Another EDS success story

[TimberWolf]

If success is measured in terms of government money laundering and getting away with it.

Basic management failure

[Moose423956]

Even now, the National Offender Management Service, which runs prisons and probation, has no idea what £161m spent before October 2007 was used for

<rant>
Just proves to me that EDS et al are on the make. Take the money and run, no sense of moral duty to fulfil the role they're paid for. Should be a police investigation IMHO.
</rant>

Edit: sorry, am in a bad mood.

[DimPrawn]

Don't fret, by the time you read that article, BoE had printed another £160M.

[xoggoth]

The only database work I have done was a purely technical one in Access, which people on here will be quick to point out is not a database at all.

But in what way is one of these huge database systems substantially different from another? A lot of linked PCs in police stations/doctor's surgeries/job centres etc. holding names and addresses of arrestees/patients/job seekers etc. with details of alleged offences/treatments/applications etc.

How can projects which must have so many simularities keep failing over and over? Or is there some complexity us non experts don't know about? Can any database experts explain it?

[conned tractor]

<rant>
Should be a police investigation IMHO.
</rant>

I agree. People should do time for pouring such amounts of public money down the drain. But then are the prisons big enough.

[gingerjedi]

<rant>
Just proves to me that EDS et al are on the make. Take the money and run, no sense of moral duty to fulfil the role they're paid for. Should be a police investigation IMHO.
</rant>

Edit: sorry, am in a bad mood.

They outsourced... sorry found a 'partner' to do all the hands on stuff at the MoD, whenever they have a new project they use this 'partner' to provide the contract labour effectively putting another chain in the link between the end client and the person that actually does the work.

So now it goes: MoD>Atlas/EDS>A+O>Agency>contractor.

You can imagine how much of the original rate is left by the time the poor guy on the end gets his renumeration. They've managed to fleece the taxpayer and the worker at the same time.

[Andy2]

The mind boggles
How could a database cost 700million
I could do it for 7 million, plenty cheapness

[shoes]

I knew (in the biblical sense) an EDS 'consultant' for a couple of years, on and off. Incompetent angry nutjob, and very defensive of EDS! Very proud of her EDS keyfob she was.

[DeepBlue]

Always makes me happy that I avoided a consulting job with one of these types of companies. Going the solo contractor/consulting route after putting in 4yr+ with a small somewhat competent software co.

EDS? Worst of a bad bunch.

[DeepBlue]

The only database work I have done was a purely technical one in Access, which people on here will be quick to point out is not a database at all.

But in what way is one of these huge database systems substantially different from another? A lot of linked PCs in police stations/doctor's surgeries/job centres etc. holding names and addresses of arrestees/patients/job seekers etc. with details of alleged offences/treatments/applications etc.

How can projects which must have so many simularities keep failing over and over? Or is there some complexity us non experts don't know about? Can any database experts explain it?

Well... when people say "database" that's not really what they mean.

A database, yes, that could be done cheaply. Design a schema and implement it in a scalable and secure fashion, not too hard. However a database is only as good as the data in it...

For the data in the database to be useful we have a) data migration b) user updates and c) reporting.

Data migration is a serious pain in the rear end. The incoming data is never clean. Never ever. So if you want to enforce some validation etc. in your new database, you're going to spend a lot of time cleaning up the old data. Don't think this is a job that you can pay Indian Development Centre to do. Been there, seen the damage. Sadly explaining what an "intelligent decision" is to most of those guys takes about 6 weeks of "FAIL. RETRY".

Once the data is there, we come to the meat of the project. Processes. Processes processes processes. Everyone has their own "pain point" which they hate, and wrote into the proposal to be fixed. Most of the processes will be straight forwards. Transfer of prisoner Gordo Brown from no. 10 to Holloway MS. Transfer of prisoner to solitary confinement. etc. etc. But someone will want workflow, so that the transfer is requested, approved, actioned. (All very sensible).

Now if you start to think of all the possible state transitions of a prisoner/parolee in the system, and assume each transition will have at least one request screen, one approval screen, one actioned screen... you see where the work might end up.

Then we look at reporting. Everyone with "manager" in their title will want their own report. Kerching for EDS. "Oh yes, we can make individual reports, really fast and easy. We can train your managers(*) to allow them to create their own reports."

(* Assuming said manager has programming language/database experience...).

An army of contractors making stupid reports that add no value to the system at all. Guestimate of 400 reports generated for such a system, and only 40 of which are actually used to add value.


So yeah. Not just a DB of Record. That's easy. Customers assume processes around their data, and they are expensive.