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Baltimore police will pay consultant $176k to maintain Lotus Notes system
- denysonique 8y agoTrying to access the site from UK: Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y agoGot same in Austria
- copperx 8y agoI could get in with no problems from the EU. http://www.cnciweb.com/index.html http://www.cnciweb.com/index.html
- Max_Mustermann 8y agoThey are talking about the Baltimore Sun website.
- HumanDrivenDev 8y agoUse a VPN.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sctb 8y ago> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mikeash 8y agoTwo years of support for $176,800? What a bargain! As long as this old system gets the job done it seems like an extremely cheap way to go.
- linkmotif 8y agoSeriously. This is an epic installation: > Officers tap into its databases to track criminal investigations, check arrest data, log ballistic test results and identify “troubled officers,” along with various other uses. There are millions of records and roughly 150 databases built into the system, each designed to address different unit and personnel needs. I also enjoy how baltimoresun.com totally defeats uBlock Origin and brings my computer to its knees. http://archive.is/QZ3q9 http://archive.is/QZ3q9
- ekovarski 8y ago... but then the next paragraph paints a different pictuere, """ It found that the “siloed nature” of the Lotus Notes databases made it difficult for officers to match, verify or search for information. It also found that various systems may contain conflicting information about the same case, or may not reflect the most complete information. Downloading or querying data is made “difficult, if not impossible” because it isn’t inputted in a standard way across databases. """ The contract was awarded to the initial company that built out the holistic platform in 1996 so you've got to wonder how much it has cost them over the last 22yrs.
- MrEfficiency 8y agoThis kind of legacy stuff makes my stomach turn.
- megaman22 8y agoCalling this a "system" or "platform" is probably being very generous. It sounds like a very loosely related glom of Domino databases that grew up organically, probably with a little custom UI sprinkled on top. Notes can be infamous for that kind of thing, worse than Excel even, since it is more powerful...
- eerikkivistik 8y agoIf anyone could provide a summary, seems GDPR has really made it hard for some outlets to render text (editors note: this was meant as a light-hearted joke, not ignorance) Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
- oh_sigh 8y agoOr they didn't think it worth it to rewrite their app to selectively allow enabling or disabling of features based on geographic region
- eerikkivistik 8y agoYeah, I said it in jest, have rewritten software myself for the same reason, it is an undertaking.
- briandear 8y agoAre people in those other regions providing revenue? If not, then why should they make their content available in those places?
- genericid 8y agoSo their content is available in those places.
- gk1 8y agoGDPR;DR - The Baltimore Police Department has been using Lotus Notes for internal communication and data storage since 1996. It's also been contracting the same IT consulting company since 1996. Some say the system is obsolete and question the decision to renew the support contract, but the IT consultant insists it's working beautifully. The BPD says they will move to a new system, and will roll out a plan in December, but in the meantime they have to maintain what's in place.
- CodesInChaos 8y agohttp://archive.is/QZ3q9 http://archive.is/QZ3q9
- raesene9 8y agota Codes
- lightbyte 8y agoHow does one go about getting contracts like these with the government to do trivial tasks for exorbitant amounts of money?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jonknee 8y agoWhat trivial task? Maintaining a very large legacy system for something as important as a police force sounds like a very difficult task. All this for the price of one cop sounds like a bargain.
- bena 8y agoI wouldn't say the task is "very difficult" either. The task is probably no more or less difficult than maintaining the inventory system for a store. The cost and job security comes from the fact that you have to do it in Lotus Notes.
- jonknee 8y agoIf you screw up and a store is out of X it doesn't matter to anyone but the owners of the store. If you screw up the police databases someone can die, evidence can be lost, all sorts of awful results. It's a much, much, bigger deal.
- bena 8y agoFirst of all, if you screw up and say something is in stock when it's out and that thing is critical to someone's life, someone could die. Even with mismanagement of an inventory system. So let's not descend into "but lives are at stake" hyperbole. The vast majority of the database are fines and tickets. And it's likely a lot of this stuff is duplicated elsewhere. If the police have a warrant for someone's arrest, that warrant is also on file at the courthouse where it was issued. If they booked a suspect and he went to county jail, the county jail has that information. If the entire evidence log is wiped out, all of the necessary information is written on the bags. There is a ton of redundancy both intentional and accidental built into law enforcement. No one is dying because you need to restore the database from a back up because Larry deleted the database again. And even still. Even if the consequences are that much dire, the work is the same. There is nothing special about the data that makes it any more or less difficult to store.
- Ftuuky 8y agoBNP Paribas still used Lotus Notes in some departments. And every year it pays a lot of money to COBOL consultants as well.
