
IBM's reputation at risk in wake of census bungle - thomasfoster96
http://www.smh.com.au/business/ibms-reputation-at-risk-in-wake-of-census-bungle-20160812-gqqxpa.html
======
seibelj
A few years ago I worked on a project where my company was contracted to build
a small piece of a much larger system by IBM. IBM was managing many different
contractors. We needed a way to "securely" show a picture, aka not using the
pre-installed image showing app. So IBM spent tens of thousands of dollars to
build a new Android app that displayed a picture passed to it via an intent. I
told our product guy that I could build it in an hour for free, but he said it
wasn't our problem. In our twice-weekly status calls, we would ask about when
the "image showing app" would arrive, and we heard all about the minutiae of
building that app, from getting a PM, to finding a partner in India, to QA, to
issues with the app, back to the contractor, and finally to us, where it was
buggy as hell and never worked right. Completely mind boggling, and very
enlightening about how IBM (and I'm sure other big vendors) operate.

~~~
sliverstorm
Presumably that kind of process rigor is necessary in massive, high-scope
projects, and the fallout we see is chiefly from the inability to apply a more
lightweight process for tiny projects?

~~~
g8oz
I'd call it process theater rather than process rigor.

~~~
dragonwriter
I don't disagree with the description "process theater", but its a common part
of the overhead of enterprise contracting (often as a result of the demands of
the customer, and often central to the compensation structure), and even a
bigger part of the overhead of enterprise contracting that involves
subcontracting.

"Securing revenue through enterprise development contracts" is a _different_
discipline than "software development", and optimizing an organization to
perform on the former can involve compromising on the latter. (The entities
that understand software development well enough to align incentives of
contractors well with effective delivery of value are usually the ones that
don't need to contract development out in the first place.)

------
devishard
IBM's reputation is utterly nonsensical. I've worked for a company bought by
IBM and for companies that used IBM's products/services and they've never been
anything other than mediocre, sometimes outright bad, with costs that are
astronomical.

My recommendation is that if you ever think about using an IBM product, hire a
developer instead. You'll pay less money for a developer than you would pay
for an IBM product, and after they're done implementing a the product better
whatever unreliable enterprise clusterfuck IBM would shoehorn into your
"solution", you have a developer who can work on other things.

~~~
blakeyrat
Anybody who's been subjected to Lotus Notes is well-aware of the average
quality of IBM software.

I found this headline kind of amazing because I was like, "reputation at risk?
This has been _my_ impression of their reputation for decades."

~~~
grillvogel
Killnotes.exe was good ibm software though

------
mcguire
Wait, wait...

" _" If you think about something like what goes on in Nauru, if a child is
injured it's not the government that's responsible, it's Serco, Transfield or
whoever else," she said, referring to the private contractors that run
Australia's offshore detention centres._"

Private offshore detention centers for children?

What's going on down there?

~~~
tantalor
Been all over the news last couple weeks,

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-25/four-corners-
evidence-...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-25/four-corners-evidence-of-
kids-tear-gas-in-don-dale-prison/7656128)

[https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2016/jul/25/teena...](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2016/jul/25/teenage-boys-were-locked-in-cells-when-sprayed-with-teargas-
in-nt-juvenile-centre?CMP=soc_567)

[https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2016/jul/26/abu-g...](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2016/jul/26/abu-ghraib-images-children-detention-australia-public-
inquiry)

[https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2016/aug/10/the-n...](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2016/aug/10/the-nauru-files-2000-leaked-reports-reveal-scale-of-abuse-of-
children-in-australian-offshore-detention)

[http://www.npr.org/2016/08/11/489584342/claims-probed-of-
bru...](http://www.npr.org/2016/08/11/489584342/claims-probed-of-brutal-
conditions-for-refugees-on-island-of-nauru)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_detention_in_Austr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_detention_in_Australia)

~~~
thomasfoster96
The youth detention centre issues in the Northern Territory are completely
unrelated to the immigration detention centres on Nauru.

------
Spooky23
In my mind, this kind of fuck up seems consistent with IBM's (and other mega
vendor) reputation when it comes to this kind of contract.

It's more reflective of poor procurement discipline than anything else --
whomever put out the bid let lobbyists or high level people do their thing
without appropriate governance or penalty. It's a relatively small contract,
and without clear penalties for poor performance this type of large contractor
will do as little as possible.

~~~
caseysoftware
I'd wager there were other complexities purely from the govt side. When
healthcare.gov launched and crashed, it was uncovered that the final
definition of the laws and rules were still coming weeks before the launch and
had changed dozens of times throughout.

From a purely technical perspective, there's no way to know if something
"works" if it hasn't been defined or - worse! - is constantly being redefined
on the fly.

~~~
mrweasel
>I'd wager there were other complexities purely from the govt side.

That is true for oh so many government IT projects. The part that I still
struggle to comprehend is "Why on earth aren't the IT companies, like IBM,
telling governments that what they're asking isn't actually possible?"

The Danish government have an insane amount of failed IT projects. Most of
them fails do to the complexity of laws, rules and requirements. We even know
that they'll fail before they even start. Most good developers are able to
predict this with great accuracy. So why aren't IBM and other telling
governments that what they're asking isn't possible?

My best guess: Because their lawyers will ensure that they're paid anyway, and
because they have absolutely no pride in their work.

You can't hurt the reputation of IBM, or at least it won't matter, because
their competitors have equally poor reputation, and no one else is going to
bid on the jobs they take on.

