25 Jul 2013
So, the BC government is entering negotiations to replace the “COTS student information system” that they implemented/purchased five years ago at a cost of about $100M.
With another COTS system. Yay.
To be managed and run by the same vendor running the current COTS system. Yay.
I think that MLA Rob Fleming had a valid point when he asked the Minister of Education during Question Period (I assume with some edge in his voice):
Given this government’s wasteful track record on IT projects, how can the minister assure British Columbians that his government won’t be wasting $100 million more of their tax dollars before he signs a new 12-year deal?
But there’s a reason it’s called “Question Period” and not “Answer Period”. So the Minister chose not to detail a management regime which will guard taxpayers against another failed implementation, nor a multi-vendor strategy to hedge bets against the failure of one vendor, nor a collaboration with another province to share in implementation and customization costs, nor any assurance at all that the next round will come off any different from the previous..
Curiously, the tactic the Minister chose was to defend the current iteration of BCeSIS!
It’s “one of the most robust student information systems in the country”, “there were challenges with the new technology” but “we have learned from that”, and finally:
I’ll also remind the member that the ministry engaged an independent report. That report from Gartner, who did the report, said that we have a good, stable student information system that’s meeting the needs of the school districts in the province.
Oh, um, no. The Gartner report is pretty clear, right in the executive summary:
The alternative assessment concluded that BCeSIS, as currently deployed, is **not meeting the business, technical or operational needs of BC and is not a viable future alternative **
At a cost of $100M, that’s a “colossal failure” in my or any other thinking person’s books.
I fear that the Ministry of Education IT bureaucracy is entering into a death race with the BC openStudent project, which is a consortium of school districts building a student information system using collaborative “open source” principles. OpenStudent is promising usable technology at a much lower per student cost than the provincial system.
If openStudent can get an acceptable working system in place in their partner districts before the Ministry has their new system up and running, some senior IT poobahs will be very embarrassed, and we can’t have that. So we’re going to get a death race.
My advice to OpenStudent: stop using “comic sans” in your business case documents. And watch out because your first public delivery will be used to beat you over the head with. “Missing all these features that the COTS product has!” “I found a bug!” “It erased my laptop” “Comic sans!”
There no bunfight like an IT bureaucracy bunfight.
24 Jul 2013
It’s hard to believe a whole year has gone by! And yet, it has. July is here, the BC 2012/2013 Public Accounts have come out, so it’s time to update my tracking of IT outsourcing spending with another year’s data points!
Last year the government’s “private sector partners” notched up 8% year-over-year growth to extract $393,603,233 from the treasury, setting another all-time record! While growth has slowed from last year’s 21% pace, IT spending growth is still above both the rate of inflation and the overall growth rate of the budget. Suck on that, children and sick people!
In the individual category, HP Advanced Solutions continues to rule the roost, posting 19% growth to notch a league-leading $130M in billings. At this point, nobody else is even close. Former champ IBM continues to shed billings, and now lags even Maximus with only $59M in billings.
My favourite systems integrator, Deloitte & Touch, has plateaued at $36M in billings, but with potential new builds in natural resources to add to the social services sector, they could surprise on the upside next season: get your bets in early.
Update: I figured out what last years mysterious entry for “Oracle Microsystems” is. Somehow, Sun Microsystems won a big services contract to build components of the eHealth systems (a pharmacy system and an electronic health record). So, the totals and growth rate numbers have been updated. And here I thought Sun was a hardware company (perhaps somebody knew somebody). Once Oracle bought Sun, we have a name change to “Oracle Microsystems”, but still a healthy $20M annual services spend. And a new seam of IT boondogglery to investigate: eHealth must be the grand-daddy of them all.
17 Jul 2013
While plans in 2012 were still flirting with bringing the glories of Seibel to the natural resources sector, I have heard that (hallelujah) that is not on.
The big “IT systems transformation” however, that is very much on, baby! And it’s going to be a glorious, Niagara Falls style, waterfall.
The first RFP for the project is out, and it calls for spending $5.4 MILLION dollars to build absolutely NO software. All the deliverables of the first phase are documentation: requirements specifications, business process models, systems reviews, and project management effluvia.
Fortunately, the reporting relationships are clear and transparent!
BC taxpayers can rest assured though, the deliverables will be top quality. How do I know? Because the government won’t be getting suckered into taking a low quality, low price bid, since the evaluation criteria assign just 10% of the overall score to price.
The RFP also mentions a separate “system integrator team”, presumably staffed by the real high priced help from Deloitte or CGI, which will slurp down the majority of the $100M+ overall budget (still to-be-determined by treasury board). I assume this is because the end state is going to be a single “integrated system”, like ICM, that subsumes all the pre-existing systems being documented during this early phase.
So I guess the sad punchline is that this flawed RFP is actually going to be the high point of the natural resource sector modernization, since it does envision spreading the work across multiple independent teams, who will each gain specific domain knowledge of their working areas. Once the system integrator takes over the streams converge into one big river, heading for the drop-off…
26 Jun 2013
What could possibly go wrong?
Bringing the unalloyed success that is ICM to the rest of government is a no brainer! (Does that mean you need no brain to recommend it, or no brain to accept the recommendation? What an odd phrase.) The strategic plan for the BC natural resource sector includes a case (authored by whom, I wonder) for “re-using” the ICM technology in natural resource permitting.
The business case will go to Treasury Board some time this year, and we’ll soon be off to the races, with a huge capital allocation for systems development that can only be bid by a major multi-national. Thanks to cabinet secrecy and third party commercial exemptions to the BC FOI law, the taxpayers footing the bill for this extravaganza will get to see neither the full business case, nor the winning bid, nor the billing schedules of the winning bidder.
If we’re lucky we’ll get to see a redacted PowerPoint presentation given to Cabinet, which ironically enough will leave us just about as educated on the issues as the actual decision makers pulling the trigger on this new adventure. Ain’t technology decision making grand?
25 Jun 2013
For years, I just assumed that, as a cash strapped municipality carrying much of the service load of the region (Victoria is the small (80K) urban centre of a metro area (330K) that comprises ten separate municipalities) my city would just never have enough money to splash out on a mapping webstacle, but today I was proven wrong.
I give you: VicMap
It’s got everything you expect from a “municipal map portal”. (For explanation of the scare quotes, please see parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 of “why map portals don’t work”.)
It’s got the Silverlight requirement, and associated “loading” gadget.
It’s got the pop-up disclaimer dialogue.
And it’s got the menu of all available layers.
It’s also got a task-oriented attempt to match usage to users, a good attempt, marred somewhat with GIS terminology (“identify”, anyone?).
Most of the data is already on the city open data site except the aerial photography. The only positive I can see is that the site is built with local technology.
Anyhow, now that we have a “new shiny”, I hope the City follows up and keeps track of who uses it and how, and changes appropriately. I’ve long noted the popularity of the CRD online atlas (Capital Regional District), another “portal par excellance”, but even my limited sampling has turned up a 100% use case of “viewing the hi-res imagery and parcel outlines” – the rest of it could be thrown out, or hidden in a file drawer somewhere.
Keeping metrics and honestly evaluating the utility of the site are important next steps, and not being beholden to the all-in-one framework are important. The site is probably not being used for what you think it is, and your users might be better served not with one big slow map, but several small fast ones.
But you won’t know unless you keep track of:
- Usage patterns day by day, hour by hour, region by region
- Usage of layers, which are popular and when
- Usage of features, which are often used, which are never used
- Usage of locality, where do people look most often, and at what layers
With that information in hand, the one big map can be taken apart into pieces that address the actual needs of users as efficiently as possible.