- daanlo 8y agoThe highest margin software consultancy I ever saw was specialized in maintaining legacy sw applications, running on setups that were popular in the late 80s and early 90s. A little niche, but extremely high margin.
- nwsm 8y agoI work at a company where one group in IT makes AngularJS apps, another writes industry machine learning models, and a few others are using Lotus Notes. People will use what works
- russtrpkovski 8y agoHelluva deal for the Baltimore police!
- chadash 8y agoSummary for those in EU: The Baltimore police department uses Lotus Notes software for keeping track of cases. > Officers tap into its databases to track criminal investigations, check arrest data, log ballistic test results and identify “troubled officers,” along with various other uses. There are millions of records and roughly 150 databases built into the system, each designed to address different unit and personnel needs. They started using LN in 1996. Now, all of their stuff is built on top of it and it's hard to switch. So they are paying $177K for the next two years of software support. Summary over. Question of mine: is this a particularly high rate for two years of support for an entire police department? I can't imagine there are many specialists out there who know how to support lotus notes, let alone all of the custom data they have layered on top of it. And it seems like it would be a reasonable amount of work to maintain.
- jandrese 8y agoFor an enterprise support contract of that size it's dirt cheap. Try to build a system with 150 databases on a cloud provider or using your own cluster and you'll spend way more than that. VMWare licenses alone would blow that figure away if you rebuilt it in a modern style. If you were crazy enough to spec Oracle for those databases then it would be many times that cost per year.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoVMWare and Oracle in the cloud? "Out of the frying pan, and in to the fire."
- toomuchtodo 8y agoNo different than Lambda and Aurora. Never marry yourself to the vendor.
- scarface74 8y agoYou’re always married to your infrastructure. That’s like developers writing “repository classes” just in case one day they want to switch from Oracle.... Statistically no one ever switches out their architecture. The risk is to great, the reward is too small, and the number of potential regressions is too high. How did all of those people who wrote thier website with Angular 1 fare?
- manav 8y agoIsn't it still alive as IBM Notes?
- v-erne 8y agoYeah it is. Some india based IT Sweat Schop (HCL) bought it and they are going to add node.js integration to it to make it look modern :)
- ekovarski 8y ago""" The consultant is charged with system upkeep until the department finishes crafting “a 21st century holistic technology platform,” he said. The final technology plan will be delivered to the court on Dec.1.""" crafting? holistic? platform? 21st century? Hmm, me thinks this "platform" is doomed from the onset if you plan on crafting a holistic platform plan by Dec 1, 2018 after still running a system crafted 22yrs ago.
- redisman 8y agoThis "holistic" platform is the one that'll end up costing 20M when the Lotus Notes thing would've worked fine
- ekovarski 8y agoHolistic at 20m? Canada tried to bring to the table a holistic payroll system, known as phoenix, which cost them 1b before they decided to scrap it. :)
- NikolaNovak 8y agoFWIW, there's nothing "holistic" about Phoenix - it is centralized payroll (same as Regional Pay System it replaces), but the HR is completely distributed amongst departments (running PeopleSoft, SAP, legacy or bespoke apps of various natures and kinds), and Pension, central index, etc are various separate monolithic applications as well. A very large percentage of problems can in principle be traced to the fact it is the very opposite of holistic system (note, I am in no way claiming that consolidating disparate HR systems into one, enforcing data cleanliness, and creating a "holistic" system could be done before heat death of the universe, for sum of money less than totality of our GDP, and resulting in anything else than chaos, confusion and disorder... just clarifying Phoenix was emphatically not an attempt to create such a "holistic" system :)
- ekovarski 8y agoLOL - It was more tongue in cheek but you are right, Phoenix, wasn't an attempt to create a holistic system. Usually when I hear projects being spun as "holistic" it means to me that folks haven't done any basic groundwork yet on the requirements and its simply the pie in the sky approach to apps, we want it all in <12mos for half the cost.
- alexc05 8y agoI was thinking that it sounded a bit high but OK for a 1 year contract, but when I read the article turns out it's over 2 years. At $88k per year that's totally fair.
- steego 8y ago> I was thinking that it sounded a bit high but OK for a 1 year contract If you think that's expensive, you really have no idea what other organizations spend on IT projects. Do you have any idea how much the NYPD spends in IT? I once interviewed a Dev Team Leader who worked at the NYPD. Based on the projects he worked on, I can easily say they spend magnitudes more than Baltimore PD, but they also have a much wider range of systems.
