Tim Worstall

More Government IT

Yes, again:

The future of the computer system that is supposed to keep track of
300,000 offenders a year who are in prison or on probation is in doubt
after ministers halted the programme this week. The moratorium follows
an admission that the original £234m costing "proved to be optimistic".

Unions
say the 2004 estimate has now risen to £950m. The rollout to 15 prisons
next month and 15 more by the end of the year has been cancelled.

The actual sum spent is some £155 million, so at least we can be grateful that someone, somewhere, has learnt a lesson: that one about holes and stopping digging.

But the thing which still gets me (and I know some of you dear readers know all about these sorts of things) is why are such things so damn expensive in the first place? Even that original estimate of £234 million looks, to this entirely untutored eye, to be excessive. Isn’t it essentially a database system? With 300,000 records? It doesn’t need banking style real time 24/7/365 access, it falling over for 10 minutes a day really isn’t that much of a problem. Seriously, what should we be talking about for such a system? An Oracle licence, a few servers and then PCs on the end of an internet connection? What else takes that cost up so high?

Even if we say it’s £100 a pop for data entry, I still don’t see where the money would have gone. Anyone able to help here?

In

5 responses

  1. Daniel Lucraft Avatar
    Daniel Lucraft

    I started thinking the exact same thing as I read the quote.
    There are Web 2.0 startups operating out of bedrooms that have to deal with more data than this. Where does the money go?
    I suppose the biggest challenge would be the 70,000 users. A normal ratio would be 5:1 so we could estimate 14,000 concurrent users. That would need more than a few servers. Maybe 5 or 6. 10 tops.
    There’d also need to be a serious security audit, but frankly after MTAS I’m thinking that any security audit at all would be an improvement.
    So as a rough estimate, EDS are padding their bill by, what? £945m? £940m? £935m? Something like that. Maybe they Feng Shui the server room.
    I should go into this industry. Oh wait … I am! Hurrays!!

    Reply
  2. Chris H Avatar
    Chris H

    I’ve worked on developing systems like this for the government and I know exactly why they are so expensive.
    1. The goverment create a commitee that come up with a complicated with all sorts of complicated and usually ill defined requirements that make it impossible to use off the shelf software.
    2. The commitee creates a complex beaurocratic process with large numbers of meaningless rules, making for lots of pointless extra work.
    3. The commitee change their mind about what they want repeatedly throughout the development process, causing delays, cost overruns and poor quality software.

    Reply
  3. Roger Thornhill Avatar
    Roger Thornhill

    It is not just the committees.
    The Government have to procure from people that have a track record in providing similar systems.
    Thus, you get the same old bunch of expensive cretins. Better the cretin you know, I suppose? No.
    Such companies often have code written by kids who have no real com-sci understanding and managed by people who were crap at programming but not so crap at manipulation and politics.
    300,000 records. Pff. I built a system that handled such but was real time stock market data – so each record updated sometimes thousands of times a day and was watched by 500,000 terminals. It has stayed up for over 5 years without crashing.

    Reply
  4. Monty Avatar
    Monty

    Why don’t they just buy a copy of the Tesco shopping website software? Or some other distributor, say Farnell Electronics. They have secure login, they keep track of thousands of different stock items, you can access data on each stock item, and they work.

    Reply
  5. Andrew Duffin Avatar
    Andrew Duffin

    What Monty said.
    Why does the State always think its requirements are so special that a custom app has to be built?
    Get something off the shelf for a few £10K’s, and if necessary change your ways of working so that you can use it.
    Not that hard really.
    But if I had the consultancy contract for this thing, that’s not what I’d tell them, either 😉

    Reply

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