UK.gov IDs identity vendors

The Identity and Passport Service has announced shortlists for two stages of the National Identity Scheme procurement programme. It has said that CSC, Fujitsu and IBM will be considered as suppliers for the Application and Enrolment Programme for the replace of passport application contracts and development of new capabilities …

[Paolo]

Round and round we go

Fujitsu, IBM, EDS - sounds very much like the shortlist for the NHS contracts and we all know how well that's going.

These big gummant projects need some new lifeblood injected into the approved supplier lists and sharpish.

[Simon.W]

EDS!!??!!

You cannot be serious. After all the failures, other government agencies threatening to sue. What the fcuk is going on here? OMG.

Someone in the labour party must be making a nice little earner out of this.

Get ready for tax hikes when it all goes titsup.com

[Anonymous Coward]

woohoo

best news we could hear, I look forward to it never ever working and going down as a money trap that will put nhs it, the UK olympics and the london dome to shame.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have got to be kidding

What is it with this governments tolerance of pisspoor IT suppliers. Expect the usual "Press Release" (crap business spin and guff about added value, solution driven solutions, etc) followed by system failure a few years down the line.

[Eponymous Cowherd]

Money for old rope

Given that Gordon Brown is likely to lose the next General Election and the opposition has promised to scrap the NIR, the chance of any of these companies actually having to get the NIR *working* is minimal.

Black Helicopter. Because they want to watch everything you do.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been working too hard....

I swear when I first read this I thought it said D. La Rue! I was wondering what the jumped up, cabaret cum TV artiste, was doing running an IT services company!

[Tom Chiverton]

Pork, pork, pork, wonderful pork

Well, the ID card project is doomed to be an expensive failure then, isn't it...

You should head on over to http://no2id.net and try to make them stop before they waste any more money on it.

[Guy Herbert]

Shortlist of 5

... for five principal contracts. Though it is a slightly different set of 5 from the one they had at Christmas. And it is totally obscure what they are supposed to be doing, but the price of the contracts is known already. Isn't competitive procurement a marvel?

[Anonymous Coward]

EDS!

Yes, oh yes!

With those three letters we know the project is surely doomed.

And nice to see IBM finally living up to its image in the original Apple Mac ad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my...

Having worked for one of these, and talking with ex-colleagues working for another, I'm less than thrilled.

In fact, on track record I suspect this short-list should be the projects death knell.

Please, kill it quickly... it's going over-budget.

RFC for the profit.

[Gulfie]

@Paolo, @Simon.W

EDS withdrew from the NHS bidding process once it had a chance to look in detail at the contract on offer and the clarity (or lack thereof) of requirements.

I appreciate the point that you are both making. Please nominate one or more large IT suppliers capable of funding (revenue is recognised downstream, remember), delivering and supporting this size of system and see if you can come up with any that haven't had bad press in the last couple of years.

By all means order your list, smallest cock-up at the top, and make certain that the cock-up in question was solely the suppliers fault and not driven by changing customer requirements, acceleration of the delivery timeframe or refusal to delay roll-out after changes have been requested.

And, if you look at the Conservatives record you won't see much difference in the suppliers used, except that PWC were out of favour.

[Chris Miller]

When will they ever learn?

Rule of thumb - no IT project should ever cost more than 7 figures or take longer than 18 months, otherwise it'll never happen (or, even worse, will be obsolete by the time it's implemented). If you're faced with a larger project, break it up into smaller ones to meet the above criteria.

If you insist on a multi-billion pound project and you advertise for outsourcers capable of taking it on, don't be surprised if you end up with the usual suspects.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know which is worse:

Paying for the white elephant and seeing all that money just plain wasted, or actually having the insidious surveillance database come to fruition.

On further consideration, it's all bad because we'll get a crappy implemetaion that will cost the earth and cause more problems than no system or a working one, ala CSA or Farmer subsidy systems...

Paris, cos even she knows better than to trust those "big names" with something this full of feature-creep and bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM's history

My previous comment appears to have not made it out of the moderation queue. If you doubt what I said about IBM do some basic research:

http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/

"But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company's custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor."

As I say - IBM have prior experience of cataloguing populations for nefarious purposes.

[Rab S]

or is it?

A cunning plan by a NOID plant...face it, its well fucked now ;-))

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM?

Will Mr. Hollerith comment, one wonders?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't IBM

supply technology to the Nazis for the gas chambers and the processing of people through it.

Sure, it may go to their track record as being able to deliver final solution, but I don't really know if the people of the country really want them to have another hand in another genocide.

[Tony Paulazzo]

Where is all this money coming from?

Banks are crumbling, the house market's in free fall, oil is sucking up all my free spending, Nulabour (and I'm no economist here), are mismanaging the economy - yet, they still appear to have billions to spend on this project.

I really think the Illuminati have taken over the reigns...

Pure fantasy.

[Anonymous Coward]

CSC AGAIN?JUST DON'T

Oh dear! CSC will more than likely off shore the work even when there told not too. I think were going to face an epidemic of identity fraud. You heard it first here. CSC has and will ignore there client as the company is heavily profit driven. Security and ethics don't come into play with this company. Watch out government if you choose this supplier you will be rather embarrassed when you have to explain why our (The British Public) details ended up on the black market.