Their lack of any grasp on the scale of what they had signed off on…

There are many and varied GIS systems. They're used…

Is there someone in these forums with considerable experience in local government who could comment on the types of tasks and the complexity which need to be achieved, and what's done and used at present?…

Well, good, let's hope it works out but, as you…

http://download.eclipse.org/jetty/9.3.7.v20160115/apidocs/org/eclipse/jetty/servlet/Holder.html

Well done, Eclipse Foundation.

Nice. I will try that next time I need to bash geospatial data.

Yeah, well, Treasury has always said that projects should be this, that and the other, but the State Sector Act makes it clear that decisions in projects…

You might be interested in what Treasury are insisting on in these post-Novopay days (endured a prescribed workshop today for a major project). I suspect the recently announced ACC transformation programme has been poked and prodded to within an inch…

QGIS – ready for prime time. I speak as a user. I built the local government election information website around it in 2010. Worked like a charm then and it's…

Um, no. Been there, still have most of the tshirts. There are bugger all actual regulations covering…

Hmmm, he may be right there ;-)

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…

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.

https://hbviewer.nz

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.

Committee meetings.

Heh, your old man and I have had many a beer discussing this very matter ;-)

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…

Is the $5m likely to be all for recruitment services? Crikey.

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?

http://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/EN/newseventsculture/mediacentre/Documents/supplierspendreportfinal.pdf

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…

Damn straight.

I misinterpreted this?

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…

If your project gets too large, you get stuck with many of the same problems that a “customised off-the-shelf” closed-source solution has. In particular, your foundations will move, and you need to accommodate this.

you are nearly as doomed as if you used closed…

In some places, this has broken down: Amazon is a tech company that sells books and stuff. Google is a tech company that sells advertising. These enterprises…

It is always a problem when IT "does" a project/implementation for some part/all of an organisation. In my experience you…

Just migrating/merging the data…

If you asked our CIO he'd say the same about our SAP implementation too. I'd bet there are very few CIOs who'd say their implementation of SAP was the disaster the actual users get to experience.

Which isn't to…

If you want some sort of accounts package, then to my knowledge there isn't even a usable package for SMEs, let alone an organisation on the…

I was wondering when you'd show up, John :-D

I definitely don't disagree that there's some weird spending going on here, but what do you see councils as needing to…

Bit it is part of the problem – if say Govt demanded local companies were preferred suppliers and to buy kiwi where-ever possible the…

Good point. The issue I've seen many times at the coalface is that systems are modified over the years to handle esoteric business processes (which in some ways is reasonable…

That not a problem with the TPP. You will always be able to choose a local supplier if you believe they are better in any way, cheaper, faster, more responsive etc

What you won't be able to do is choose a…

weak, blustery ego, in other words

In both cases we…

When government Ministers can get away with Oravida, Saudi sheep, gaming the OIA, and sundry #dirtypolitics activities, what hope of that?

The fish rots from the head. In Te Ao Maori, that's Wellington.

Today:
Callaghan Innovation faces problems recovering $2.9m Gameloft grant

Yet another example of useful bespoke software that would probably just do with some freshening up and modernisation chucked out in favour of a monolithic PoS that needs hefty and expensive customisation by expensive…

"You'll never get fired for buying IBM"

.. unless you're the NZ Police

It's one of the most costly aspects of TPP – permanently removing the ability of small local companies to grow through local contracts because giant foreign firms appear a safer or cheaper bet and…

imagine if we invested locally, maybe we'd have more of a knowledge economy – I guess this will soon by scuppered by tenders having to be…

I've worked in retail, that's not a computer problem, it's caused when a supplier sends a consignment of product with a PLU that hasn't been loaded. Unfortunately, the system doesn't do telepathy, but the supervisor can often guess a price or…

Seconded. Went there, found that and pissed off.

Caution, link leads to site run by idiots. "ad-blocker detected, piss off".

Worse, if the supplier commits to that they might actually deliver what you originally asked for rather than what you turn out to need. I've interviewed at one conslutancy that was very clear that if the client demanded a fixed…

Long term projects in large institutions are crippled because nobody wants to tell the new IT manager that they can't do it, and they're pretty sure…

The other thing, which empire building IT…

My guess is that you might want to re-work that model if you're including all the other expenses. At 48 weeks x 5 days x 8 hours that would work out to less than $105 / hr.…

My experience with management suggests that they always believe that what is offered by some big multinational MUST be better than what can be produced by anyone they could hire.

So if Deloittes offers SAP then it must be better than what could be produced by kiwis. As…

The present outcome was pretty predictable especially so with the politically driven lack of transparency

OK the IT situation is…

Think about it.…

The finance department should have had its files raided and audited years back. CFO Andrew McKenzie resigned in mid 2014. The CFO was the head of council IT as there was no CIO. Only a HoIT which was Mike Foley

Deloitte were lying about the cost, and they knew it

The estimated timeline was somewhat more realistic, but the cost estimate of $200m was complete deception

Auckland Council have also outsourced contracts for Data Center, infrastructure management as well as other IT…