Australia's Bureau of Meteorology Dumps Water Data Project

littlekorea writes "Australia's weather bureau has racked up bills of $38 million for a water data system, based on Red Hat Linux, MySQL and Java, that was originally scheduled to cost somewhere between $2 million and $5 million. The Bureau's supplier, an ASX-listed IT services provider SMS Management and Technology, did a good job of embedding itself in the bureau, with all changes having to be made by the original consultant that built it."

Comments

We are not an audience

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got to say that the initial post on this topic perpetuates one of the paradigms that is sticking in the craws of Slashdot users. We are not an audience. We might be users, we might be members, we most certainly are contributors. But we are not an audience.

If you persist in thinking of us that way, then you're going to get it wrong. You serve an audience differently than you serve contributing members of a community. Most of the complaints hinge on that difference.

If we were an audience, we'd be coming here for the articles. Most of the complaints are about the comment system, how difficult it is to follow a conversation, how difficult it is leave a comment, etc. I come here, most of us come here, to read what my/our fellow slashdotters have to say. The value here is the community, and the most important contributors are other members, not the site or the editors.

If you don't get that straight, then you aren't going to "get" why we're upset, so there's no chance that you'll deliver us something that we can live with. And that community is going to vanish, leaving you with nothing of value.

You can take suggestions and maybe reduce the implosion, but unless you understand *why* we're upset, you're going to be heading in fundamentally the wrong direction.

Re:We are not an audience

[Joce640k]

Either some people do not know how to behave, or this site has a major failure.

Correct.

Re:Reminder

[PGC]

I guess you are right. Hereby another reminder: Fuck Beta.

Re:Reminder

[pejyel]

It is rude to randomly redirect visitors to beta.slashdot. Even more so because beta sucks.

Providing a hard to find opt-out, adding /?nobeta=1 to the url, just upgrades the aggravation level from "rude" to "insulting and infuriating". The only acceptable option is, as always, opt-in.

I guess you need reminding. a lot.

that's why everybody's heading to this page to talk about what our options are if DICE refuses to hear us.

on topic thread here

[crutchy]

this article seems to imply that linux was the reason for the cost blowout... and not that it was managed by a government agency.

look at any project administered by any government agency around the world... how many are on budget? why is that? it has nothing to do with linux and everything to do with government waste

Re:on topic thread here

[ChunderDownunder]

The problem is the tender system is broken. Government projects in Australia are contracted to the consulting company who promises to deliver a solution in the shortest time and the smallest budget. They then sign a blank cheque based on the expected initial phase of development and then the company puts its hand out until completion.

What happened here is that the company promised to deliver a solution at $2.5million a year and has managed to milk the system for an additional $30m ! So it's a government department, certainly, but the contractor exaggerated its ability to deliver.

I've worked for a government IT project, directly employed by the department, where years after the original company did handover, we were still cleaning up the mess. No documentation, no code comments, some of the worst anti-patterns I've ever seen. Too many cowboys in the industry and it's a pity the government just don't have an in-house development team.

Diff between Using and Being FLOSS

[Coeurderoy]

This waste of public money illustrate the fact that companies might be "Pushing Open Source" but not wanting to be "Open Source"...

Using "free" software is not really relevant if the company does not integrate a policy of putting software back into to "free" pool...
If they would use best practice, the level of contribution (+ probabley higher reuse) would make sure that they are not the "only player avaiable"...

And of course going over 80% increase of the initial deal should get you axed anyway, how the hell did it grow to 38 in 18 month ?

    Somebody willing to "show" his/her code would probably not end up in this situation, additionally even if the deal would be "more expensive than initially planned"
    at least the Australian government would have something they could promote, share, sell to other countries....
    That way they just have a big hole in the public account (and probably some people who have got a very nice and totally undeserved bonus of some form or another...)

Re:Boycott, vote up anti-beta submissions

[StripedCow]

Meanwhile, at Slashdot headquarters:
"Wow, the comment statistics have really been going up lately."
"Must be related to those 25% of users that are using beta now. They seem to like it. Keep pushing it!"

TFA disagrees with submission summary

[maynard]

According to TFA:

SMS Management and Technology won the IT initial development contract in June 2009 in a deal initially expected to be worth at least $2.5 million per year.

The audit office questioned the value of the project, which is estimated to have reached $38.5 million for associated systems and applications by 30 June 2013.

So, across four years what should have cost $10M wound up costing nearly $40M. However:

Within 18 months, however, four change orders had been processed, increasing the value of the deal to over $15.4 million in the first two years

Thus, change orders from a client who changed milestones mid-stream:

The milestones for the contract were not tightly specified, nor was the extent to which the industry partner staff would be integrated with or separated from internal bureau IT staff roles and deliverables.

Leading to a situation where, "The contract began to resemble a time and materials contract rather than a fixedâfee contract contingent on achieving milestones and deliverables." Meaning that the client kept changing their mind so often the consulting firm was required to baby a system they hadn't thought through to begin with and had thus grown into a monstrosity that served disparate and disorganized goals.

No wonder it went over budget.

But that has nothing to do with open source and everything to do with bad project management. Notice that they've solved the problem by choosing "...a replacement, based on an off-the-shelf software product."

Which, if it meets their needs - bully for them. But is more likely an imposed solution to a problem they hadn't clearly defined to begin with. Thus, it's likely they'll find themselves in the same situation. Not because open source software is bad, or the commercial software is bad, or the consulting firm was probably bad... but because the bureau of meteorology has no idea what it wants to do with this data.

The problem here is with undefined goals set by management. Until they face that fact they'll go round this merry-go-round again and again. And taxpayers will foot the bill.