Posts by nzlemming
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to Bart Janssen,
To be fair Govt procurement is horrendously hamstrung by regs. Often the folks doing the actual work know they are pissing money down the proverbial, but they have no option to do otherwise.
Um, no. Been there, still have most of the tshirts. There are bugger all actual regulations covering the whole of government for procurement. The GCIO is putting out standards, but they have no teeth to enforce them. IT procurement in central government is a little better than other procurement, but there's still no strict process or regulation to hamstring anybody.
Vendors who speak the loudest and promise the greatest deal are the ones that get chosen. I've known vendors to send christmas boxes to panel members in the middle of an RFP process! I collected them all and sent them back. Somebody else would not have - in fact, I got abused by the people who'd received them for doing so.
There's no red tape to speak of. There's just venality and "get it done" and "how hard do I really want to make this? After all, no-one ever got fired for buying [insert monolithic vendor name here]."
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to Nigel McNie,
Dad has filled me in now. He says you owe him a beer ;) but he also told me to say that just to wind you up :)
Hmmm, he may be right there ;-)
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to Nigel McNie,
nzlemming has my position basically right.
Heh, your old man and I have had many a beer discussing this very matter ;-)
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to Russell Brown,
Is the $5m likely to be all for recruitment services? Crikey.
I'm not surprised by the numbers, given the number of contractors and conslutants (deliberate) that have gone through Auckland Council, and sometimes contractors are paid via the recruitment company and the company deals with tax and the like, so that could be some of it. #beentheredonethat
But, yes, recruitment costs via agencies are eyewatering, to say the least. I would guess that, having selected AbsoluteIT and Madison, they signed preferred supplier contracts so that they didn't have to do tenders every time they wanted a new contractor. Government procurement is arse, much of the time.
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Well this in every town has the flag. Our Courts. (Article only for Emphasis)
I never said there would be no costs. But Bart was talking about total refurbs of buildings, carpets, letterheads, the works. That's not going to happen. It would top out at a couple of hundred plaques at most plus a thousand or two flags.
EDIT: Government does not supply flags to everyone who flies one. RSA's, for example, pay for their own. -
Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
But it does appear on our nation’s coat of arms, and every act and law
for instance:True but there's very few that use the coat of arms as a logo if any. And even fewer that use it on their letterhead or corporate branding. That's what costs. Ask MBIE.
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
The software development industry uses open source software all the time at small scale, with great success. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can build larger projects on its back.
I misinterpreted this?
Yeah, you did, taking it out of the context. Nigel says that open source won't solve all your ills, if your project is a big one . Neither will closed source. It's poor project management that causes the issues, and not knowing what you want/need from the start, not the type of software you use (differing individual products have higher or lower learning curves/issue ratio.
He's right, as IBM proved with INCIS - big arse project with continually changing requirements. If they'd used open source, the result would have been the same. It would have cost a lot less though.
With closed source, your customisation has to be done by fully accredited "partners" of the software publisher, who get special training in how to tweak and write addons, because everybody needs software to be customised to their business unless, as John Holley suggested, you change your business to suit the software (never a good idea IMHO - it'll bite you in the end). And even partners don't get to view the source code. They get privileged access to the API's but that's about it.
With open source, you can hire any competent programmer who knows the language the source is written in and they can do the customising you need, right in the code.
Open source is not just about free as in beer, but also Free as in speech. </tirade>
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
He seems to be saying Open Source not suitable for for large projects.
No, you had to work hard to read it that way. He's saying that you need to take care with any IT project, as they have a habit of spiraling out of control when they get too large. The key line is "At least your failure will be cheaper" with open source. Open source is just as ready and suitable as closed source for large projects.
The Internet largely runs on open source software.
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Bart Janssen,
You don't think all our government departments will go through those changes as a result of the flag change? Frankly I think $60 million is way under the final cost.
But it's not a logo change. The flag, from memory, doesn't appear in any department's logo (I'm open to correction, as I'm a little out of date, not having worked in central government for a decade), so nothing needs to change, except the actual, y'know, flags. Matthew has a valid point here - that cost figure has no actual foundation. I suspect it's based on "this is how much it cost one agency to rebrand - multiply that by x agencies" and that's just not accurate. I have no doubt that some of the more idiotic comms managers will take the opportunity of the flag change to initiate their own rebranding exercise, but that's not the flag's fault.
That said, not costing as much as people say it might cost is not a valid reason to go ahead with it.
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to John Holley,
And from history, my bit along with some of the other CIOs.
I was wondering when you'd show up, John :-D