Posts by BearishTendencies

UK govt Matrix has unenviable task of consolidating several different ERP systems

Again?

How many more times are they going to try this (and not succeed yet again)?

Government IT provider UKCloud goes into liquidation

Re: What?

Liam Maxwell.

Digital burglary at recruitment agency Morgan Hunt confirmed

Re: Why not store some data offline?

Of course it does! It needs to be tokenised and stored as an NFT on a private blockchain. That's the future.

English county council blasted for 'inept project management' in delayed SAP replacement

Re: Still reinventing the wheel from scratch

Doesn't work. See the 'One Oracle' shared service in London for how well it doesn't work.

UK government tool to monitor its legacy application estate is… LATE

Four box model?

How very 1980s. Why not a Wardley map or some other trendy bullshit?

Perhaps, as others have said, a list would be sufficient.

Academics horrified that administration of Turing student exchange scheme outsourced to Capita

Re: How do they do it?

Only the mere 20 years as a commercial practitioner....

Re: How do they do it?

There's a reason there are no definitive references re: can't take past performance into account. It's bollocks

Here's the Government policy on how its done

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/417211/PPN04-15_Supplier_Past_Performance_.pdf

Beam me up, UK.gov: 'Extra-terrestrial markup language' booted off G-Cloud

Quality assurance...

Whilst the humour in this is all good fun, the fact this was listed tells you exactly how quality assured G-Cloud is. It's not.

Oracle UK's profits have more than halved

Re: You can only get away with a screw you attitude...

Nowhere near £1bn. Myself and some colleagues did the sums a few years back when I was working on procuring the master agreements with Oracle, Microsoft etc. It was a lot but nowhere near £1bn.

End of the road for Basho: Court puts biz into receivership

NHS Spine II.....

Isn't that on Riak? Might cause an issue or two.....

UK govt digi-chief confirms he is standing down after ... 9 months

Good......

Dismantle it. And Crown Commercial Service.

Monoliths based on no plan and no delivery.

UK.gov's promise to pour cash into SMEs was just hot air

Re: Yes, it's only 1/16th of the budget.

Afraid not. £1bn is the total over all the multiple G-Clouds, against an annual comparison. The best is £500m per year.

Hey, Britain! Meet Mr Maxwell, our new National Tech Advisor

Re: How about doing some research, commenters?

Hi Liam,

Long time no see.

Love,

Bearish Tendencies

UK.gov kicks long awaited digi strategy into long grass, blames EU referendum

Purdah is civil servantese for.....

Its Election time so we can't make a decision that an incoming Government might not want to do.

http://www.civilservant.org.uk/jargon.pdf

Buying gov.UK kit via price-comparison digital portal could 'save £10bn'

Re: Or just Brexit!

Not for IT. It's just over £100k over the course of the contract

Amazon Shocker: Firm recalls Fire and Fire Kids power adapters

Was really easy.....

Until I needed two of them for both my kids devices.....Then I had to order them then have Amazon credit me back for one of them. The code is limited to one per account, not one per purchased device.....

No £160m for you: BT to receive termination notice from Cornwall before Christmas

Think the point was the fuck up in outsourcing it in the first place....

Not the consequent court action (which is a waste but inevitable if the supplier isn't performing, which itself is also inevitable)......

Somerset are at it too. SouthWest One with IBM is being terminated too....

MoJ digital software glitch sends thousands of divorcees back to negotiating table

So is this.....

An internal error, a GDS error or a supplier error?

Whichever it is, the testing sounds shockingly bad

HMRC bets the farm on digital. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Sooo

I think you're confusing what the sensible people in HMRC want to do and the 'Digital team' and GDS want them to do.

Clusterfuck ahoy!

(Unless the PAC hearing on RPA actually has the effect it should and throw this shit in the bin)

London councils splurge wildly differing amounts on Oracle software

Re: Bottom line

Or its that Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea have huge opportunities for collecting revenue from other souces of income due to their geographical and population advantages?

Re: Meaningless numbers

Or user, or expense line, or PO line, or.....

No context = non-story.

Re: User count

That and what 'an Oracle licence' is would help. And what applications are then run on it. Which will differ widely.

