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."

Comments

Re:$1.2 billion payroll system

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact IBM did comment on this:

As the prime contractor on a complex project, IBM must accept some responsibility for the issues experienced when the system went live in 2010, however, as acknowledged by the commission’s report, the successful delivery of the project was rendered near-impossible by the state failing to properly articulate its requirements or commit to a fixed scope.

IBM’s fees of $25.7 million accounted for less than 2 per cent of the total amount. The balance of the costs is made up of work streams which were never part of IBM’s scope.

Project governance issues

[DrXym]

I wonder if any government has *ever* had a good experience after signing a major contract with a supplier to implement one of these systems. A single time ever where a project was delivered on time, on budget and performed at or beyond the expectations set down in paper.

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.

Re: Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

The telling part is that IBM only got $25M for their efforts. I say this as a government PM. We are absolute, miserable failures at buying software. We don't know what we want, which begs IBM, SAIC, SAP, et al, to bid low and then increase the price every time we go "shit, we didn't really mean that."

Re:Lol

[erroneus]

Indeed. IBM's reputation is pretty well established. They are slow, tedious and yet effective. They are a glacier in IT. But I see it everywhere -- people making decisions in an IT project that have know knowledge of what it takes to make things happen. The illusion that "it's all so easy" has really gotten buried too deep in someone's head somewhere.

Right. IBM Needs More Process.

[C0C0C0]

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.