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Australian State Bans IBM From All Contracts After Payroll Bungle
renai42 writes "If you don't follow Australian technology news, you're probably not aware that over the past few years, the State of Queensland massively bungled a payroll systems upgrade in its Department of Health. The issues resulted in thousands of hospital staff being underpaid or not paid at all, and has ballooned in cost from under $10 million in budget to a projected total cost of $1.2 billion. Queensland has now banned the project's prime contractor, IBM, comprehensively from signing any new contracts with any government department, until it addresses what the state says are IBM's project governance issues."
Obviously, you Aussie blokes need to learn Hindi if you want to partner effectively with IBM.
Deflection, Qld health are the worst run bureaucracy in country. I've heard first hand they put non IT on the project and were forever changing scope then pushing forward with little or no testing.
That's not how government procurement is supposed to work! A company that has failed to deliver on multiple contracts in the past should be given priority, because it has significant experience in government contracting work!
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If I were paying $1.2 billion for something as rote as a payroll system, it better be fucking amazing. It's estimated that the entirety of Linux could be recreated from scratch for $600 million. A payroll system twice as complex as the entire Linux operating system! Think of the possibilities! I have no idea what the possibilities are, but they must be amazing to justify that cost!
"Hey honey, I'm going to McDonald's to grab a bite to eat, be back in 10!"
(A few hours later)
"... Umm, honey, how did you manage to spend $710 dollars at McDonalds?"
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
IBM were the contractor for New Zealand's largest IT cock up INSIS (Integrated National Crime Information System, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INCIS) which was a total flop and cost $110,000,000.
Funny thing is though, we didn't learn from our own mistakes and hired an Australian company called Talent2 for our Education Payroll. It has been a runaway failure (with more new bugs being found than being fixed over any given time period).
QLD implemented SAP payroll and IBM was the consulting firm. Why they went ze German based ERP is a good question.
My wife is a doctor who works for Queensland health. To be honest, they had comprehensively mucked up her payroll numerous times prior to the IBM System. Unfortunately, they now feel the need to deduct her pay based on shifts she did 4 years ago (as the new system has slightly different data than the old one). The staff of QH are basically comprehensively useless, and even prior to the new system they would do things like email her other people's personal details and salary information. The staff always have been lazy and careless, and the new system couldn't handle users that didn't give a shit about doing a good job. IBM has undoubtedly ballsed things up, but QH Payroll are genuinely amongst the least competent people in the world. In fact, pretty much anyone in a government position in Queensland is useless, which is why they are in the process of firing 16,000 of them...
IBM bungled a massive project for the re-automation of the AKH, Vienna's main hospital. Got banned. It seems, however, that IBM does not care: such "missers" are like flies to such an elephant - yet.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I thought these contracts were just an excuse by suppliers to wildly overcharge governments on the daily rates, software licences and support fees knowing that once the ink has dried on the contract they basically have them by the balls.
I wonder given the expense of these systems if governments wouldn't be better off to hire teams in-house to write this stuff.
don't you need to learn German to work for IBM?
Just like in the US, the healthcare system guarantees that no valuable money is wasted on actually delivering healthcare to actual people.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
While IBM is just being IBM here, Govt Payroll systems are not easy to deal with either. Combine that with bureaucracy, ever changing requirements, you got perfect recipe.
Most of the Govt agencies have their own rules for payroll, union contracts, written words that contradict each other often. Union contracts and payroll stuff is so complicated they can drag cases through courts for years. Yet, someone thinks its easy to implement "payroll" into software and sets project with 10 mil expectation.
The very impression that Govt Payroll automation is simple is THE root cause of the disaster.
While IBM is just being IBM here, Govt Payroll systems are not easy to deal with either. Combine that with bureaucracy, ever changing requirements, you got perfect recipe.
Most of the Govt agencies have their own rules for payroll, union contracts, written words that contradict each other often. Union contracts and payroll stuff is so complicated they can drag cases through courts for years. Yet, someone thinks its easy to implement "payroll" into software and sets project with 10 mil expectation.
The very impression that Govt Payroll automation is simple is THE root cause of the disaster. This is not the first or the last one to start with that assumption and tank.
IBM has become a joke. At one time, they were an expensive company, but competent. Now, they are an expensive company, but inept.
When you outsource work to a 3rd party, the best you can expect is to get what you ask for. If its not explicitly specified in the agreed specifications, then you can be sure it will not be delivered. An example (or actual) in situ is a payroll system that limits payouts to 160 hours per month, with higher hours requiring manual approval by an appropriate, accountable and human authority.
When a company try to sell a solution to an organisation/company the customers always try to change the way the product work. It's easier to ask a contractor to change the product than to ask your employees to change the way they work. People hates change. And big contractors LOVE that, they even encourage you to ask for special requirement because each change is a lot $ in their pockets.
It's even more surprising that the same customers who ask for everything to be customizable accept to have completely generic windows stations sometimes even with default background or accept the new office with ribbons, which is a big change, more easily than you product where an icon moved.
Every time I'm at an airport, and see the backlit billboards pandering various IT and organizational consulting services, I think of the endless stream of waste of our, the taxpayer's, money those companies have caused, are causing, and will, very likely, continue to cause. Every time some smug suit talks about how great outsourcing is, and how their consultants are going to fix everything for everyone, I just chuckle. It's the stories like this that keep my chuckle going. IBM Australia, thank you very much for that. A smile supposedly makes you live longer. The way things are going, I'm immortal.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
That's off by more than two orders of magnitude. Heads need to roll.
Ditto. I know one of the IBM Admins for this job, she said Qld health signed off at every stage before going live. I'd like to see who has the greater budget for a court battle - the qld govt is broke.