Third time a variant of this story has been run (at least). Central government, then police, now local government. It was nonsense first time. It's still nonsense.

UK will pay EU £180m in fines due to botched CAP IT system – NAO

So.....

In conclusion:

DEFRA don't know what they are doing

GDS really don't know what they are doing

GDS are ideologues, who put rate their mantras more highly than risk control

GDS use 'spend controls' to bully departments

GDS abdicate responsibility by never actually saying what they will do

Liam Maxwell failed hideously

Costs went up

Risks went up

Yet we definitely need to fund them for another £450m because they save money.

And we need to adopt Government as a Platform because its a good idea (by a book publisher)

But it's OK. Because you've got a Macbook. And insecure Google Mail.

Public sector IT, you are about to be even more fucked than ever before.

Re: The same old sh1t eh?

At least we now know what 33% of the GDS budget increase is for. Paying this on behalf of DEFRA.

MoJ restarts troubled £250m National Offender management ICT system

Re: MOJ's move

Re: MOJ's move under the £1.2bn FITS deal to disaggregate its IT outsourcing contract is also going badly

That means GDS can point to this and force them to split up into even small chucks and really fuck it up. And CCS can 'help' with the complex transactions team too! Result!

YAY! GO GDS! YAY! GO CCS! YAY! GO MOJ!

World needs 252,288,000 seconds to decide fate of leap seconds

re: the slowing rotation of the earth...

... means that readers' descendants may end up out of synch with reality

Judging by the actions of my contemporaries (esp management), I suspect humankind has long since detached itself from said reality

G-Cloud sellers hit out against cap on scaling services

For a change.....

I'm with CCS here on this.

One of the premises behind G-Cloud is regular recompetition. If you can just extend and expand ad infinitum, you're not driving any market or value.

The problem though is what it is touted as being. From a supplier's perspective, its a licence to sell in any way you like. But it's not that at all. It's a licence for the buyer to buy the defined services. Making it clear the terms of that licence is probably appropriate.

So, GDS saved Brits £1.7bn through 'digital transformation'. Sure about that?

Indeed.....

Not as good as Crown Commercial Service savings though.

My favourite of theirs....

"As digital services are generally a new service with no previous spend to compare against the benefit methodology is to take an average of all bids under the tender and compare to the winning bid."

Irrespective of market rates or proper benchmarking, we add 'em up, divide it and take away. Savings guaranteed!

How much do UK cops pay for Microsoft licences? £30 a head or £137? Both

Or they are just buying different stuff

How many more times are El Reg going to publish this nonsense where apples and oranges are compared?

For a start, the police are covered by the Microsoft/CCS MOU so there is only one price for all of that. And then what will change is how they are buying it to suit local needs and when. Some might be 'getting their Microsoft free;. When they are on 'holiday' and sweating a perpetual asset.

MoJ admits to splashing out on 2.3 MILLION Oracle licences

Re: Licensing

Been there, done that....

Enterprise Application Support Services contract.

Plods waste millions keeping their arses covered and ears open

How to get ripped off in one easy step

"He said one of the "low hanging fruits" for IT savings would include plans to start consolidating licensing contracts, mainly with Oracle and Microsoft"

So now you get an NHS CfH 'Enterprise Licence' which you have to renew in full every few years because someone always wants something.

Total goes up, not down.

Financial Conduct Authority wastes £3.2m on unnecessary Oracle licences

I used to handle these as a consultant on a regular basis

In one case, they tried to pursue my client for a settlement. Turned out the licences weren't theirs. They were the outsourcers. And they didn't expect it to be noticed....

BIS shuns Steria HR and payroll shared services centre

Re: It is unclear how much has been saved...

If only it was that much.

Ex-SAP director: I bribed govt officials to seal the deals on software

Re: How else do SAP sell their ****?

Oracle ones go just as well.....

Parliament wants to splash £6m on network build 'n' run contract

Re: To aid the shambles that is Government Contracting

It can't be put through a CCS framework. CCS is an instrument of the Government. Parliament must be independent of Government. Hence Parliament has its own procurement function and can't touch any of the frameworks of CCS or any other public body for that matter.

