Mary Fisher wrote:

And the entries will be run not only by public-spirited people, but by
contractors on minimum wage - maybe some offshour outsourced workers too -
whose immediate goals are about meeting their supervisor-set targets on
'number of cases dealt with per hour', because that's easy to measure;
while 'accuracy', 'quality', 'right first time' are harder to measure - so
aren't in most data-entry shops.


Will they? You know that? How?

Because big IT projects of this nature are only procured by government
and not run by it. They will accept tenders for the work from the usual
suspects. They will award contracts for the one with the most convincing
pitch (big buzzwords, snazzy sounding high tech stuff that must be
really good because it says so), and with the lowest price (as they
always do).

This lowest price is achieved in several ways, firstly by resourcing and
staffing the project for the lowest possible cost (i.e. buying data
processing support from outsourcing centre's in Bangalore etc), and more
importantly by "out lawyering" the government such that the "fixed
price" quoted is only a starting point that is then built up from each
time the government deviates from what they thought they wanted at the
outset. This is how your 3bn budget will rise to 10 and more. How do I
know that? Because that is exactly what has happened with every major IT
project to date, and the government seem resistant to learning that lesson.


--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/