

Run government IT like an Internet start ups? - harel
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/6884
The UK government allows people to create e-petitions which will be debated in parliament if enough signatures are collected. I created one which I think can save billions if government IT projects will be scrutinized by a panel of internet start up pros.
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buro9
This fails to stop corruption and just introduces further red tape.

It seems that you're looking for a sanity check to veto insanely out of date
and silly practises, but having read the synopsis of the petition I would say
that you are introducing further ability to have private industry act
corruptly and direct more tax payer money into their pockets without actually
providing the sanity check you're looking for.

I say that speaking as someone who has taken part in a number of multi-million
pound bids for work in the past.

What you've got to do is stop the vendors from being the decision makers.
Government lacks the knowledge of how to do things and keeps asking private
industry, who then write their wish list of work that keeps them flush for
another 10 years. Nothing in your proposal stops this, and all it seems to do
is to make this corruption even more official as they would just pay another
3rd party to approve the proposal.

~~~
harel
The panel cannot take part in the bid itself, just scrutinize the bids they
come and question their budgets. The bidders do not know who the panel is so
they can't influence it. The panel doesn't have to know who the bidder is as
well. They just get a spec and a budget attached. All I'm after is not seeing
so many multi-million-billion failures when I know the initial budget was way
overkill. (If 'multi' was 1,5 or 10 million I would have understood. But 100,
600, 20,000 million is a bit much).

~~~
buro9
Just like I always knew which company had written the proposal from the
technologies and choices made, I would also know if I were on a panel all of
the possible bidding companies and the solutions.

The panel would have to be vetted and trusted, right? In which case there
would be record of who was vetted and trusted and you would know who to suck
up to and bribe in other ways.

And the panel would definitely spot the SharePoint vs Clarity choice and know
who was the bidding consortium or vendor.

I applaud your intent, but think it fails to address the problems with IT
acquisition and could actually make it worse. If I can see how to abuse the
process, you can be certain that a vendor will take advantage of it even for a
contract worth a couple of million.

~~~
harel
OK, I hear your point but its still a technicality that can be over come - how
to shield the panel from the bidder and vice versa. Perhaps the decision on
who's in the panel is random form a large pool of professionals and decided on
the day? Perhaps its like a Jury duty where the panel is removed from their
environment for a day or two? Its a logistical technicality. The idea I think
still stands - those budgets are a blatant misuse of public funds due to
misdirection and misinformation, and at the scale of those budgets its
disastrous in the state of the current economy.

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harel
The UK government allows people to create e-petitions which will be debated in
parliament if enough signatures are collected. I created one which I think can
save billions if government IT projects will be scrutinized by a panel of
internet start up pros. At the moment those projects go to huge corporations
operating under silly budgets just because they can and the government will
pay them that much. Many of these projects fail to the tune of millions and
sometimes billions of pounds.

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
I know of one huge govt IT web project (+$100 million) soon to go live that is
being delivered, believe it or not, from their mainframe. I wonder what your
panel of experts would think about that approach. :)

~~~
arethuza
If it hasn't gone live yet then it is perhaps just a wee bit early to be
treating it as a success!

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
The organization is already treating it as a smashing success, although it's a
couple of years late and much of the most useful functionality has been pushed
back to later releases.

It's amazing how little your hundred million gets you in the government.

I should also mention that this is not the UK government.

~~~
harel
I think all governments are suckers when it comes to technology they don't
understand. There will always be someone who does and can scoop up their/our
cash.

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purephase
Sadly, the cultures are not compatible. By their nature, start-ups are risk
takers. You can experience a few bumps along the road to a successful launch.

In many government/large organizations, failure of any kind is not an option.
The reason for the large contracts and bidding processes is political. The
idea is two-fold. In the event of a failure, you have fingers to point and
contractual obligations to use for re-mediation. There is also a political
shell-game in place such that the decision makers in the organization can use
to re-define failure by extending deadlines (at higher cost), changing
requirements (at higher cost) and managing expectations (my favourite!).

The money is not being spent on hardware or software. It is being spent on
thousands of person hours in consulting, lawyer fees, salaried staff, hotels
and meals etc.

~~~
harel
But they do fail, often and to the tune of billions. How can an internet based
project rack up a 100 million budget. How can any IT project rack up 20
BILLION pounds:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1542486/20bn-NHS-
comp...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1542486/20bn-NHS-computer-
system-doomed-to-fail.html)

[http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/bloomberg-
seeks...](http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/bloomberg-
seeks-600-million-refund-from-citytime-company/)

I'm not saying to run the project like a startup and I'm not saying to have
startup type people implement it. Just that those bids, which are often a ten
thousand page manuscript nobody actually reads is passed by professionals from
the startup world so that they can mark up the bullshit that those companies
use to generate such bills..

