Home Office haunted by 25-year-old asylum system The effectiveness of new IT systems designed to speed up asylum claim processing in the UK continues to be held back by the Home Office's failure to decommission its 25-year-old case management database, five years after it promised to retire it. In January, the UK's major projects watchdog said the "full benefit" of Atlas, …
Never fail to show failure
I wonder whose fault this is
Not good enough analysis
Poor requirement gathering
Scope creep
Incompetence
Wrong tool
Too many customisations for said tool
worked fine in version 1.0 or said too, but 2.0 made changes and broke all customisations
Add more to the list as there is bound to be many
Quote: "....Poor requirement gathering...."
Where have you been for the last twenty years?
The "Agile Maifesto" has made the very WORD "requirements" obsolete.....so....so....so......twentieth century!
What is needed now:
(1) A large unobstructed wall at least twenty-five feet by twelve feet
(2) An endless supply of yellow Post-It notes
(3) Hundreds of "user stories"
(4) Endless arguments about the next "minimum viable product"
(5) Endless discussions about how to structure the "scrum of scrums"
(6) Endless debates about whether to talk to ACTUAL users....or to the "Product Manager"
(7) .....and so on.....
.....and of course, with no SINGLE source for "requirements", it's highly likely that the test regime has NOTHING to validate against......
.....and all the developers believe that "project management" is "interference"......
Why would anyone believe that this shambles would EVER deliver something useful?
FaceVACS is apparently an API that supports facial recognition.
Until today I'd never even heard of FaceVACS.
My obvious thought was "WTF don't you go Oracle all the way (treat the desktop as a terminal emulator/browser interface) or MS all the way" ?
Con-sultants call this "Best of breed," I tend to think of it as a configuration clusterf**k.
And BTW oracle is a proper relational DBMS which should be able to cough up such information as a schema, and data files on demand
So why didn't they map the new system to the old and plan an ETL phase to do a baseline population of the "new" system?
The Southport stabbings kicked off the riots and the thugs attacking hotels in 2024
Although there were a couple of incidents prior to this - protests at a hotel in Standish, Lancashire in September 2021:
https://www.wigantoday.net/news/mp-calls-for-wigan-hotel-to-stop-housing-asylum-seekers-after-incident-involving-schoolgirl-3391661
and then in March 2023 in Knowsley after claims "a man made inappropriate advances towards a teenage girl"
https://news.sky.com/story/knowsley-asylum-seekers-attacked-outside-merseyside-hotel-where-anti-migrant-protests-erupted-12835247
"A report from the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), a joint body of HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office, said in January 2025 that the tech migration has not taken place, according to data from March 2024."
I see what you did there... after all, they did promise to reduce migration.
"would not be realized until the legacy Casework Information Database (CID) is decommissioned."
And what would happen if somebody went it to switch the servers off right now? Screams of people not being able to do the work. It's not the decommissioning that's the problem, it's the failure to replace it. But labelling it as (implied) IT's failure to decommission the system is a handy way to shift blame.
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