- cl0ckt0wer 8y agoDid anyone click the link to gaze on the vendor's beautiful website? http://www.cnciweb.com/index.html http://www.cnciweb.com/index.html
- thedancollins 8y agoWhere is the "e-mail message going around the globe" gif and the "made in FrontPage '95" banner?
- pavel_lishin 8y agoDon't forget "under construction", and the hand exploding out of the page through torn paper.
- bitwize 8y agoOr the "Uniracers arrow".
- mipmap04 8y agoI bet it's super reliable.
- bena 8y ago"Custom programming is also available in most of the latest languages including Lotus Notes, Access, Visual Basic.NET and C++." "We had a guy who installed Visual C++ by mistake once"
- rayiner 8y agoStill better than Engadget's website.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoHey, if their major selling point is being able to support a system that the police department has been using for 20 years, that website looks just fine.
- LarryDarrell 8y agoI can't wait to see what the ancient systems that need support in 30 years will be.
- throwaway_bmore 8y agohttps://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/06/baltimore-police-study-mandated-by-feds-finds-massive-tech-fails/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/06/balti... Some context
- ChuckMcM 8y agoOne of the things I do not miss in the slightest from my time working at IBM was their use of Lotus Notes databases all through the processes they used in finance. In hindsight it is a text book example of a tool that gives the installation great freedom in customizing and tailoring the system to their needs, but provides very little in terms of configuration management or evolved system visibility. What really surprises me though is that IBM doesn't have a tool for extracting the resulting system out of Lotus notes and putting into something else. They could have used it internally to modernize their finance systems, and they could sell such a tool to the consultants who would bid on modernizing the police department's systems. I think the complaining about the $176K as an expense is silly (its pretty cheap) the complaint that they aren't investing in modernization is more critical. In terms of ways to change the world with software, these sorts of business process systems are a place where there is always room for improvement it seems.
- slantyyz 8y agoAt some point, didn't IBM move Domino to a DB2 back end? I would think moving data off of an RDBMS like DB2 would be easier than the legacy Domino engine. I remember there being an Notes-ODBC driver, but I don't remember if it was any good.
- v-erne 8y agoThree was a brief moment when this was a thing. But it really did not catch on. They deprecated this feature few years ago (by deprecate I mean the "IBM deprecate" which is ignoring feature in future releases so maybe people will forget about it). Data is not the problem here - it always was the hakish way most notes app was created. How can any consultant / it dep. keep up when there are hundrets of apps done without any prior design by "Citizen" developers.
- dougmwne 8y agoClickbait title. The article itself seems mostly positive, rational, and informative but the poor citizens of Baltimore are getting squeezed for ad dollars instead of being kept properly informed about local events. This is a nonstory and the journalist knows it. Baltimore PD is getting a great deal supporting their legacy IT while they convert to a modern system that will no doubt cost many times more to purchase, integrate and maintain. At just $44/hr the consultant is being underpaid for the area if they're full time 1099.
- walshemj 8y agoThat's only just over 20% premium to the fulltime UK salary I could get in London which pays a lot less for developers than the USA does. A average contractor in London would be making about $160k
- mywittyname 8y agoThe contract is for two years. So it's actually a 10% discount.
- disillusioned 8y agoWell, in three years when the headline is "Baltimore police pay $240M for failed Lotus Notes migration," then I'll click. But sometimes maintaining the legacy system is the lesser of evils, especially in government systems. We built a custom management system for a state agency here 10 years ago. The state still pays us around $40k/year in associated improvements, changes based on new legislation, reports, etc. Far less than paying $1M-$2M to rebuild the thing, or more. Total cost of ownership for the system is ridiculously low, all things considered. And yeah, it's written on some old crufty PHP, but it still does the job and they use it every day.
- rhizome 8y agoThis thread is hilarious in how many people apparently have blinkers on about the "find a need and fill it" advice that populates every BizDev-oriented thread here. It makes me wonder how many have any experience in software maintenance.
- icebraining 8y agoWhat comments are you taking about?
- rhizome 8y agoThe ones implying, "gawd, why does this kind of business even exist?"
- sonofblah 8y agoThis article is irresponsibly written, because the two-year term is buried in its middle. The headline reads "will pay consultant $176,800," which will be parsed as "per year" by, what, 99.9% of readers? The first sentence is no better: "pay $176,800 to a computer software consultant." As others have mentioned, this is almost certainly a bargain--I can't imagine any new system being quoted without a price of 'millions.'
- j45 8y agoI suspect no one 8nderstands the cost of building and maintain gig software past 10 years. Some problems have been around longer than most developers who want to rebuild every 3 years. Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino were among the original mobile, offline first business apps.
