[pydry]

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.

[blibble]

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

[ta1243]

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.

[blibble]

GDS didn't bid for contracts, they were part of the the cabinet office and worked on cabinet office projects

[ta1243]

Sure. So do that across the whole of government.

[PaulAJ]

During COVID the government tried skipping those procurement rules in the interests of expediency. The result was a huge corruption scandal.

[KronisLV]

> 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.

[lozenge]

There have also been huge corruption scandals before and after COVID. Grift will find a way.

[blibble]

clearly there's a middle ground