Capgemini wins £30m deal to work on UK customs Capgemini has won a contract worth a maximum of £30m to integrate the UK tax collector's much-delayed customs platform with its other systems. The award is part of a tranche of deals potentially worth more than £100m awarded in the last month, including a further Capgemini agreement to integrate controversial Brexit-related …
@Tubz
That is also a standard crap comment.
I delivered and produced software for more than 40 years, and I know, like everybody else who has delivered software to customers, that "two are needed for tango".
And something that always seem to happen is that new features are needed and added, more time is needed and more money too. Things happen often outside anybody's control among those involved with the project.
The more "crap" the people in the customer organisation are the harder it gets.
And "crap" includes an organisation where every decision takes ages.
One thing is for sure, those who deliver want it to happen rather sooner than later.
> One of the most telling aspects of this is that it wasn't designed to be integrated with the rest of the systems from the start.
It probably was. But the system was no doubt deemed "too expensive". So savings were demanded. So they found a way to save about £10m (Which now results in a cost of £30m to add back the functionality because it's less efficient to do it later.) But "savings" were made and a politician was able to congratulate themselves.
Or something like that. :-)
This would be the case if it were true, but it isn't. CDS is highly integrated with all of HMRC's systems. Moreso than almost anything else in the place actually.
"Integration" in this case is more of a contractual term that may be better read as "delivery" or "build" - it simply implies another layer of components and procurement underneath the prime "integration" contract. Some will be custom, some will be cots, some will be glue. The contract is to run those subcontracts, pull it all together and deliver it.
The problem with CDS is that back when it was specced in 2013 Brexit wasn't even a word, so it was very much defined with the rest of the world in mind. Then of course it suddenly needed to handle something like 100x more submissions of about 10,000x more varieties, from a set of companies that were barely even in the hierarchy for the backing datastore. And it needed to do that in the space of two to three years. This happened within touching distance of the originally-designed CDS being delivered, and within months of the originally-planned decommissioning of CHIEF (the previous system). So just about the worst case scenario.
The fact this has only cost an eight figure sum and six years to tidy up is a miracle.
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