- wallflower 8y agoOT - Someone smart once said that Lotus Notes was an email/groupware app wrapped around one heck of a robust sync engine. As an even more OT comment, I always loved the password entry box for Lotus Notes. When you typed in your password, it would do a simple animation of cycling through hieroglyphic symbols.
- justboxing 8y agoWhat's OT? [ Please don't dismissively downvote. Google search for OT yields a wide variety of expansions, none of which seem to explain this abbreviation. https://www.google.com/search?q=OT https://www.google.com/search?q=OT ]
- hutzlibu 8y agooff topic ... Welcome to the Internet, stranger.
- openasocket 8y agoIt stands for "off topic"
- EADGBE 8y agoThe same sort of reasoning behind my Java web apps interfacing with a database system that doesn't understand booleans; and needing to interface through RPG programs in order to actually get any business logic done. As a web developer, it makes me scream sometimes. I get it (somewhat), but I still want to scream.
- MithrilTuxedo 8y agoGiven the number of FOSS hospital management systems out there, are there no similar attempts to create FOSS software for the common government problem of law enforcement? Some of our Federal agencies might be able to help with this, saving state and local agencies buckets of money over their various bespoke solutions.
- nwsm 8y agoIf you go with name brand software, you can find someone to support it 20 years later. I doubt the same is true with most FOSS
- saagarjha 8y agoIt's kind of sad that so much information is stuck in proprietary systems that need to be continually maintained, even if the original vendor of the software has left. With something open usually there'd be a quick and easy way to migrate all the data off of the platform to something newer when necessary.
- fencepost 8y agoAre you under the impression that rebuilding the whole thing on any of the popular development options currently available would result in lower maintenance costs? Or a more open system? Let's say they rebuild it with a Ruby backend (or maybe Go? That's trendy these days), a bunch of React (or vue, or maybe whatever's current for Angular), Postgres (or MariaDB, maybe Oracle's MySQL, maybe even Mongo), maybe throw it on some Linux boxes with Apache. In 20 years that's all going to sound like "We built it on Notes and now pay $7500/month in maintenance and update costs" along with everything that'll happen in between when ECMAScript 10 deprecates a bunch of language features. Could it be better? Absolutely. Should the current system be kept and extended? Heck no. Is data migration a significant issue? Only in that it's a very complex system with a huge range of different types of structured data. They have programmatic access to the raw data, dumping it out is logistics.
- saagarjha 8y agoI meant open as in not proprietary. It's a lot easier to migrate an SQL database than a Lotus one, because one is open and people have written code to allow data to be exported.
- v-erne 8y agoActually its not true - notes (or rather domino) data metamodel is really simple (except for rich text maybe). The real problem is lack of schema which ecourages people who dont know better to build horrendous things. And if there is no schema and no documentation then is it really notes fault that migration is sisiphus work?
- bcheung 8y agoAm I missing something? Seems like a fairly mundane and common occurrence of hiring a tech worker. How is this newsworthy?
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y agoI think a Wire rewatch binge is in order...
- scarface74 8y agoI have a “it’s not going to help my resume” premium for any technology that doesn’t help me get my next job. I also have a slight “I’m going to learn a technology that will help keep me marketable” discount.
- scriber 8y agoUnfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
- PaulHoule 8y agoAs old as Lotus Notes is, I don't think anything quite like it has come on the market since.
- mr_toad 8y agoMost organisations seem to stumble around using a combination of unstructured Word documents, file systems and email. When they find themselves totally at a loss they’ll try and shove the whole mess into a document management system, but a combination of unstructured documents and organisational inertia means it usually does more harm than good. There’s SharePoint, but that’s best avoided. Some places, with a bit more technical skill use wikis, and issue tracking systems like Jira, but even they aren’t quite what Notes was in its heyday. I sometimes wonder why there isn’t a compelling successor to Notes built on CouchDB.
- chid 8y agoI wonder why you say that SharePoint should be avoided. I get that for small businesses it's a lot of administration to worry about (and ties them to using Microsoft software) - however they can use O365. What features would make a compelling successor that SharePoint doesn't (and what are even alternatives?)
- chrisdhoover 8y agoIt could be worse. 10 years ago the California judiciary spent over $2 billion for a case management system that never worked.
- theshadowknows 8y agoNotes and Domino are actually fairly capable from my understanding. We used it until very recently to support hundreds of retail locations, thousands of in house applications, and corporate mail services. IT has been slow long replacing it over a couple of years but it was working well. The email and messaging part is fine, it’s really the calendaring part that was giving us the most grief.