The vultures are circling...
Monday, May 30, 2005

...and some pretty incompetent vultures at that.

The Times: Government in ID card talks with firms before Bill passed
THE Government has begun talks with companies hoping to win lucrative identity card contracts before the controversial legislation has been passed by Parliament, The Times has learnt.

These companies include the disgraced Accenture (AKA Arthur Andersen) and EDS, "which was responsible for the disastrous introduction of the Child Support Agency’s £456 million computer system" and "which was also responsible for the breakdown of the Inland Revenue’s tax credit system". Auspicious.

But apparently:

Home Office denies that an "unofficial" procurement process is under way and insists that contracts for the scheme will not be negotiated until after the Bill receives Royal Assent.

But after the leaks of an LSE report warning the scheme could cost £18bn...

The Home Office said that it could not comment on the LSE’s findings because of the confidential nature of the commercial contracts involved.

But there aren't any contracts in place yet, the Home Office said so. So riddle me this: how can anything be commercially confidential at this stage?

The fix, it would seem, is in. There's your culture of respect right there.

Anybody who's worked in IT can tell you: projects overrun which means you have pay more money. Costs rocket. I worked on some huge and incredibly bloated lemons during my years as a programmer. And the systems and situations become so complex, and the politics surrounding them are massaged just so that it becomes impossible to apportion blame in any meaningful way. Projects that should have taken months, take years. Teams that should have been disbanded are kept together to firefight the mess they created in the first place.

Systems never, never, never work first time - they're riddled with bugs. When I was a programmer we used to call it "factoring in the overtime". I once worked on a system that, when a customer bounced a direct debit payment to the system, the system then issued a cheque to that customer for the same amount. Another system I worked on, one memorable Christmas Eve, began deleting customer records at random.

These problems weren't acts of sabotage and the errors that caused them were amazingly small to have caused such damage. But programmers and team leaders are like everybody else. Why do it on a Friday after lunch when you can finish it on Monday. Why do it on Monday with a hangover when it'll wait till Tuesday? The system's due in three days and there's a penalty involved for late delivery so you're going to have to cut corners on the testing.

"Fuck it, that'll do" applies as much when you're providing IT systems to government as it does when you're providing cleaning services to hospitals. Particularly, as we've seen in too many PFI ventures to mention, the Government will pick up the pieces and foot the bill in the very high likelihood of it all going pear-shaped.

At this stage, there's been an excellent job done of lulling people into thinking that our ID cards are going to arrive in the post like an ATM card from the bank, we're going slip them into our wallets and forget about them. There is absolutely no way however that this is going to run smoothly, first time, on time.

You don't have to have had to scrabble for a tax cedit, or queued for a passport, or expected a computer system to chase a deadbeat dad for you to know that we're in for a whole world of trouble with this. Being kept on hold by a call centre when you phone your bank is one thing, but if it's to get the cocked-up personal details on your ID card sorted so you can have your child seen by your GP, you'll soon see a whole new level of tension introduced into your life.

Like the frog in the hot water who boils to death because he doesn't notice the temperature rising, the British public have been treated like chumps so often by New Labour, it's become second nature - an invisible part of daily life. 80% of the population back ID cards says the Government. 99.9% of those have no idea what's about to hit them.


5 Comments:

On May 30, 2005 2:38 PM, Anonymous Chris Applegate said...

Good post - one point though, the allegory of the frog being slowly boiled to death is false; sadly, even frogs seem more aware of their surroundings than us humans are.  


On May 31, 2005 12:01 PM, Blogger Roger Thornhill said...

The government should spend time up front in defining standards for vendors to meet and that is it.

Once the technology and products are available and meets the spec, then various providers can bid, with the government buying piecemeal as and when it needs it. Companies then have to compete on speed of delivery, cost and reliability, without a single big fat tender which will end up costing immense amounts of money once signed...though not before!

Will they do it? Will they hell!  


On June 01, 2005 10:28 AM, Anonymous martinb said...

I'm not so worried that the Govt is talking to potential suppliers per se at this stage. Reason being - how else is HMG going to get an estimate for costs?

And if HMG didn't have at least a ballpark, top-down, order of magnitude estimate for costs at the enabling legislation stage, you, I, the press and HM Loyal Opposition would be asking some pretty serious questions as to why the hell not, and are we expected to write totally blank cheques now?  


On June 01, 2005 10:32 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

the baron quoth:
then various providers can bid, with the government buying piecemeal as and when it needs it.

Ummmm you've never dealt with the Govt's idea of Project & Programme Management, then... as previous examples have shown, they can't manage a single supplier particularly well, so what hope do they have of managing a whole range of them?  


On June 01, 2005 4:40 PM, Blogger CuriousHamster said...

MartinB. I see what you're saying. I think we all expect the government to consult about possible costs.

I think the problem is that the public wants to know what those costs are likely to be.
The government says it won't comment due to commercial confidentiality.
Leaving aside the fact that the govt also says that no contractual negotiations have taken place, it still seem that they are hiding the facts from the public.
Ballpark figures based on estimates are what we're after to start with. The government, he say no.  


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