~~~
pyvpx
IBM is best at writing iron clad contracts that mean precisely that -- no
matter the outcome, they get paid.

~~~
scholia
IBM: You can buy better, but you can't pay more.

~~~
neurotixz
Incredible Billing Machine

~~~
scholia
We must have had a dozen of these in the 1980s. An internal IBM one was I've
Been Moved. Others I can still remember include Install Bigger Memories, It's
Better Manually, Itty Bitty Machines, and Idiotic Bumbling Morons....

------
Smerity
An interesting thing to note that is that Australia selected IBM to run the
digital Census (which, surprise, failed horribly) whilst one of their states,
Queensland, has an explicit IBM ban due to an ongoing $1.2 billion dollar
contract debacle[1].

As an Australian, I hope we can move far away from such contractors. The
amount of waste is insane. It reminds me strongly of the initial
Healthcare.gov contracting failures.

[1]: [http://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-
on-4...](http://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-420969)

~~~
ethbro
I think the Healthcare.gov comparison is interesting, because to my knowledge
it's the exact opposite situation.

On Healthcare.gov, there was no primary contractor who had authority to manage
the other contractors building various pieces. Solution: hire an IBM.

On the Australian census in the article, it seems like they only contracted
IBM to both manage and build the project.

My takeaway is that you can get a decent result in large software projects,
but (1) hire a party whose sole role it is to manage / conduct ongoing audits
of work, (2) set the contract such that the managing party has a mildly
adversarial relationship with the implementing parties, & (3) cover off cost
overruns in the initial contract.

~~~
Smerity
I may be wrong but from what I read the solution for Healthcare.gov didn't
involve a primary contractor, it involved changing policies to reflect start-
ups[1].

The Healthcare.gov debacle and resulting "start-up culture" resulted in the US
Digital Service, which terms themselves as "a startup at the White House".

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-
se...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-
startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/)

------
sjwright
The funniest thing about the census debacle is that enough people mistook
_census_ for _Sensis_ (a moderately well known brand that publishes our Yellow
Pages) in large enough quantities that sensis.com.au completely fell over.

~~~
cnd47
Interesting. Sensis runs on AWS.

~~~
sgt101
Maybe they had a limit on how much they would spend to serve pages?

------
gmac
$9.6m AUS sounds like peanuts for this — something is surely wrong here.

~~~
matt_wulfeck
I agree. The price seems very low to me also, especially since they can't use
a cloud provider. I'm assuming they are running this in some already
established data center that they own and control.

Having to be in a DC alone makes them much more vulnerable to a DDoS (I
remember our provider would just cut us off first and then ask questions later
is they spotted bad traffic).

~~~
scholia
It was hosted by SoftLayer, which IBM bought in 2013.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftLayer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftLayer)

------
sadengineer
I started working at IBM ~3 months ago, as a DevOps Engineer. Joining IBM was
probably the worst mistake that I have ever made. My group (IBM is a big
company) is a complete cluster-f. No leadership. Managers have no knowledge of
the technology that they are in charge of. Worst of all, we are forced to use
IBM's proprietary, shitty tools (Notes, SameTime, Rational Team Concert,
UrbanCode Deploy, IBM-specific JRE, Retain, ect, ect.). I started looking for
a new job after two weeks. I would not buy anything from us.

------
jpgvm
If anything it's just cementing their reputation as a complete joke.

Corp sector in Australia is on the tail end ridding themselves of IBM nonsense
after a decade of utter incompetence.

Unfortunately the gov sector catches on slowly.

Sadly a lot of places don't learn though and just replace IBM with TCS/TechM
which is somehow even worse.

~~~
douche
I've dealt with a couple of customers of ours in Australia that have used IBM
services for their IT. It's been a complete disaster. I don't know whether
they are all that bad, or Australia gets the C team, but, wow.

And don't get me started on TCS. Fucking shitshow.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Where is Watson when you really need it. I would be much more impressed by
"Watson successfully saves an IT project screwed up by IBM management" than an
article about how Watson diagnoses cancer.

~~~
raverbashing
I guess if Watson was really intelligent it would have not picked IBM in the
first place, leading to a paradox

------
agumonkey
Not long ago there was a thread about IBM PhotoStore system from 67, a Terabit
of storage on photographic film: [http://www.computer-
history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Photostore....](http://www.computer-
history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Photostore.dir/index.html)

I miss this IBM.

------
evolve2k
"The detail of exactly what happened has not yet been independently reviewed.
And as we saw in other stuff-ups, such as Queensland Health, when it was
independently reviewed the blame was shared around quite a lot," Mr Noonan
said. The attack was either a foreign or locally planned denial of service, or
just a "large load" that appeared to be a denial of service but was in fact
people trying to fill out the Census, he said. It "beggars belief" IBM's data
centre could not handle a denial of service attack, he added."

There's been a bunch of discussion in Australia that there likely had been no
"attack" and that it was simply just terrible planning around expected loads
the night of the census.

------
microtherion
This must be all the more galling for IBM as they literally have more than a
century of experience with census jobs:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith)

------
darkfishboat
haha, all they do is problems with outsourcing.

This happened in canada. [https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&ion=1&es...](https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=canada%20phoniex)

------
Hondor
IBM also caused $100,000,000 waste on New Zealand's failed INCIS police
computer system.

------
grillvogel
they've been rearranging the titanic deck chairs for quite some time now

------
douche
Maybe somebody will finally get fired for buying IBM

------
X86BSD
No one ever got fired for buying IBM!

Too soon?

