30 Jun 2014
One morning this winter, while I was sipping my coffee at the cafe below our office, a well-dressed man and woman sat down at the table next to me, and started talking. Turns out, they were my favourite kind of people — IT people! They were going to bid on the Integrated Decision Making project, and were talking about my favourite systems integrator, Deloitte.
“Is Deloitte trying to bring ICM and Siebel into this project?” she asked.
“No, not anymore” he replied “now they are really pushing SalesForce.com.”
Now this was interesting! Chastened by their failure to shoehorn social services case management into a CRM, Deloitte has adroitly pivoted and is trying to shoehorn natural resource permitting into … a cloud CRM.
(I should parenthetically point out that, unsurprisingly, the SALES people in our company find SALESforce.com very useful in coordinating and tracking their SALES activities.)
Certainly pushing a platform that is actually growing in usage makes more sense than pushing one that end-of-lifed a decade ago, but still, again with the CRM?
Deloitte isn’t being coy with their plans, they are selling them to the highest levels of the government. On October 7, 2013, the BC CIO spent two and a half hours enjoying the hospitality of Deloitte and Salesforce.com at a “BC government executive luncheon” on the topic “Innovation, Transformation and Cloud Computing in the Public Sector”.
And there’s another wrinkle. SF.com is a US-based cloud service provider, and our Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPPA) says that personal data must be stored in Canada. SF.com is also a US legal entity, which means they are subject to the PATRIOT Act which allows authorities to access personal data without notifying the subject of the search. That is also not allowed by BC’s FOIPPA.
What is an ambitious system integrator with a hammer suitable for every nail to do? Not change hammers! That would be silly. Far better to try and get an exemption or figure out a workaround. Workarounds add nice juicy extra complexity to the hammer, which can only help billable hours.
More on the workaround, tomorrow.
24 Jun 2014
FME was one of the first geospatial tools I learned at the start of my career, back in the mid-90s, and getting invited to keynote the quintennial FME Users Conference this year was quite an honour, so I wrote up a special keynote just for them.
23 Jun 2014
And when is it something more?
Every year, I report on the progress of IT outsourcing in BC (news flash: it keeps going up, 2011, 2012, 2013) and marvel at the sums we lavish on international consultancies, fees that largely march offshore, generating no local innovation or economic growth.
Last fall, I came across a news release from the Ministry of Health, describing a $842 MILLION “Clinical and Systems Transformation Project”. I now realize, I’ve not been tracking a significant seam of IT spending: the systems being commissioned by the five regional health authorities and their central services arm, the Provincial Health Services Authority.
Indeed, a quick perusal of the 2012/13 PHSA suppliers list shows a $50M spend on IBM, and an $11M spend on HP in just one year. That’s enough to change my annual spending tracker quite a bit!
So, IBM won the new “Clinical and Systems Transformation Project”, worth $842 MILLION over 10 years, I wonder what that RFP looked like? I asked for it, and was refused, so I FOI’ed it, and it came back. It’s 500 pages long. Have a look.
Fun sidebar: On page 186, in the “economic model” of the RFP, they direct that “proponents are to include 4% growth per year in infrastructure (e.g. storage capacity, network bandwidth, processing capacity, etc.) needs over the Term.” Any readers see a problem modelling IT capacity requirements at 4% growth per year over 10 years? Hint: A 2003 iMac shipped with 256Mb RAM; a 2013 iMac ships with 8Gb RAM: that’s 32 times more capacity. 4% compounding over 10 years generates only a 50% increase in capacity over a decade. Think those terms will need to be renegotiated?
It’s a long read, but fortunately there’s a really interesting bit right away, in the Mandatory Requirements:
Proponent is willing and able to transition any Public Sector union agreements relevant to the Managed Services to their organization, if required
Whoa! This isn’t just an IT systems agreement after all, it’s an outsourcing deal.
The government seems to have learned little from the experience of BC Hydro outsourcing to Accenture or Medical Services Plan to Maximus, or from reports by the Auditor General, or even their own consultants who reviewed outsourcing from 2001-2010 and noted that:
- Contracts were structured towards a specific solution or specific outputs rather than a desired outcome
- Contracts were negotiated in isolation gave the same scope of services to multiple vendors
- The procurement process resulted in contracts that while defined, are no longer what is required
- Risk transfer objectives were not met
- There was no consolidated vendor management
- There was no central management of the deals or the benefits achieved
The “Alternative Service Delivery Secretariat” wound down in 2010, but the government is still hard at it, now quietly preparing to outsource the clinical systems of three health authorities to IBM, for $84M a year over 10 years. Significant portions of critical government operations are being transferred beyond direct government control for very long periods of time.
Perhaps the managers who pushed this solution didn’t trust their own staff, or themselves, to successfully bring an ambitious project to conclusion. They didn’t want to “take the risk” so they took the “safe” option. They need to spend some time behind the velvet curtain in organizations like IBM or Accenture: the only results that matter to those organizations are the quarterly results.
There will be some good people in them, and some bad ones, but the level of competence or capability won’t be orders of magnitude better than you could build yourself in-house. And as organization, as corporations, they have only one bottom line, and it’s theirs, not ours.
17 Jun 2014
Once, when I still had the energy, I was reading an Open Geospatial Consortium specification document, and found an inconsistency between a directive stated in the text, and the examples provided to illustrate the directive. This seemed pretty important, since most “Humans” use the examples and ignore the text, so I raised it with the author, who replied to me:
“Examples are not normative”
To me, this seemed to summarize in four words everything there was to dislike about the standards community: dismissive, self-referential (“normative”? really?), and unconcerned with real-world practice. One of the reasons I no longer have the energy.
08 Jun 2014
Here’s a talk I gave on innovation and components at the National Association of Broadcasters this spring.
Download MP4.
