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Comment by taitems | Hacker News Reader

Author here, hi HN/Reddit.

I had hoped I'd made it clear enough, but by no means am I recommending something I cobbled together in an hour on the couch be rolled out as a competitor to BlueNet. I mean shit, I'm web scraping their database and using compressed footage from cheap dashcams. The algorithm is also untrained.

I was, on the other hand, hoping to promote healthy discussion and pose some good questions related to IT procurement here in Australia. There needs to be a happy medium between what I've wired up and an $86M solution.

For a full disclaimer, many many years ago I did work on various Victoria Police IT projects in a previous company. While our projects were delivered on time and on budget, we did hear some horror stories about what the multinational consulting firms were charging.

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I worked in government once and could not believe the cost required to get what I saw as small projects done.

In the end I understood, when I came to understand, as other in this thread have pointed out, that there's support, rollout, training, documentation, project management, planning and it goes on and on. The technical solution can be just a small company of providing a sustainable solution to an organization.

Having said that, you should be packing this up and selling it.

I've worked with state government and fortune 50(0)s, so I get where you're coming from. Costs that are just part of doing business seem like enormous waste to outsiders. That being said, I've heard some horrible war stories. NDAs but.

I've got a war story about a government project we did for which we invoiced in total ~$80k, which by the time it made it to the media was a "$3.5 million dollar project".

Feasibility studies, hiring experts to write reports, the salaries of everyone in the department, etc? I have no idea, but conceivably if one wanted a juicy headline, there's ways to get it.

Also lying. If there's no comeback, then there's no real downside to heavy exageration.

To me the problem is with out a true project plan and an extensive list of requirements it's impossible to tell anything.

Let's assume that your system is wrong 1 out 10 times or 100 times. And they're are 1 million scan a year. that's going to result in 100,000 people pulled over wrong. For a cost of let's say 860K(assume your outfitting the system, training people, data storage etc.).

Let's say your going to need 4 to 5 sigma better performance to get that. Does that mean 10x more effort? 100x more effort? Think data collection, storage, possibly state of the art algorithm...

what if the data gets hacked.

All I got out of your article is there's already no way to tell the difference in cost between an toy system and enterprise, government system.

BTW, it was still a cool toy project...

> I was, on the other hand, hoping to promote healthy discussion and pose some good questions related to IT procurement here in Australia. There needs to be a happy medium between what I've wired up and an $86M solution.

A related story for this discussion: QUT students design a $500 cloud-based census server four times better than IBM’s $9 million system [1]

[1] http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/qut-students-design...

"four times better"

I have two objections, which the article doesn't seem to fully address.

First, do we know that the server the students designed actually met the spec handed to IBM? Often times a lot of the complexity of a project comes from the interaction of a few features. It's quite possible that the version the students provided didn't actually do the hard stuff. We know from the article that they specifically didn't address any security/privacy ramifications of sitting running in the cloud.

We also don't know how many similar projects were attempted and failed. Sometimes things just come together, way quicker and cheaper than should have been expected.

I'm not endorsing the work done by the student, I just thought it was relevant to the discussion. I agree completely that they probably haven't addressed all of the requirements or gone through the rigorous testing and verification required. Not to mention that when things go wrong you want somebody you can hold accountable.

Great article, loved it.

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