Paper driving licence death day: DVLA website is still TITSUP

You've got to love 'Digital'

YAY! GO DVLA! YAY! GO GDS!

Sage boosts profit but that means NOTHING without the CLOUD

Having worked with Stephen Kelly in Cabinet Office

I can assure you that this is not a picture of 'some kind of grinning lizard in a skin suit'. It is instead a picture of 'an enormous bellend of a grinning lizard in a skin suit'.

GDS monopoly leaves UK.gov at risk of IT cock-ups, warns report

More interestingly...

Jack Perschke used to work for Liam Maxwell doing spend controls. Which is now part of GDS.

Another GDS cockup: Rural Payments Agency cans £154m IT system

Re: Well.....that's a shock

That was the point. There's no one actually responsible. And if the limitation of liability is the value of the contract then a £154m spend could go up in smoke with a maximum claim being a few million......

Live Beta

"However, the system is not officially fully live – under the GDS “digital by default service standard”, the system is still in beta test phase" according to Computer Weekly

What the f**k? You're telling me that the system running the payments to farmers is actually hasn't come out of test???

Well there's Gpv.UK

That's Gov DOT UK. Which looks sooooo pretty but is so dumbed down it doesn't tell you what you need to know.

And there's........um.....um......um........

Well.....that's a shock

The question is how agile was it? Very, apparently. So agile you can do it on paper.

YAY! GO GDS!

More seriously, when will someone stop all of this nonsense? This stuff actually matters. It's not lastminute.com trying a new feature on a website. It's just not the same.

And this multi-supplier stuff is dreadful to manage commercially. Who is actually now responsible for this failure? I suspect no-one can actually be sued.

So any chance we can take the real lessons stop this crap before we do the same to HMRC and destroy our nation's ability to collect tax?

Oracle salesmen get SEVENFOLD salary boost for flogging its cloudy aaS produce

Ahhh CEO......

The only job where you get bonuses whether you do your job or not.

Devs don't care about cloud-specific coding, right? Er, not so

Re: Sweeping statements

Any chance you could tell that to GDS?

Stop press! NHS trust finds G-Cloud, BUYS SOMETHING with it

Re: Value?

Bloody obvious what they're getting....the full G-Cloud buy what you want, how you want, no need to worry, it's all OK, it's all great value experience.

UK.gov shuns IT support tower model. Now what the hell do we do?

Re: C.R.A.P.

You missed off the ita at the end.

GDS solved that

Everyone is SCS or Band A, near enough.

It's obvious.....

Complete disaggregation, 'Government as a Platform' and in-house 'apps' built by GDS or the local 'Digital' team.

Now let's be fair. Apart from the 'Government as a Platform' buzzword bingo (which seems to me to be just some re-usable apps for common tasks (which there's probably commercial software for already)), that;s how things used to be done. But it relies on....

1) In-house capacity and capability to run IT

2) High level procurement skills

3) High level contract management skills

Good luck with that.

Ex-G-Cloud bigwig Chant weighs in on GDS' framework rebrand

You've got to love both GDS and self-serving twonks......

I'm not exactly a fan of GDS but this is even more twaddle than they could produce (except the discussion on how to pronounce GOV.uk). It seems to me this is two blokes who 'built' G-Cloud (whatever built means in terms of delivering not very much but a dodgy framework agreement and an unrealistic 'cloud-first' policy) not liking their dubious legacy being eroded. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.

YAY! GO GDS! YAY! GO SELF-SERVING TWONKS!

Yes, we need two million licences - DEFRA

Re: Really?

You're confusing the technology licensing with the EBS licensing. The tech will either be by processor or by NUP. I suspect the former but I don't know.

There's then another set of licences to use the ERP. That's what's being paid by use and will be pennies per 'licence'. It was, at one point, the standard way of licensing purchase orders and expense management as it kept it simple.

El Reg and others (including HMG themselves who produced the chart in here http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2011/11/oracle-has-70-per-cent-of-soft.html) have done this article before and made the same mistake of conflating two very different licences and adding them up to give a single number. It's completely erroneous to do that conflation. Apples =/= pears.