What I never understand with these enormous projects is what proportion is consultancy waste/profit, and what proportion is "genuinely, this is a very large software project".
IT projects that cost billions are incomprehensible to me, outside of frontier work that the AI companies or FAAANG might do. Is the problem really that hard? Assuming building in-house capability is off the table, is there no space in the market for a good software consultancy? Or are they just outcompeted for getting the contract?
> IT projects that cost billions are incomprehensible to me, outside of frontier work
Getting a large bureaucracy to agree on a question where any answer will disadvantage some members of it is frontier work. No-one has a good general solution. Very few people even have approximate solutions for a few special cases.
> is there no space in the market for a good software consultancy? Or are they just outcompeted for getting the contract?
You can't grow big enough to bid on these big projects and stay good.
The problem for the UK is the Fujitsu owns the last vestiges of the UK IT scene.
ICT/ICL and a bunch of other were all bought out by them in the early 90s.
But also there are two other issues:
1) there aren't many companies that are able to bid on that scale
2) if you remove fujitsu then you're handing it to either crapita or atos. who are also shite.
The solution to this is develop decent in-house architecture team who are able to drive specs and keep an eye on developments.
But
That requires three further things:
1) long term vision, with enough run way/agency to affect change
2) enough money to pay and keep decent people
3) the ability to terminate contracts when they get into shit. This is policitically challenging because contract termination == the current minister is shite in news term. "FLAGSHIP PROGRAMME SCRAPPED BECAUSE OF POOR PERFORMANCE, here is why $government is bad with lots of input from people with agendas that haven't properly been vetted because the journalist isn't a specialist (or its not a news site)"
> 2) if you remove fujitsu then you're handing it to either crapita or atos. who are also shite.
Yes, agreed, although (at least) Capita are probably much worse. They're currently in a deep hole having screwed over the administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme. It's been causing deep pain for people for a long time now. Where's IBM when you need them, or Oracle? Just joking.
IT projects that cost billions are incomprehensible to me, outside of frontier work that the AI companies or FAAANG might do. Is the problem really that hard? Assuming building in-house capability is off the table, is there no space in the market for a good software consultancy? Or are they just outcompeted for getting the contract?
Getting a large bureaucracy to agree on a question where any answer will disadvantage some members of it is frontier work. No-one has a good general solution. Very few people even have approximate solutions for a few special cases.
> is there no space in the market for a good software consultancy? Or are they just outcompeted for getting the contract?
You can't grow big enough to bid on these big projects and stay good.
ICT/ICL and a bunch of other were all bought out by them in the early 90s.
But also there are two other issues:
1) there aren't many companies that are able to bid on that scale
2) if you remove fujitsu then you're handing it to either crapita or atos. who are also shite.
The solution to this is develop decent in-house architecture team who are able to drive specs and keep an eye on developments.
But
That requires three further things:
1) long term vision, with enough run way/agency to affect change
2) enough money to pay and keep decent people
3) the ability to terminate contracts when they get into shit. This is policitically challenging because contract termination == the current minister is shite in news term. "FLAGSHIP PROGRAMME SCRAPPED BECAUSE OF POOR PERFORMANCE, here is why $government is bad with lots of input from people with agendas that haven't properly been vetted because the journalist isn't a specialist (or its not a news site)"
> 2) if you remove fujitsu then you're handing it to either crapita or atos. who are also shite.
Yes, agreed, although (at least) Capita are probably much worse. They're currently in a deep hole having screwed over the administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme. It's been causing deep pain for people for a long time now. Where's IBM when you need them, or Oracle? Just joking.
Admittedly the one time I felt pity for Atos, given that the orders to screw things up came from the client (government)
Palantir? (Also just joking)
The Post Office scandal is really really really bad.