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by nicktelford 1114 days ago
They honestly should be blacklisted after the Horizon scandal. Allowing them to get away with it sets a precedent that could encourage other companies to behave just as irresponsibly.

As it stands, is yet another example of privatising profits while socialising the costs, just in this case, the costs weren't (entirely) financial.
1 comments
pydry 1114 days ago
A lot of UK government IT is like this and has been forever.

There was a short period under the coalition where GDS was set up and they created a consistent framework for people to work with and would open a portion of the market up to smaller players.

Now it's mostly large bodyshop middlemen like the prime minister's wife's company taking a 70% cut for the work of a cheap offshore developer.

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blibble 1114 days ago
a lot of the problem is the contract procurement rules, which are written so only large companies are capable of bidding

a legacy of EU membership, but I doubt the government has any will to change it

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ta1243 1114 days ago
Except during the coalition things were far better with GDS, while we were in the EU, after the new-labour ppp stuff and before the tory-grift stuff.
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blibble 1114 days ago
GDS didn't bid for contracts, they were part of the the cabinet office and worked on cabinet office projects
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ta1243 1114 days ago
Sure. So do that across the whole of government.
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PaulAJ 1114 days ago
During COVID the government tried skipping those procurement rules in the interests of expediency. The result was a huge corruption scandal.
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KronisLV 1113 days ago
> During COVID the government tried skipping those procurement rules in the interests of expediency. The result was a huge corruption scandal.

I don't think that this is the guaranteed outcome for all governments and situations.

In Latvia, the COVID-19 contract tracing application "Apturi Covid" wasn't developed with a bunch of buraucracy beforehand, but as a voluntary community effort between both different orgs and people. As a consequence, it was developed reasonably quickly, actually worked and was helpful (even if the user numbers weren't as great as expected, but that's besides the point): https://lv-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Apturi_Covid?...

I know this because I was a part of the developer team (the website in particular: https://apturicovid.lv/#en before handing it over to govt. once my participation was concluded) and it was actually encouraging to see how well professionals with a common goal can work together, as opposed to some of the less successful processes I've seen. In particular, our e-health platform was once of those serious government projects with lots of bureaucracy, yet still didn't work after many millions in investments: https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/zinu-analize/...

(I've mentioned this previously, but the point still stands and the contrast is very apparent)

I don't see why a slightly more streamlined, iterative and goal oriented process couldn't work for commercial software projects, even in the public sector. Of course, if the clients don't know what they want and change their requirements whenever new people come into the office (new management), no particular process is going to save you. Nor will you be successful when people quite frankly don't care about shipping software that works and instead of answering your questions just throw a PDF with 200 pages at you, that doesn't provide the actual answer either.

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lozenge 1114 days ago
There have also been huge corruption scandals before and after COVID. Grift will find a way.
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blibble 1114 days ago
clearly there's a middle ground
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