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by StopDisinfo910 234 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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.

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.

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.