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Comment by nudge | Hacker News Reader

Can someone with knowledge or experience of extremely large projects such as this please explain what exactly are the costs? I cannot even begin to understand how you could ever arrive at £13bn, even if you had an army of systems engineers and buildings full of new equipment. What exactly is being paid for, and what is it billing at?

(I'm not looking for an answer like "They're gouging them because they can" - although I'm sure there is some of that going on - I'm actually interested in what are the purported costs, i.e. how could it even be seen to be the correct order of magnitude of expenditure)

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It's a huge mess of contractors, sub-contractors and consultancies. Enormous companies or consortia bid for these projects, government ministers have no freaking idea about software or technology so hire consultants to consult about hiring these consultancies and get thoroughly shafted in the process.

For example, check out the UK e-Borders system [1]. The spec, according to the article is

"Under the e-Borders scheme, immigration and government security systems will be linked with transportation hubs to check and log every passenger travelling in and out of the country."

On the face of it, it doesn't sound much more complicated than say the Diaspora project, and I'd fully expect a small group of YC-calibre hackers to put together a functioning prototype in a couple of months. It's obviously not that simple, but what do you expect when you hire a consortium consisting of Raytheon, Serco, Accenture, Detica, QinetiQ, Steria and Capgemeni [2]? Christ.

And how do you think the existing security systems that need linking to have been developed? Do you think there's an api?

[1] http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2202536/borders-wi...

[2] http://trustedborders.com/about-us.shtml

There will be no push back on requirements - nobody is going to say "do you really need that" as they will be reducing the scope of the project and therefore the amount of money made.

Implementations of complex systems in the commercial world (e.g. global ERP systems) often work best when the chance is taken to align the processes of the organization at the same time. I can't see that happening in the context of outsourced government projects - nobody has any incentive to reduce the amount of money spent.

The current cuts are providing some incentive but I think you are right but there is another part of the picture:

the lack of incentive to cut is one thing.

The ability to see things that can be cut is the other piece of the jigsaw - and I guess this stems from exactly what you are talking about - its not been a necessary skill or a part of the process before.

In order to constrain costs both motive and ability to do so are essential.

So for a government project in the UK:

You first of all need to go into the procurement process. This pretty much starts with the principle that you need to know whose fault it is when it all goes wrong which kind of sets the tone for everything.

To be able to cope with the procurement you need quite a large and bureaucracy heavy setup to start with - the emphasis is on accountability not performance. Also the government moves very slowly - it is a very large organisation with few of the commercial pressures we in the private sector are used to - this leads to delays - which in turn lead to costs. The type of company that can cope with doing business with the government has a lot of overheads.

Secondly the government side is quite hampered with rules and regulations to prevent what you might characterise as corruption. This means a lot of stuff has to be done formally and that often brings delays (and expense). (I don't want to portray this as a bad thing - corruption is bad - but it does prevent a lot of agility IMO)

Thirdly the people on the government side often don't know what a successful IT project looks like and the people doing the procuring frequently won't be people who know anything about what they are buying (and the actual end users of the system will likely not be consulted until long after the procurement). To be fair to the procurers they really do try and get value for money - but way things are setup normally means that this can't be done in sensible ways.

It's one of those "well you wouldn't start from here" type things - and whats worse they do keep starting from here and it keeps going wrong.

It's like this: the bureaucrats (who know they have jobs for life and aren't spending their own money) have lots and lots of meetings, mainly to justify their own existance, and eventually write a spec document that is literally 10s of thousands of pages long. They then give this to Accenture or EDS who are about the only companies on the planet who have enough spare staff to even read it.

Then they say, OK, we can do this, and it will cost that much. Any changes however to this spec will cost THAT much.

The bureaucrats say OK and work starts, then they realize that they need to make a whole slew of changes, since they didn't really know what they were doing in these meetings, none of them has ever worked in the NHS, they went straight from Oxbridge to the Civil Service Management Fast Track. But, whatever, it's only taxpayer's money, and Accenture did take us golfing that time.

So it goes. Fix is easy: any civil servant who overspends is dismissed with no severance and no pension. Then you'll see their interests aligned with ours.

Given I sometimes work on these kinds of projects I could not possibly comment.

To be fair though I think that the "its only taxpayers money" attitude is disappearing. But there are still so many other inefficiencies.

As for your fix. You try firing a civil servant and making it cost less than their salary plus pension.....

Surely even a civil servant can be fired for gross negligence. I think their union would have a hard sell getting the public behind them striking over someone getting the sack who wasted a billion squids of the NHS budget!

Ha ha ha ha.

I can see you've never worked in the civil service. Promotion, possibly "sideways", is by far the more likely outcome for gross negligence. Sacking people for gross negligence is hard enough even in the private sector under uk law.

HR in the civil service is sh*t scared of the unions and strikes are an option of last resort. Virtually nothing gets that far.

Again as I've commented above it would require such a sea change both in law and process - all of which the unions would fight every last step of the way - that there are undoubtedly other lines of attack.

Be interesting to see. The person or people responsible almost certainly would be easy enough to turn the public on (6-figure salary, first-class travel, gold-plated pension etc, etc) and has wasted a billion quid/year at a time when the NHS is strapped for cash. Let the tabloids do the rest. It might encourage the others, at least.

I don't have any particular knowledge, but this sentence from the article:

Over a billion pounds was spent on the programme last year alone

seems to indicate that it's an accumulated number.

Also, I think it's a safe guess that a significant slice of that money is recurring license fees for many, many instances of very enterprisey software.

You also have to take into account that the delivery of said systems will be undertaken by a consortium. There will be someone like accenture taking a huge slice for general management/PM and this is where the accountability comes in.

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