wouldn't have been possible without a bunch of IT guys at NIHR's end who were pretty damn competant, and very willing to get stuck in. I can't say as much for the contractor's guys, though. We ended up with a TUPE case against us, with them arguing that we had a legal obligation to hire them on, even though we were providing a completely different system (i.e. one that worked).

Anyway, that's a bit of a rant. In conclusion, if IT seem like they're a wee bit shit, then they might be, or alternatively, they might be having to deal with a lot of shit from elsewhere.

Yeah, tell me about it

[jholyhead]

I'm a web developer for an organisation that builds web based software that is primarily used by UK local government departments.

IE6 is my nemesis.

A lot of these local authorities are slowly starting to upgrade to Win7 platforms (just in time for Win8), but just like a chain being only as strong as it's weakest link, we have to ensure we are developing for the slowest common denominator.

From the dozens of conversations I've had with Council IT teams around the country, it isn't a lack of will or of motivation or of education, but of a real (and partially justified) fear that if they upgrade to Win7, some essential legacy web based application that works flawlessly in IE6 and XP, will fall over when introduced to IE8. This has happened at various places around the country and has cost Councils a pile of money to fix the issue or to replace those legacy systems. In the post recession cost-cutting world, no one wants to be the guy who lands their employer with a huge bill. I expect we wont see the stragglers taking up the challenge until austerity is done and dusted.

And there you have it. I managed to make this all the coalition government's fault. My work here is done.

Re:Same Story in Germany

[Shadow99_1]

As a IT admin, I can attest we are not all lazy. It more often then not is a matter of pulling upper levels of the business kicking and screaming into modern times by spending some money to make sure things still work. They would often rather spend tons of money maintaining old OSes on modern hardware then make sure old software they feel is critical actually gets fixed to work on modern OSes.

It's even crazier when they then want some ancient IE6 based web app to miraculously work on their shiny new Ipads and don't understand that they simply won't work. I have had a a CEO complain that we need to put IE6 on his Ipad because he needs to run X web app that was made 15 years ago and only works in IE6. He refused to accept that an Ipad will not run IE6, to the point where he even cursed at us and demanded we install Win XP on his Ipad to 'make it work'.

Most of us IT admins know that we have to get this stuff working and get them off of systems often setup before we were even hired. Getting large businesses and governments to do such things though is at times futile.

Blame shit web applications

[benjfowler]

The culprit here isn't the desktops, it's the general, rock bottom, dire state of "enterprise" software.

Truth be told, shrink wrap software is way better put together than the overpriced, utter shite corporate web apps that many government and big corporate users are forced to endure. They are usually written by inexperienced or bored 9-to-5 developers, and get bit-rotten and unmaintainable fast and thus are sheer hell to work on or upgrade.

As a bored corporate drone myself, I feel the pain. I endure IE6 for using our business apps, and use Chrome for everything else.