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Comment by Davidbrcz | Hacker News Reader

Comment from a French insider: It will not work. The last two IT projects the government ordered I have in mind are the ears dropping facility for the police and SAIP, an application to warn citizens in case of a dramatic event such as a terrorist attack. Both are failures. On the first one, the police complains of crashes, slowness, and not fulfilling its missions. The second simply does not warn people when there is an attack...

The worst is that it will cost tax payers millions

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You forgot Louvois which was used to pay the soldiers' salary. The project costed 500 millions € before being cancelled and a new contract bid was won ... by the company that was unable to write the software in the first place ...

Lets hope it's not as bad as this French government project:

https://projectfailures.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/project-fro...

All government projects goes wrong (I was in several of them). But man this was extreme.

As someone using it already, it works pretty well actually ;p

Such a comment is meaningless without context. How often do corporate IT projects fail? How often do government IT projects fail?

How is the corporate failure rate relevant?

It is if the grandparent meant to disparage government IT projects (compared to corporate IT projects) -- which is a possible reading.

(It's also relevant because because we pay corporations with subsidies, tax cuts, tax evasion, research grants, public procurement, specialty laws favoring them, etc -- sometimes even more than we pay governments).

It is relevant because IT projects are inherently difficult, and many of them fail. Just because the French government failed at two projects mentioned in the original comment does not mean that a) it's particularly bad at IT projects or b) it will necessarily fail again. Having the corporate failure rate as a baseline could help assess the proficiency of governments around the world.

The problem is not really about corporate vs government, it's about size.

These folks tend to think big. Everything else stems from that. What they really need is a little app with simple messaging, end to end encryption, and a server that doesn't log anything they don't want it to log. What they are likely to get if they pay some big shot contractor big money to do it is a Swiss army knife the size of a kitchen sink. With bugs.

SAIP has never sent an alert to me. But I get alerts from International SOS. So a third party emergency app does a better job than the official French app. Quelle surprise!

Yes let not forget the unifed medical record.

And SAIP was budgeted for at least 78M€ ...

That seems insane, even for the French government. Do you have a source ? I can't find anything with a 2 minutes search.

http://www.itespresso.fr/saip-application-alerte-attentat-ec...

That actually was the estimated cost; it grew at least at 81,5M€. (there's also a story in the article about one of the components of that seemingly simple app being 37 months late)

81.5 for the whole project SAIP (broadcasting warnings on several mediums (phone, ad panels, radio, TV,...), not only the SAIP app.

Or the phones nobody in our gouvernement wants to use (slow, old tech, freezes alk the time).

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