Or, indeed, over-investment in trash-tier IT services provided by blood-sucking IT consulting companies.
I've seen the insides of some UK Government IT systems (not the NHS), and it's astonishing how little functional software one can get in exchange for a few hundred million sterling.
That, and the bitrot of holding on to ancient, never-updated IT systems.
[Edit], back on topic, I sincerely hope whoever did this is burned alive for their crimes.
Basically, yes. Bring it all in-house, ban the contractors/consultants/mercenaries/etc. Remove the profit motive and suddenly you don't have millions of dollars/pounds being siphoned off by vampiric consultancies and third-party vendors. Suddenly you can spend tax-payers money in a sane and rational way.
Hire a bunch of talented people who care about the wellbeing of their nation state, pay them well enough and task them with building the best systems possible in the most efficient way possible.
If it had been an in-house project with actual experts employed in building/deploying on a smallish scale (say, a town or county) and then rolling out it could have been a thing of beauty.
It should have been what AlphaGov became.
This is impossible. Any large organization eventually resorts to using pay scales to combat corruption. When the right people will be 10+x more effective than the wrong people, pay scales are impossible.
Literally the entire reason why large organizations resort to hiring contractors is because they know it's impossible for them to hire good people directly.
Then requirements start coming in, the stakeholders, the politics. The multi faceted organizations, the disparate teams with never ending edge cases.
3 years later when it's past phase 2 and creaking at the seams, along comes the next upstart... DJango! Which idiot picked that?!!! Me n my friends could....
However, in the context of an established organisation it's really hard to pull off, and so we eventually ran into serious pushback from other factions within the org, particularly the established IT Ops folk.
Still, it can be done, and it can be a raging success. Especially gratifying when you spend two days writing up a system in Python which replaces some 90's garbage that's costing the organisation 200k per year in licenses.
Killing Leeches is fun.
Tech has improved ten-fold this last decade, and IT consulting services simply don't care because they profit hugely from it. What makes this issue even harder to solve is the fact that IT is so simple to hide because society does not understand it enough.
Similar to the Tech Pledge, we should stand and be very vocal about the fact that you CAN build strong, secure and relatively cheap systems. If we don't do this, who else will ?
We're stuck between a part of the industry which benefit from this (and especially the big bosses, they don't care about the developers either) and a society which doesn't see the value of homegrown (as in company/government-grown) tech talent and the tenfolds decreases in IT spending it could entail.
Please, Sam Altman ? Someone ? Please ?
> eventually ran into serious pushback from other factions within the org, particularly the established IT Ops folk
"Mordac, preventer of information services"
Thankyou very much for fixing this kind of thing, seriously.
100 user system, Windows CALs and RDS licenses per user = a lot of money. Found only 40 users needed the CALs, rest were fine on Linux.
Took the devil of a job to persuade them this, as the Microsoft rep told them they couldn't.
Open sources equivalents are nowhere near as good.
edit: I should say some as to be fair, I'm not 100% sure of the extend of this.
Another research department I worked at was seriously underfunded, which resulted in questionable decisions, such as using round cube for email, and a central shared drive with a Microsoft access database containing patient data. Hospitals have terrible security.
Maybe post offer a decent reward - say £10 million for information leading to the identification of the culprits.
This said, they're probably popping champagne at Tory HQ right about now.
There are more subtle methods of course including outrageously broken internal market management restructures (Stafford Hospital Trust, 'fund holding GPs' in the time of Thatcher) and the like.
And because departments are left to their own devices, they solve all their problems with shared drives and excel sheets.
Ransomware is the hero we didn't ask for.
Yeah, I think this is probably closer to what's happening.
I've worked with some of these Enterprise-level IT consultancies in the past. I do understand that it's quite a different market from the lean, tech-focused web development market, but some of the solutions I've seen implemented are shockingly* bad.