IBM wins five-year whole-of-government deal with Australia IBM and Australia’s federal government have signed a billion-dollar five-year whole-of-government procurement deal. Big Blue’s spinning it as a win because it runs for five years and means that government agencies who don’t already work with IBM now have a way to buy from the company without needing to strike new contracts. …
"I'm not sure the business of Government is sitting around playing Xbox all day or even conversing with Alexa, but then again I'm not Austrailian, so I could be mistaken?"
I am Australian, and if that's what they do all day, it might explain a lot of things.
IBM and Australia’s federal government have signed a billion-dollar five-year whole-of-government procurement deal.
I hope IBM wine-and-dine y'all because once the one year "honeymoon period" ends what comes next is going to be a whole-of-government pain.
<DOUBLE FACEPALM>
NOTE: With a US$1B contract, I'd keep an eye out for news (in the next 12 months) about a new Australian-born addition to IBM board.
"I'd keep an eye out for news (in the next 12 months) about a new Australian-born addition to IBM board."
That sounds about right for being after the next federal election, would not surprise me if that's an exit strategy for one of our current crop of leaders. Would not surprise a lot of people if the result of that election is a change of government, or even a hung parliament.
Play a bit of golf? Don't really understand how this whole IT thing works? Senior management? Like nice food and drink and attending the occasional event? Got a large budget to spend somehow? Contact IBM now!
And to translate:
"the Australian government will achieve significant cost savings" == IBM will attempt to offshore work by firing locals, discovering they can't offshore the work and replacing the previous team with less expensive, less skilled locals and fewer of them.
"reflects the long-term anticipated value of the agreement" == if the Australian government was stupid enough to sign a new deal after our recent history, signing up to some of our wilder ideas isn't out of the question. We have some great ideas around using Watson to mine bitcoin for five years and then switching it off to dramatically cut your greenhouse gas emissions....
AC, you optimist you. Jobs go offshore, done badly if at all, data slurped "managed by contract conditions" * , and no local staff employed again. Oz just gets a lecture about how lazy we are and have unrealistic expectations of what governments can do. * quote from a PHB in Oz public service when questioned during the Howards Way destruction of the Australian Public Service IT.
“to become one of the top-three digital governments in the world by 2025"
I would suggest that not wasting money on quantum computing, blockchain and AI is probably one of the main prerequisites to achieving this ambition. Try investing in actually existing useful tech on projects to make government processes run more efficiently.
Oh, and don't lock yourself into a single big supplier.
Good point SVV. IIRCC there was a government inspired report and committee recommendation 4 years or so ago to avoid big bang outsourcery to single vendors because of lack of evidence for any cost savings or appropriate performance conditions. Inability of public serpents to manage and usefully negotiate with foreign Big Company sales weasels (my paraphrase) was also mentioned somewhere.
"How tiny is Australia?"
Depends on what you are measuring. The physical size of Australia is roughly about the same as USA. The population size is roughly on par with a few of the larger USA cities put together. The IQ of our politicians as on par with USA politicians, but that's a low bar to clear. We have waaaay less states, but since we fit them into the same area USA squeezes it's into, ours are much larger. We have cattle ranches that are bigger than Texas, USA. We have a small country town called Texas, which if I recall correctly is near a small country town called Paris. Oddly enough, each of our three biggest cities individually has a bigger area than almost any USA city. We have way more species of deadly animal than just about anywhere else. Our mountains are kinda short. We have the biggest rock in the world, but no natural holes in the ground as big as the Grand Canyon, though I can't comment on the size of our man made holes. One of our cities has the largest Greek population outside of Athens, and that city has a Malaka* Street to celebrate that fact (I used to live near it, oddly in an area with a large Jewish population).
Our dollar is often smaller than the USA dollar, but has been known to be bigger.
It's entirely possible that our politicians are cheaper to buy than USA politicians, I've never compared them. While it is true that anything imported tends to be more expensive than it is in the country we import it from (known locally as the Australia Tax, they do it coz they can get away with it), we recently purged our politicians of any with dual nationality, or potential dual nationality, or even rumoured dual nationality, so none of the remaining lot are imports.
