‘Digital by default’ agricultural payments halted: Farmers start smirking On Friday its was revealed that the new "digital by default" payments system for Common Agricultural Payments has been put on ice, with farmers having to go back to a paper-based system. Sources have told The Register that the system costs could have now escalated to £177m, with that figure likely to increase further. The …
"they've [sic]", "They're [sic]", "them [sic]", "them [sic]"
can someone cleverer than myself let me in on the joke? why are these terms bein'g SIC'ed? Is it because he keeps refering to a group that he is a member of as if they are a group he is not a member of?
or is it just turtles all the way down?
> "they've [sic]", "They're [sic]", "them [sic]", "them [sic]"
I assume that the attemptedly-pedantic author of the article thinks that the singular form should be used when referring to the Rural Payments Agency, not the plural. I would say that the point is moot. It is quite possible to refer to an organisation as an "it" or a "them".
Why the FUCK does every noddy government IT project always end up pissing hundreds of millions of taxpayers money up the wall? And still end in failure? What is so fucking hard about this pattern:
1) take some information from somebody
2) store it
3) calculate something with it
4) issue a payment
This isn't rocket science. It's EXACTLY THE SAME FUCKING THING that hundreds of other government IT systems do.
Look. Just pay me £10 million and I'll have it figured it out for you.
Want to know how?
Get 5 briefcases. Fill each with £1 million in bank notes. Hire an office in Shoreditch. Start interviewing people. At the interview, slap the briefcase down on table, and tell this prospective developer that, if they work non-stop for the next few months implementing this noddy webapp to take some details of farmers fields, applies the EU payment rules, and issues and tracks payments, that will be their bonus. Pick the 5 smartest and competent ones. Let them loose on it, with those briefcases in a locked glass vault in the middle of the office.
I get to keep the other £5 million.
I'd prefer Southampton and Croydon for a bit of joined up government. One of the challenges seems to have been mapping elements. So GIS. So Ordnance Survey and Land Registry. So hopefully one knows where it is, the other who owns it. Then RPA can add attributes to polygons showing what it's used for and how much to pay out. If £177m has been spent, I suspect a certain amount of wheel reinvention occurred. Then again, given how much OS charge for map data, it could be wooden dollars circulating between government pots.
Anyone who has a qualification from an agricultural college or a degree in agriculture is probably more able and qualified in more subjects than you can shake a stick at.
I know a few farmers and they all use a PC for most of the day to day running of the farm like any business and most crop growers use sattelite crop management; it's the Agile crap that doesn't work and that is being foisted on them that they don't like.
I wonder if Mike Bracken ever spoke to a real farmer as opposed to representatives from some of the big corporates like Co-op farming or Blade?
It seems that the so-called "Agile" methodology was first introduced as long ago as 2001.
The BBC's Digital Media Initiative, scrapped at a cost of nearly £100m, also used Agile.
This seems to be another "solves all possible problems" mechanism which would appear to work well on paper but whose implementation can be quite disastrous.
My answer to "do you know agile?" is "what do you mean by agile?".
It's a meaningless buzzword, covering everything from well-managed, reasonably well-specified solutions with rapid prototyping and rapid releases and a strong emphasis on automated unit testing, to "throw it live and hope".
The thing this clearly failed on, one of the most valuable aspects of agile, is rapid prototyping. One of the drivers of agile over waterfall is rapid prototyping - the users get to see the system as early as possible and continue to be involved during the development stage. And that's the real end users, not some bureaucrat, but the poor sods that have to use your digital disaster.
But, hey, it's not their money. No-one will get fired for this.
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