
Centrelink crisis 'cataclysmic' says PM's former head of digital transformation - technion
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jan/06/centrelink-crisis-cataclysmic-turnbull-former-head-digital-transformation?CMP=share_btn_tw
======
shakna
> ...would include ensuring only technically proficient executives were placed
> in senior IT leadership roles

If only.

Instead we have an in-house piece of software pattern matching between SAP
(Centrelink), across a shaky VPN built by Telstra in the 90s with only spartan
updates since, to a poorly configured REST service(MyGov), and from there to
the ATO running some IBM software.

It wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't had an 80% staff turnover every year
since beginning the mygov project.

Instead of unifying departments, so that the data matching project had a
chance at working, or being improved, a new layer of fragmentation was added.

And everyone but the non-IT IT manager gets fired.

> “The way they did it, obviously it’s dangerous, because their algorithms are
> flawed in the first place,” Shetler said.

> “Secondly, you have to be careful with data. Much of the data that’s in the
> federal government, how good is it really? There is this sort of a blind
> faith in data.”

------
jazoom
>The man handpicked by Malcolm Turnbull to head the government’s digital
transformation has said the error rate in Centrelink’s data-matching process
is so unfathomably high that it would send a commercial enterprise out of
business.

I could say this about most government organisations.

