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

Language Barrier

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, you Aussie blokes need to learn Hindi if you want to partner effectively with IBM.

Re:Language Barrier

[Nyder]

Not likely given China's propensity towards spying on everyone.

Did you say that with a straight face?

Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked on a large project for a quasi-government body building software for Queensland Health as a customer.

They had reservations about us being able to deliver. We delivered a rock-solid piece of software on time and budget. They, however, took 8 _years_ to take that piece of software and put it into production.

Yes, they are that bad.

They were a basketcase _at least_ a decade before the payroll bungle.

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."

Wrong!

[TheRaven64]

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!

$1.2 billion payroll system

[Agent ME]

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!

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.

Re:$1.2 billion payroll system

[pipedwho]

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.

There is an expectation that engaging a large professional specialist contractor would avoid the problems of using a smaller outfit or running the project in-house. You'd expect a specialist mega-corp would be able to help you define the scope and requirements of the project, as it's something of which they supposedly have prior experience.

IBM should have been the one asking the right questions at the start, and requesting access and authority to do their job. It's not like a health care payroll system is something new that no one's ever seen before. The QLD government is essentially employing IBM to be the experts in this area to deliver a suitable system.

I see this crap from these big end of town software outfits all the time. They sell products and customisations that the client doesn't need, features that in most cases just get in the way and make the systems unusable. They charge 10s to 100s of millions to build websites that are unstable and too cumbersome to maintain and use. And generally overcharge for a final product that they shoehorn to fit the actual requirements of the customer (and by extension, the customer's customers).

I don't think the general tendering/bidding process helps much either, as it doesn't always give enough access to scoping and requirements gathering to be able to generate a valid cost estimate. In many cases it comes down to the sales team getting a huge bonus contingent to signing off on the sale. And they'll say and promise anything upfront, and let the weasel^wlegal team rewrite the contracts to make every request for something that should have been included seem like an out-of-scope up-charge.

Australia could have learned from New Zealand

[ernest.cunningham]

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).

Queensland Health Payroll were a joke already

[Anonymous Coward]

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...