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IBM is one of the go-to partners for outsourcing tasks of the Australian government, and it's usually a dumpster fire. - 2016. Australia decided to run a censu

IBM is one of the go-to partners for outsourcing tasks of the Australian government, and it's usually a dumpster fire. - 2016. Australia decided to run a census, population wide (~22 million people), all online. If you didn't enter your stuff you risked a fine. You had one day to get a good 'snapshot'. The service, built by IBM, went down immediately. 'Census outage could have been prevented by turning router on and off again: IBM' http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and-on-could-have-prevented-census-outage/7963916 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and... 'IBM to pay more than $30m in compensation for census fail, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull suggests' http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-in-compensation-for-census-fail/8057240 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-i... (Have they done this? I don't think so) They said it was an 'overseas DDOS' but there is no proof for that, personally I think it was Australians accessing the page from overseas. Interestingly, this is not on IBM's Wikipedia page. - In Queensland, IBM borked the rollout of a new health payroll system so extremely that the state premier banned the state from outsourcing to IBM (and that was before the census catastrophe!!) >The commission, headed by former supreme court judge Richard Chesterman, tied a number of IBM employees working on the contract bid to serious ethical transgressions, including using leaked information about competitors to gain advantage and attempting to access tender responses by opposing bidders Logica and Accenture. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-420969 https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-... In the end, the state had to carry the costs (1.2 billion) https://www.itnews.com.au/news/qld-health-ibm-payroll-court-battle-officially-over-417921 https://www.itnews.com.au/news/qld-health-ibm-payroll-court-... It was supposed to cost less than 10 million. This is also not on IBM's Wikipedia page.

piva00 8y ago
What? $ 1.2 billion for a failed project that in 2010 Queensland's government gave IBM a waiver? This is blatantly corrupt, why the fuck would a government give a company a waiver from their contractual responsibilities on a failed project? That's utterly insane.
- easytiger 8y ago
  If the project fails then the people who commissioned the project would be at fault, therefore these things rarely truly are considered failures
  - jacobush 8y ago
    "We learned a lot along the way."
martinwww 8y ago
It's everywhere the same story. In Czech Republic IBM has implemented quite a lot IT projects for government. Just for example : There's software for tax management of whole country which is running on mainframes from 1992, it was written in Informix 4GL language there's only GUI is MS-DOS based terminal. all officials need to work with that system. Of course it was fine 15 years ago but from that time we had quite a lot changes in tax system, many new conditions has been addad and in the result we have unstable deprecated software where maintainability is nowadays near to ZERO. There are currently no people who knows how it works and who knows Informix 4GL language in 2018... After few years it will be probably replaced but cost of new project will astronomical (...of course). I am not blaming purely IBM, quite often government officials are incompetent when it comes to software project planning.

piva00 8y ago

What? $ 1.2 billion for a failed project that in 2010 Queensland's government gave IBM a waiver? This is blatantly corrupt, why the fuck would a government give a company a waiver from their contractual responsibilities on a failed project? That's utterly insane.

easytiger 8y ago
If the project fails then the people who commissioned the project would be at fault, therefore these things rarely truly are considered failures
- jacobush 8y ago
  "We learned a lot along the way."

martinwww 8y ago

It's everywhere the same story. In Czech Republic IBM has implemented quite a lot IT projects for government. Just for example : There's software for tax management of whole country which is running on mainframes from 1992, it was written in Informix 4GL language there's only GUI is MS-DOS based terminal. all officials need to work with that system. Of course it was fine 15 years ago but from that time we had quite a lot changes in tax system, many new conditions has been addad and in the result we have unstable deprecated software where maintainability is nowadays near to ZERO. There are currently no people who knows how it works and who knows Informix 4GL language in 2018... After few years it will be probably replaced but cost of new project will astronomical (...of course). I am not blaming purely IBM, quite often government officials are incompetent when it comes to software project planning.