
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.