And again, it’s this kind of very expensie debacle that should encourage governments to consider being forward thinking – would have saved them (and that’s us, the tax payers) about a billion dollars in this case…

It doesn’t happen. Graduate learns his stuff, then leaves to higher pay elsewhere. Rather than bring someone in asap to learn the process, government waits till 2 weeks after the admin has left before trying to fill the position. Then that person gets thrown in the deep end, becomes really good at what they do through pure trial and error, and then gets a job elsewhere for higher pay. Rinse and Repeat.

Add fortran to that list too.

I’m guessing you meant that IBM are number *one* in mainframes… Actually, they are numbers 2, 3, 4 etc also, since the demise of the hitachi plug compatible system z machines, the last of their kind.

And I think you need to check your facts about the cost of a Cobol programmer – if I could make serious money writing Cobol, I would. I presently teach people Cobol at university part time to help meet this burgeoning need as older IT workers retire – Cobol is childs play to learn compared with Java or Dot.Net.

People without experience of these environments have no idea just how much is saved by NOT having to throw away your hardware and software every life cycle of an application – and that’s why these environments are still being used in commercially run places like banks. Only Government can afford to throw a billion dollars at something and not have it work!

Sorry but I just laughed when I saw that! Who is number in Mainframes ……. IBM, that’s who and their latest generation “System Z” machine is pretty damned spectacular!

Btw, supporting legacy mainframe apps can be frighteningly expensive, especially seeing as they are usually written in cobol and cobol programmers are worth their weight in Diamonds!

That’s pretty much the issue. It’s all well and good developing in-house solutions, as long as the intent is to always maintain. Which leads to the next concern; the issue of long-term support. What happens when the entire brains trust for that solution has left, or retired?

The answers are never good.

Solutions are changed because it often comes down to the cost of maintenance. Software is no different in that respect. Try calling Microsoft for support on Windows 3.1. It wasn’t that bad at the time.. still perfectly workable now, right?

It’s debacles like this, and I can name many of them, that make an obvious lie of the entire rationalisation of outsourcing, deskilling and core compentencies that has occured in almost all facets of in-house IT support organisations in the past quarter century.

Commercial Off the Shelf Software (COTS – heck, they even made an acronym for it!) does not always equate to ‘better’ – and this project serves as another good example of how true this is.

Sorry, I didn’t get past that ;) How the hell are you supposed to support this kind of thing in a decade???

Reason for replacement? ‘Old technology’, ‘not cost effective’, ‘hard to find staff with knowledge of how to maintain and upgrade it’, and at a last resort, let’s not use the ‘m’ word in a modern, progressive, IT culture – the mainframe… Yes, at the end of the day, QLD Government threw away a working peice of technology for dubious reasons to replace it with something hundreds of times more expensive that does not even work yet.

And they try and tell us that mainframes are the expensive dinosaurs of IT, simply unbelievable what some people will swallow given enough sales pressure…

You really CAN get sacked for buying IBM.

IBM is more than just a vendor, they offer consulting, handholding, integration, and all manner of services, so I think we might say they carry at least some of the responsibility. That said, governments are very difficult to deal with, and the Qld under the ALP managed some uniquely bad stuff-ups like management of Wivenhoe Dam, and then needing to restart enquiry into why they couldn’t manage the dam.

I believe they even had an existing fully working system to measure up against; so they were not breaking any new ground as far as any algorithms or data capture goes. Please correct me if I’m wrong on that.

In-house verses Vendor/ External really has almost zero influence as long as communication lines are maintained.

It’s understanding a project, understanding the stated (and often unstated) intent and delivering to that. Things can go just as horribly wrong in-house as external. It’s a lovely myth that it “never happens” in-house – forever perpetuated, it seems.

I’d agree with that at a management level, most of the good public service IT managers end up going commercial, while the ones that can’t cut it there stay.

I don’t agree with your comment at a staff level though, usually they get good training and while the pay isn’t as good as commercial, the super, Flexible Work Year arrangements and a bunch of other stuff make it a “Lifestyle” issue more than a “More Dollars” decision.

Unless they communicate and understand how X can become Y, no-one will end up happy. That’s a lot harder than people assume. Always.

The rationale for SSI was pursuit of “economies of scale” achieved by reducing duplication and delivering standardisation etc etc. So, Qld Health offloads a working specialist payroll system provided by a Qld IT company originally called Concept Systems now Talent2 and replaces it with a “I couldn’t care less” multinational giants SAP and IBM. What do reckon is going to happen?