You can build Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter, to 1:1 scale for 20
Billion pounds...

~~~
jerf
When purephase said "they can't fail", (s)he was not saying that it is
impossible for the process to produce an outcome that an _outsider_ would
consider failure. It is impossible for the process to produce a result that an
_insider_ would consider failure, and all necessary damage to the budget,
original spec document, and yea verily the very laws of time and space itself
will be done to make sure this result occurs. Plain reality will be denied, if
necessary, such as confident declarations that yes, it's OK if entering
someone's name, birthdate, and address takes 40 keystrokes and half an hour,
yup, successful outcome!

BTW, this does precisely bupkis to solve the problem. Having competent people
around makes it harder to pretend that everything went great and the job is
done, so the competent people would simple be ejected at the earliest
available opportunity and everybody would know it. If you really want to fix
this problem you have to go a lot deeper at striking at the incentives. Lack
of competence is a second-order effect of much, _much_ deeper pathologies.

(Actually I'm honestly uncertain of a way to structure incentives in such a
way that this outcome won't occur in a government project. And I mean,
_actually_ won't occur, not a handwaving fairyland theory about how it might
not occur, but an actual process that will produce real engineering results in
the real world. The incentive mismatch in government goes all the way to the
top. This is a non-trivial part of the reason behind my libertarianism.)

------
ses
The sentiment of this petition that government IT projects are ludicrously
expensive and often fail due to a lack of internal technical knowledge I fully
agree with.

However the world of the 'internet startup' and large scale software
development are somewhat far apart. And you have learn to walk before you can
run. Perhaps the government should start by making more use of IT / software
sector experts, and encouraging career development and training for in house
staff to help retain the young budding quality developers rather than have
them disappear into the private sector. I'd happily work for something more
constructive for less money if I knew I would be allowed to make full use of
my skills and help the public sector to be more innovative with technology.

~~~
harel
I would have classified big internet projects done by startups as 'large scale
software development'. Maybe my use of 'start up' is not really accurate when
you look at it from within the industry but I was trying to make it easy to
digest to people outside who will think 'early google, early facebook' and
apply the scale of these now to the moniker 'startup'. I'm not talking about
small web apps with 1000 users. I am actually thinking 'google like' and
'facebook like' in terms of volume of interaction. Those dwarf any scale of
government initiated project, and in contrast they actually work.

~~~
ses
I don't think you can compare even the most successful startups' web apps to
government systems. Yes there are some things government could learn from a
variety of private sector software and web development businesses, but there
are some major differences between things like social networks and b2b or
government software.

Although they manage it most of the time Facebook offer no guarantees about
functionality or uptime. They don't have built into their 'contract' with
users clauses that state that if something fails, Facebook are liable pay to
huge costs to the users. For these sorts of issues, the government are surely
better off seeking advice from businesses that develop software for the
finance, engineering or manufacturing industries.

~~~
harel
I used to architect solutions used by the social services and those concepts
of data integrity, security, guaranteed deliveries etc. are something I came
across everyday, and I think those same aspects are valid in public
enterprises. The fact some people ignore those points doesn't make them less
valid. And it doesn't change the fact that a failure in government IT is 100
million pounds and private startup failure can range between just lost time to
a few millions private/VC money: calculated risk (usually, I know there are
exceptions like boo.com :)

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mhw
Sorry to be all nit-picky, but the title of the submission here is
significantly different from the title of the petition. The title here
suggests running government IT like a startup (and a number of comments seem
to be addressing that idea), while the petition is for government internet
projects to be approved by a panel of startup pros.

~~~
harel
yes you're right. Sorry about that. Can't edit it though...

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andrewcooke
government isn't like an internet start-up. it's like doing consulting for any
big company. they are completely different jobs, and what works in one doesn't
work in the other (in my experience, having done both).

a startup is all about getting something fast and pivoting. it's technical +
marketing (a numbers game with a fluid set of customers).

big company work is all about creating win-win situations (with a smaller
number of fixed customers) and then building on that.

you might argue that if you "did a startup" in a big company it would gain
traction. but i suspect it would more likely be ignored or sabotaged.

~~~
harel
I worked in both as well, and I know a lot of those budgets are fluff. See my
other comment as well - I'm not saying it should be run by startups or as
startups - just that the bids themselves are scrutinized by the same pros that
run facebook, rabbitmq, mongodb etc, to weed out all the bullshit. Think of it
like a paid version of Jury duty for geeks.

------
arethuza
I'd rather see the government providing a standard set of easy-to-develop-
against interfaces (e.g. a RESTful government) and encourage entrepreneur to
build competing useful end-user _applications_ on top of these services.

~~~
harel
Even better!

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arctangent
Another approach might be to fast-track technically competent people through
the levels of management within government organisations so that those
organisations can become more intelligent customers.

~~~
ses
An excellent suggestion, I mentioned this type of approach above. Acquisition,
development and retention of technically competent staff would go a long way
to helping the situation. I think this type of discussion is really what the
government needs to encourage better practice, and also possibly stimulate the
industry in the UK.

