[tsimionescu]

So much this. It's absurd that in a world where every government interaction isoving online, we still ask every individual state institution to contract out the development and maintenance work to outside companies, instead of having a government IT provider.

The savings on bureaucracy and time spent analyzing puvlic offers alone would be immense over a decade.

[atonse]

At least in the US we started solving this by having high salaries for tech workers in government (see 18f and USDS, etc, both shut down by Trump), or UK's GDS which was a pioneer in this space.

If you want to attract good talent, there are successful models out there now, but you have to start by paying them way more than the average government salary. But the contractors throw lobbying money at these things and try to stop them every step of the way.

[tsimionescu]

The problem isn't that governments can't hire programmers. It's that they refuse to hire programmers, and prefer to pay the same consultancies for the same programs over and over again.

[jack_tripper]

I disagree. Unlike the US, tech salaries in Austrian private sector are not terribly amazing to begin with, so the Austrian government would have no issues to find labor within the budget that they gave Atos, not to mention that government workers in Austria have other perks that workers in the private sector don't have, like harder to fire, having their own private kindergartens for the workers' kids, much better pension funds and health insurance funds with more coverage and less waiting times, public housing, etc that to a lot of people will have more value than a higher paycheque in the private sector.

So IT IS technically possible to gather the labor force to build the project in house, it just isn't much political motivation to do so when you have lobbyists swaying leaders in the other direction, and the investigative journalists and voters are too tech illiterate to understand this type of grift because when the government pays a billion Euros for a bridge or a tunnel and after 10 years the bridge or tunnel is not there, everyone notices and someone needs to go to jail or at least loose their job in politics for that obvious theft.

But if you spend a billion to consultancies on a government IT project, and it's an offshored clusterfuck that barely works and could have been done better by a local shop for 1/100 of the cost, then the journalists and taxpayers have no clue they've been robbed blind because nobody understands the nitty gritty and costs of SW development, and unlike bridges and tunnels, the public can't see the source code in the open as they walk to school to see that there's nothing there, which is why government IT projects has now become the best and easiest way to funnel taxpayer money into private pockets.

[Ajedi32]

I think from an efficiency standpoint it makes sense to contract out to bigger players. Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free.

The problem of course is that using someone else's proprietary, closed-source code makes you beholden to them. That's a problem for consumers but it's an even bigger problem for sovereign nations. Would be a great outcome if greater awareness of this problem lead to more state resources being invested in open source alternatives to proprietary software.

[tsimionescu]

The economies of scale would work exactly the other way than you think. Right now, the same company can sell the same solution for the same money to 20 government agencies, ones that have broadly similar needs, because it costs too much for anyone else to compete with them. The company then extracts massive profit from every subsequent project, with none of the savings going to the government. And even if a new player wins some of the contracts, they have to start from scratch and thus need to charge similar prices.

If there was a government IT office, it could build this in house, and after the initial investment in building the base infra, re-use it almost for free in every government agency in the same country. In the context of the EU, they could even make moves to share this code with other governments, passing on the savings there as well.

[jack_tripper]

>Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free.

If that were true, then all these government IT projects from these infamous consultancies would all come in-time and under budget, but that's never the case, because every government wants things completely different than the other government, so it's never a just a copy-paste, fire-and-forget type of job.

[1oooqooq]

oh it very much is. they just act and bill like it's not.

corruption requires costs you cannot verify after delivery. for construction it's the exagerated foundation which they only actually deliver what's needed and pocket the difference. for software it is the hundreds of rewrites that may or may not have happened and are now in the past.

[tsimionescu]

> corruption requires costs you cannot verify after delivery.

No, that is plain fraud. Corruption is paying so that no one notices or cares about the the costs that can't be justified after delivery.

[1oooqooq]

i guess your pedantry is right. it would be much more expensive to pay for corruption without the "safety" of some well executed fraud... but now it's open season and nobody even have to care about looking innocent anymore.

[Ajedi32]

On time and under budget is relative to what you set the budget and deadlines to in the first place. If these companies had to rewrite Excel from scratch for every client I guarantee you the budgeted cost would be a lot higher (and they'd probably still go over that figure).

[harvey9]

Nobody suggested rewriting Excel or even customising libre office. These projects are often ERPs which get customised to the client's requirements. Chaos and ballooning costs often follow for all the usual reasons.

[Ajedi32]

My point is "completely different than the other government" is only true to an extent. Even with significant customization, there's still a lot shared which benefits immensely from economies of scale. As you said, nobody's rewriting Excel.

[tacticus]

> I think from an efficiency standpoint it makes sense to contract out to bigger players. Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free.

I mean sure if it wasn't for the fact that those bigger players are going to be looking at this as a way to print money.

[StopDisinfo910]

You think governments should have a full integration team full time for potential software deployments of bought on the shelf solution?

That doesn’t make much sense. Governments don’t have that much software integration to do. Especially when you consider that these projects generally require specific knowledge of what’s integrated. What will these people do the rest of the time? Are you suggesting hiring specialists of every piece of software the government is likely to use full time?

I mean when faced with something you completely fail to understand there are two solutions: it’s all a scam or you are missing something fundamental. Here I think a lot of people are completely misunderstanding what integration is about.

Consider that these are not IT issues which push all these departments to ask for different feature sets and customisations leading to every integration being different and these are not problems programmers will solve.

Consider also what happens if projects fail. With an integrator, you sue them or breach with penalties and move on to a competitor. No harm, no foul. If it’s internal, you have a full on restructuration on your hand for something that is not even your core responsibility.

Anyway, I would like to see the face of some you when you learn that it’s highly likely that’s the people managing the integrators from the customer side were probably mostly consultants for a big consulting firm because that’s another thing government agencies don’t know how to do.

[lou1306]

> Governments don’t have that much software integration to do

...What? Most European governments rely on herds and herds of pachidermic, segregated software systems and databases. There's surely enough to keep a whole team busy for years, if not decades. And I'd be surprised if the final costs would be higher than hiring consultants again and again.

[StopDisinfo910]

You are mistaking technical issues and organisational issues.

Projects are driven by business requirements and values not a desire to share more or rationalise. Segregation is more often a matter of governance and processes.

That's not things you will solve using a bunch of developers. This discussion makes me realise that most of the people commenting on HN probably work for software companies and have very little experience of how big projects, be them IT or organisational, are conducted in traditional companies and what are the challenges they face.

[lou1306]

Well of course going towards integration vs segregation is an organizational (in this case, political) decision. I was saying that the average EU state machinery has a lot of room for integration, should there be a political intention to go that way.

Case in point: in Italy, different towns used to have different systems for their resident registrations. I doubt there was an extreme need for customization in this context, it was just that bigger/wealthier towns had a chance to digitize earlier and so on, leading to extreme fragmentation. Moving to a nationwide register took literally a dozen years or so, for a single service of a single country.