Here's how I've seen it done on other projects - disclaimer: I don't know about Qld.
While your Admin was toiling away at her job, the folks that the sales rep needed signatures from where being taken out to dinner and were being entertained. Nothing really wrong - just a night or more out.
At a very nice restaurant.
The Beemer shows up - probably a 6' 2" ex-collegian football star that would be recognized by the fans and swooned over by the ladies; let's call him Jeff - they all go to a nice restaurant, the wine list comes out and a bottle shows up (and they don't stop coming), expensive appetizers, and then dinner. At the end of the evening, the Platinum Company Amex comes out and a round of "Thank yous!"
Nothing more.
Signature time comes up. Jeff hands over the form and Government bureaucrat having the best time of his life signs, and Jeff then says, "See you at dinner?"
Rinse, repeat.
That, you geeks, is how it's done.
how much do i have to cum to feed a few goldfish in a bowl?
IBM has long known how government contracts tend to work, the company has been around the block. At the first sign of issues, they should have back out of the contract and sighted reasons of customer failing to stay on target. If IBM doesn't have lawyers who could have made those arguments, they should just close their doors now.
Any government entity will naturally blame a contracting company for their failings to know how to handle a business project in a government environment. I've seen the same thing happen here in the USA with the EPA and other departments. They don't want to spend a little extra up front to properly scope out and gather requirements that make sense and then stick to those requirements.
And OMG your initial project for your government was $10 million and it ballooned to over 1.2 billion? Who the F... does that or allows that? How did the tax payers not fire all of your asses in a new election?
IBM has had some newsworthy problems with big contracts of late and ALL of them are government deals. And at that all of them are at the sub-national level; states, provinces and such. Whatever is going badly wrong has to do with the horrendous problems of trying to do business with 'state' governments be it Texas or Indiana or Queensland. For every anecdotal story about the absurd demands placed on contractors by Federal or National governments - states are that and more. The states seem to think they can be even more demanding, cheaper, vague, arbitrary and frankly, insane. Because there's no standardized contract arbitration process at that level of government like there is at the state level. They hold out the carrot of the potential of large long run contracts and then they act like Napoleon screaming contradictory requirements and there's no opportunity for the contractor to appeal the threats.
The Department of Labor and Industry wanted to upgrade its unemployment compensation system from its mainframe system. IBM initially said it would take 3 years and cost $15 million.
The state finally pulled the plug after the project was 42 months behind schedule and $60 million over budget.
So much for those vaunted project managers and the PMI certs they have. These two projects fall under the 70% of IT projects that fail, a statistic that hasn't changed in 2 decades.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I remember an IBM project at my old day job where the firm, fixed-price bid was $5 million with delivery in 3 months.
5 years and $27 million dollars later the project was abandoned, no product was ever delivered.
The government project manager was given an award and promoted.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Good job assholes, that's going to work out real well for you. I hope all your existing staff do a mass knowledge evac and it goes up shit creek.
Liberals are vermin.
I think not. IBM maximized profits, didn't they? Isn't that what a well run project should do? Nothing is as efficient as a private sector corporation in maximizing profits. They should get some sort of award for this, increasing revenue by 12,000 percent. Just think of the taxes they paid!
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Poppycock. I used to work for Big Blue. It was the most process bound organization on Earth. It's entire business model is to sell, not innovation, not cutting edge, not feature set, but a complete and utter lack of surprises. If there is anything I can't imagine blaming on IBM, it is a lack of governance.
You are totally blocking my view of the wall. - Dogbert
I understand cost over-runs, but this is a full two orders of magnitude bigger. That's ridiculous.
This sounds like someone went into this with no friggin' idea of what the scope was, or knew damned well it was much larger than the client would go for, and knew they'd make it up on the "time and materials" aspects of it.
Companies like IBM sometimes know they have no chance of doing it for the stated costs and can make lots of money on the hourly stuff -- but this is ridiculous.
This is more than a billion dollars over budget .. hell, for purposes of discussion, it's about $1.2 billion over budget. That's either fraud or incompetence.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I remember back in the day IBM had a few major project failures around SmallTalk.
Government decision makers are un-fireable and are terrified of making real decisions that might have consequences, because that means heat from their bosses. So they provide little to no actual direction. Government contracting companies just want to suck money from the organization; they don't really care much about anything else. The two would be a perfect match for each other, except for the millions of taxpayers funding their little do-nothing empires.
In my experience, when these big projects start to go sideways the vendor always gets blamed. Or the software. Anyone but the incompetent government boob running the project. The outside contractor is always the first to get the blame.
But fear not...big companies like IBM are used to this sort of thing. That's why they take their time and make you sign this document and that document authorizing decisions along the way. Change in project scope? Sure...sign here. They do this because they know that eventually something like this will happen. And when it does they will have a paper trail of evidence should it go to court. In the end, faced with the mountain of evidence, the client will make a confidential settlement to save face and IBM moves along to the next project. Nice and neat. Thanks for playing.
We need ACTION ITEM MAN! Professional Superhero.
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Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Oh look.. another project destroyed by a company infested with Indians.. probably shouldnt have laid off all those American engineers who were patching up all that crap your offshores write.
I'm waiting for the government's current support contracts for DB2, informix and Cognos to expire. Then what will they use?
I constantly see salespeople I work with create a potential disaster during a client brief.
The response to salesman X's stupid promise, idea or agreement to a stupid idea, goes something like this in my head at the time:
"Sorry, no Bob is an idiot and we aren't going to do that - instead what we can actually provide is..."
Mix a sales based approach with an unobjective/misguided perspective of public servant management and you will create a bizaar fantasy which has nothing rooted in reality.
Well said -- right on target -- my thoughts exactly.
-kgj
...except, now, IBM...