Some of the above may be inaccurate, I've not looked things up recently, and my memory may be wrong on some of the details.
* I'm not Greek, nor do I know any Greek, but until just now when I bothered to look it up, I was under the impression "Malaka" is Greek for "shit". My quick web search tells me it has a variety of meanings, most of them not good. This maybe why the area around it is largely Jewish, the Greeks didn't want to go near it. I have no idea if "Malaka" is a Hebrew word, I don't speak that language either.
Oz, get a good deal ? Only if Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra wiped out by a tsunami concurrently. Oz ruling cliques, whether public or private, are trained overseas and have a craven colonial mindset instilled. In some cases it might be genetic.This mindset is at odds with the general population who think they are are as good as anyone else. Some of them are better, some worse like any other country. However the brown nosing manglement (for want of an appropriately vile epithet) adopt foreign fads only after the poms and merkins at least have shown that said fad does not work, has been demonstrated to fail multiple times and means lots of money, usually taxpayers and long term investors, goes overseas in return for lots of markings on dead tree carcass if that.
"gig that later went very pear-shaped indeed (although the client was to blame)"
I wonder how IBM got that previous contract?
"“The only finding possible is that IBM should not have been appointed” to the contract in the first place in part because of “ethical transgressions” on the part of some of its employees, including “the obligation not to use the State’s confidential [bid and proposal] information” that it had somehow couldn't explain came into its possession from a restricted government database along with the apparent privileged insider information from a government consultant to the project who happened to be a former-IBM employee."
Any former IBM employees involved with this new bid?
"that it had somehow couldn't explain came into its possession from a restricted government database"
It was locked in a filing cabinet, that was purchased from a second hand furniture dealer? Only people that have been paying attention to a recent Aussie government scandal are expected to understand that joke.
May as well use these Bingo words, as they dont exist, and will never get delivered, and Id quite like to go to Australia where the government are on ICE or other hard drugs, and have wodges of cash to spaff all over the worst ideas by the worlds worst outsourced supplier, yeah Australia can be my SPAFFDADDY!!!!!
Certainly was IBM that ran the census. A monumental clusterf**k.
And then there was the Prime Minister's highly advertised "innovation nation" election promise to drive technology development and industry in Australia....
So let's solve both problems at once by giving the work to a non-Australian company with a track record of failure. And yet , people wonder why I moved my IT career from Australia to Europe.
Wasn't that IBM? The Australian Government never learn.
Yes, this is the same IBM that failed to deliver the QLD Health Payroll system.
And yes, this is the same Australian Government that said that "heads will roll" after the ABS Census went down like a $5 hooker.
Seeeeriously, I didn't realize that the phrase "heads will roll" means that Malcolm Turnbull will be handing IBM a >US$1B contract.
NOTE: It may say US$1B contract but in reality it will be MORE THAN three times the value over time.
'Seeeeriously, I didn't realize that the phrase "heads will roll" means that Malcolm Turnbull will be handing IBM a >US$1B contract.'
"Heads will roll" means bundles of cash will roll like heads of lettuce into IBMs coffers. For those that don't know about the colour of Aussie money, the green ones are the largest, $100 notes.
...all today’s best buzzwords - quantum, blockchain and AI.
What, there's no IoT, digital detox, microservice or serverless architecture, something/everything/anything as a service (XaaS), dark data, self-service analytics? For that much money, I would expect IBM to go really, really big. Three buzzwords is hardly enough to get out of bed for.
Most of that stuff is too new for our Prime Minister, the Man Who Invented The Internet*, to have heard of. He's still catching up on how mathematics works.
* According to our previous Prime Minister, who is rumoured to have had at least two whole brain cells. Possibly as many as five, which he may have shared with his Treasurer.
IT? icon, coz they've heard of it.
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Granted western civilisation has been committing intellectual suicide for 2 centuries, but I did not expect Oz to throw away its government IT remnants so rapidly. All Oz citizens need to practice writing legibly with the original digital interface, because the electronic comms systems will be done for good soon. OTOH, state sponsored snooping will not work to well.
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