How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu | Hacker News Reader

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

theregister.com

57 points_dain_11 comments

In an analog world, the government used to think that pushing papers around was part of the job they had to do. But with the digitization of government bureaucracy the systems have been outsourced to private entities. The government no longer has the know-how to do its core business, only to operate the system handed to them by these private entities.

Government agencies seem to think they are in control of the IT systems, as they have ordered them according to some specification they made up. They're doing the first step in a waterfall process of software development. But the waterfall process is not a good fit for software development. Sadly the people in charge has not yet learned that.

The IT knowledge and systems development must be moved back in-house, into the government agencies. The government must start seeing software development as part of their core operations.

You have no idea how often I have had to troll through boxes of printed documents exceeding the legal retention period because digital records, if they ever existed, were improperly tracked and filed.

People, even the ones who live in IT, treat digital records as disposable because they can't see the costs or value associated with keeping the damn things organized beyond their managers' interest in them. Even with backups, I can go back years to find data that wasn't included because they weren't told it was important at the time.

More than once, the only thing keeping everything from the fire is an unassuming person in the back who's been there 25 years and is the sole living record of that department's or division's history. And they absolutely remember every bonehead that told them to scrap or change a critical process, saved or printed and filed everything of importance, and have been waiting for years for someone to finally ask for it.

Unrelated Edit: If you want something to be archived for eternity, include a recipe on it somewhere. I'm in the middle of scanning my grandmother's recipes, and the number of unrelated publications she kept from national, state, and local entities dating to the 1950s solely because they put some grandma-bait in them somewhere is astounding.

This article is the British upper class blaming a foreign software contractor for what was purely a result of the utter contempt that the upper class has for ordinary people in the UK. Repeatedly and callously convicting innocent people without ever finding a single cent that was allegedly stolen is reflective of the deep indifference the ruling class of that nation has for people unfortunate enough to not have been born to a politically connected family. This is such an alien concept to Americans it can be difficult to explain British class dynamics to someone unfamiliar with their cultural attitudes.

Wow. What an evidence-free hot take.

So, is _The Register_ "upper class", while sub-postmasters are "ordinary people"? Are Post Office managers "upper class"? I'm pretty sure it's not one of the main careers for old Etonians. Is Fujitsu "foreign", even though its business in the UK is mainly just the old, British, ICL.

Were any "cents" stolen? I suppose it's possible, since Post Offices do deal in foreign currency transactions.

It there's any actual substance, can you explain it with a few sources, please?

Sorry, I forgot the URL of the official UK government website where I can type in names of people, jobs and newspapers and be told if they are upper class or not. I guess you will just have to make up your own mind the way I have.

one word. kickbacks.

in india this was and is present on every level but now the government is moving towards e-tendering on a B2G model where a govt official can buy a chair from anywhere in the country or a float a tender and bidders would participate from anywhere.

on a smaller scale things are back to old days with kickbacks and favoritism but lets say a govt contract to manage a website, well there will be competition.

Now, i have worked with govt departments who float these tenders and many tenders which are to be given to a particular person often are given requirements taht only the intended person has and no one else.

on paper it would look like only 1 person was eligible but in reality the tender itself was made according to the wishes and situaion of the contractor

The only other thing that underlies in mystifying things like this is the old "you don't get fired for IBM/Accenture/etc" thing. Large vendors exist as career insurance policies for upper middle management. Executives can't question them, regulators can't question them, etc.

The kickback aspect I've always wondered about. It was also rife in things like medical device / drug sales, and probably still is. US Government jobs are so underpaid in DC that of course it must happen there as well.

see. in the case of fujitsu for example. if i were fujitsu and in bed with the government, i would say, the work abc would cost $10 but how about you say the estimated project cost would be around $100 and only we would bid at $90. i (fujitsu) would give you $30 for your troubles in either cash or in kind, by giving you or your family members or their busiensses some favour in similar kind (like purchasing unnecessary stuff from them at inflated prices) and this kind of thing is very difficult to investigate.

This is absolutely how govt. contracts in EU work - be it IT or construction. I remember public contracts made up ~20% of the Austrian GDP.

Siemens infamously had a kickback arm in their Romanian subsidiary, SAP was fined over $200 million just recently for bribery charges.

I don't understand why the government would outsource this hard. It's not cheaper than doing it in-house, and you end up chained to a random corporation.

Think of as the Charlie Sheen principle: You aren't paying them to show up, you're paying them to go away.

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