Lets be honest, the UK Home Office has already chosen Microsoft. Your bid is really just to help provide them with leverage to negotiate a lower price.
UK Home Office seeks suppliers: £25m up for grabs to build database to keep track of crimelords' ill-gotten gains
The UK Home Office is seeking out software vendors to replace a vital but ageing database that helps keep a track of criminals' assets accrued through illegal activity in the UK. In a procurement which could be worth £25m, the central government ministry is looking to replace the Joint Asset Recovery Database (JARD), a live …
COMMENTS
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Monday 7th September 2020 23:22 GMT veti
Re: Can this really be that complicated*?
Speaking with my database engineering hat on...
... yes. Yes, this can easily be "that complicated" and a good deal more. If you build it in some kind of SQL, I'd be surprised if the finished product has fewer than 500 distinct tables.
Of course, "building" the database is only the tip of the iceberg of costs. As ane fule kno, the real money is in maintaining it. That's the dirty little secret that the "software development life cycle" tries to cover up: at least 80% of the cost of software happens after it's installed, assuming of course it's actually used.
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Tuesday 8th September 2020 08:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Can this really be that complicated*?
"Yes, this can easily be "that complicated" and a good deal more. If you build it in some kind of SQL, I'd be surprised if the finished product has fewer than 500 distinct tables."
Err ... no. The complexity is in the auditability and managing the integrity of the data. The actual data itself appears to be relatively simple, at first glance.
"That's the dirty little secret that the "software development life cycle" tries to cover up: at least 80% of the cost of software happens after it's installed, assuming of course it's actually used"
Then I'd humbly suggest that you're developing/producing/maintaing software wrong.
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Tuesday 8th September 2020 06:14 GMT big_D
Re: Can this really be that complicated*?
You have to have the data stored in unalterable format (i.e. once a piece of data has been added, it can't be changed or deleted, just "extended"), otherwise a corrupt official could easily just delete entries or reduce their worth, whilst packing the "goods" into a white van at the loading ramp.
That means a lot of encryption, auditing options and much more, to ensure the database can't simply be altered and any changes are accredited to the correct user, so you have full traceability.
The large part of the price is probably servers/server licenses, CALs for access to the database, then comes the development of the software and maintenance.
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Monday 7th September 2020 23:36 GMT IGotOut
I'll do it.
I'll create a AI blockchain cloud hosted neural network.
That's my tender, pretty sure I've already won.
In 5 years time, 3x over budget I'll happily delivery a completely unfit for purpose, half finished piece of crap.....just in time for me to win the bid for its replacement.
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Tuesday 8th September 2020 07:42 GMT David Lawton
25 Million could pay the wage of some very talented PHP or ASP + SQL people to make an in house solution, thats web based, so hopefully platform neutral so it would work on Windows, Linux, Mac, iPad OS, Android.
I'm just more surprised to not see the word CAPITA in the article, who i'm sure would love to make some crappy bloated thing that requires a Windows client and the NET Framework.
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Tuesday 8th September 2020 14:39 GMT SWCD
No guarantee..
From my experience in SME's nowadays, there's not a massive amount of difference between ensuring availability of Windows/.NET, or whatever browser a "cloud" provider chose to use.
One business needs to use Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. Then of course the FD has a MacBook. No IE, or dual-booting, or.... :-( Just browser-neutral nowadays would be nice.