* Posts by Gwydion

5 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2024

IBM swoops in to rescue UK Emergency Services Network after Motorola shown the door

Gwydion

The current Airwave TETRA based system is capable of point to point radio comms should the main network become unavailable.

The replacement 4G based system does not have that facility - no network, no comms.

Go out of coverage, you're on your own.

Emergency Services is, by its very nature, not always going to be in a controlled "everything works" environment.

Just looking at the fires in Los Angeles where Musk has put StarLink wagons in there to provide a mobile telephony uplink illustrates how susceptible to disruption civilian comms systems can be.

The whole concept of ESN was flawed from day one and illustrates the inability of those in government IT procurement to be trusted with anything more sophisticated than a torch.

This stupidity has been going on for a decade now and we'll be having the same discussion in 2033.

Europe's largest local authority settles on ERP budget 5x original estimate

Gwydion

So that's just £108M is it?

What about the schools who were originally part of the requirements but have now been dropped?

Are they just going to carry on with whatever they were originally using, or is there going to be further expenditure to replace that system as well?

Europe's largest council could face £12M manual audit bill after Oracle project disaster

Gwydion

Re: how different can councils be

In the simplest model, there three layers of council.

1. County Council

2. District Council

3. Parish Council

County and District Councils have core responsibilities which remain standardised with the exception of councils with a coastal area, but even those are standardised responsibilities.

Parish Councils have such a limited number of responsibilities that an excel spreadsheet is pretty much all they need.

There is absolutely no need for councils to go shopping for complex software that they then proceed to try and "customise" because they feel somehow unable to adjust their internal processes to match the COTS standards prevalent with those packages, or because they see themselves as a "special case".

The reality is that no council is so "unique" in what they do that they could not use a Government Digital Service (GDS) developed and supported platform, and indeed some common apps used by councils are already provided by GDS.

A bit of forethought would allow for things like unitary realignments, vanity projects and changes in responsibility from central government.

Yes, it would take money to develop, but you only have to look at the ridiculous cost spent by Birmingham City Council to achieve... absolutely nothing, to justify the dev costs.

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

Gwydion

So McDonalds outage on Friday followed by Sainsbury and Tesco online orders failing the day after, and all three claiming it was a config change.

Sounds like they all use a common platform somewhere...

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

Gwydion

When I initially heard about this it was billed as a "security concern", which made me laugh as TikTok is inhabited by people who would never have any "secrets" to give away.

As gut wrenching as it is to admit it, Trump was almost right.

While Chinese kids are studying astrophysics, molecular biology and super computing, our kids are hooked on TikTok and learning how to twerk like a drag queen and self identify as pop up toasters...