NSW Dept of Education IT system still in slow-motion collapse

The NSW state government's troubled education IT system rollout continues to plague its users, with Fairfax Media reporting enrolments at Sydney Institute of TAFE are in crisis. The system in question, Learning and Business Management Reform (LMBR), is a decade-long attempt to create a one-system-to-rule-them-all SAP …

[Michael Hoffmann]

Why?!

I stopped reading at "SAP".

Why? Just, why? Years of reading tech journalism and I have yet to read about a successful SAP implementation that didn't come out 5 times over budget. Or that didn't fail outright.

I mean, people bitch about Microsoft, they moan about Oracle, but SAP just seems to take the cake.

[FozzyBear]

Yet another

government IT project bites the big one. Nothing new to see or read here, move along now...

What would be news nowadays is reporting on the successful projects, it would make for interesting reading.

[Oengus]

TAFE Student

I recentlty enrolled in a TAFE course. I completed the enrolment application and was advised, by e-mail, that I would be contacted within 3 working days to confirm. No contact was forthcoming. Fortunately, I had a direct contact for the teacher of my course and checked with him after 2 weeks. He advised that I had been accepted and was enrolled and apologised for the system problems.

Official channels have yet to advise me of the progress of my application (I am now 2 weeks into the course...)

[Tim99]

$1 Billion

I don't know this project so I will make some wild unsubstantiated guesses.

<1,000,000 rows? 10,000 active users? 100 tables? How can they spend this much, even with SAP?

I have done a project bigger than this with Oracle on HP (not known for being cheap) with 3 developers over 2 years for a lot less than $1 Million - And it worked, and it was for a *very large* public body... You could almost do it with SQLite (well, prototype it anyway).

Disclaimer: - Our users already had access to terminals, so the end-user infrastructure was already in place; but assuming that this system was web based, not much additional cost there either.