Hard News: The unstable Supercity
94 Responses
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nzlemming, in reply to
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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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?
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not sure if this is IT related or human error at implementation
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/77652198/state-payroll-blunder-may-be-widespread-hitting-private-workers-too -
Sacha, in reply to
That last sentence does seem to support your interpretation, yes.
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Sacha, in reply to
The Internet largely runs on open source software.
Damn straight.
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Here's the thing. After reading all the posts I get the impression that what we need is a Ministry of Information Technology and employ our brightest and best engineers to come up with a National standard for Government information systems, that is scale-able to local needs, that just talk to each other. They could work as one to alleviate all our concerns in this area.
What could possibly go wrong?. -
Nasi Goreng, in reply to
Does anybody see the irony in the top two payment contracts made by Auckland Council? Yes, that is for six months only.
You also need to factor into the cost of the overseas trips to understand how the vendor can ensure a mutually beneficial outcome, so it is not all salaries and consultants.
Does anybody know if McCall is still feeding at the public trough or did he exit with Foley?
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nzlemming, in reply to
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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Russell Brown, in reply to
Does anybody see the irony in the top two payment contracts made by Auckland Council? Yes, that is for six months only.
SAP at nearly $22m? Wowsers.
Wellington-Based Absolute IT at nearly $5m? Tell me about them.
And WTF are we paying MBIE nearly $5 million for?
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Hi folks. Looks like my words were somewhat confusing. nzlemming has my position basically right. I don't consider open source to be some kind of antidote _for large projects_. It's a very good strategy for smaller projects, but it won't counteract the problems you will encounter when the project gets too large. Cheers!
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Glenn Pearce, in reply to
I wouldn't mind shares in Madison Recruitment either.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
And WTF are we paying MBIE nearly $5 million for?
Heir straiteners?
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John Holley, in reply to
Absolute IT (head office in AKL) and Madison are recruiters and provide temps/perm/contractors to Council.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Absolute IT (head office in AKL) and Madison are recruiters and provide temps/perm/contractors to Council.
Is the $5m likely to be all for recruitment services? Crikey.
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nzlemming, in reply to
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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nzlemming, in reply to
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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Bart Janssen, in reply to
And WTF are we paying MBIE nearly $5 million for?
Committee meetings.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Government procurement is arse, much of the time.
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.
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Nigel McNie, in reply to
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 :)
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Roger, in reply to
The Hawke's Bay Region has recently developed a single region-wide open source GIS platform that seems to be working well and has delivered significant savings:
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
Looks great, but where's the source?
Also, it looks to me to be a viewer tool. By GIS, I'm thinking of something like ArcGIS or MapInfo that allow a user to manage and analyse geospatial data.
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David Hood, in reply to
like ArcGIS or MapInfo
or R
My computer is currently calculating world population by timezone in the background, using shapefiles of timezones against shapefiles of locations of populations and population information, then adding it all up (this is just a hobby project thing, but it is analysing geospatial data together with other data).
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I think an example of the sort of stuff they might want to do is find all the water lines that are coming up for maintenance, determine which properties they serve and export a list of the people to send notification to, all without getting a programmer/DBA in to write a custom query.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
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.
Namely the requirement that the contractors have to have a physical nationwide presence.
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Nasi Goreng, in reply to
What happened to the compliance and accountability processes at Auckland Council that allowed Foley to repeatedly force through these poor decisions over such a long period? There are many, many projects that will never see the light of day so the false claims the benefits of this spending are yet to be realized need to have a harsh light upon them.
As mentioned elsewhere senior managers either walked or were walked but $1,240,000,000 doesn't get vaporized without process failures and lack of accountability throughout the organisation. The highest levels of the senior team must have seen the impact to the bottom line, e.g. our rates.
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