Natural Resource Sector goes Over the Waterfall

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…