There's a dimension left out here on the Phoenix disaster: It wasn't really IBM's fault at all.<p>The Canadian public service is really complex. There are multiple unions with multiple overlapping collective bargaining agreements, where the public service is allocated to different classes. These classes are paid specific rates, with retroactive pay being common for changing classes. The majority of the problems with Phoenix have been employees moving from their classes and being paid the correct amount. It has also adversely affected non-unionized positions.<p>My understanding is that the Harper government (Prime Minister until 2015), who was responsible for the negotiation and for laying out the requirements, was trying to save a money and not responibly create a pay system. Two major factors that jump out at me:<p>1) Requirements did not call for training. The system was implemented and IBM was not required to train any operators on how the system functions, which is important because all new staff were hired to run the system and,<p>2) Due to the need for cost saving measures (the government was trying <i>really hard</i> to balance the budget, as the election was coming up), the previous payroll staff were <i>terminated</i> and a new payroll centre was opened in Miramichi, which is a small town in the middle of nowhere.<p>So, on top of new software, the government lost all of its institutional knowledge regarding payroll and how things are supposed to work. It's actually hard to say how much of this is IBM's fault and how much is the governments, because the government <i>doesn't know</i> how to fix it. No one knows how Phoenix works and no one knows how it is supposed to work. It's just a big mess with no end in sight.<p>Could IBM have done a better job? Probably, but garbage in, garbage out.<p>For further reading, the Auditor-General's report: <a href="http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201711_01_e_42666.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201711_01...</a>
12 years ago some guy had the courage to report this predatory activity in Kuro5hin<p>"How IBM Conned My Execs Out Of Millions"
<a href="http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2005_9_27_95759_4240.html" rel="nofollow">http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2005_9_27_95759_4240.html</a> (cache)<p>I remember the guy was harassed by IBM lawyers and even lost his job.
These stories of failure, but skew the reader simply because there are very few companies that can bid on and attempt to manage projects of this scale. This article could easily be written to focus on the failure of sweeping, enormous, poorly-thought out projects that suffer changing visions and scope, rotating project managers, and evolving systems ... that IBM happens to bid on and execute poorly.<p>Small projects are better focused, cost less, are easier to understand, and therefore succeed more frequently (or fail more silently). It's big projects, frequently proposed and conceived by governments or enormous industrial conglomerates that are poorly thought-out, improperly managed, and suffer the worst of project management incompetence or hubris/excess. But who bids on that kind of project? Big companies like IBM. Let's be fair, they don't just bid on them, they also coax them into being, but my point stands: if you want to fail big, you've got to dream big. This isn't a defense of IBM, who deserves to own the shame of talking big but being unable to actually deliver. But it is a reminder that the project designers get equal blame for these sweeping, grandiose, visionary catastrophes.
As someone who used to work in/on/underneath websphere. I can tell you I am loathe to even consider anything IBM. I was almost recruited by them and then I recalled how miserable I was on one particular project. The money was good but I said no. I recommend everyone I mean to stay away from IBM and Oracle as best I can. I just don't think the line between open source and enterprise is crystal clear anymore.
Well, this news that came out last year is somewhat relevant. MD Anderson Cancer Center's IBM Watson project failed, with $62 million paid to IBM and PwC for essentially no results. However, I don't blame IBM, I blame people who dove in without clearly thinking it through. <a href="https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-cancer-centers-ibm-watson-project-fails-journalism-related/" rel="nofollow">https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-cancer-...</a>
This is an interesting narrative. However it cannot be the only one. Let us explore some alternatives and side notes.<p>Who was responsible for picking IBM?
Are they still working for the CA gov?
Have they passed the hot potato to someone else?
How were their technical skills and soft skills evaluated?
Did they receive any donations for the contract?
Where are the safety clauses in the contract?
Is IBM the only benefactor of this contract?
Any political implications?<p>Remember that Gov. point person also bears a lot of the responsibility for shopping for IT services in a magazine or trough their business network.<p>If IBM has been so ineffective at delivering services there would be more cases like this and it would ultimately hurt their bottom line. If this was wide spread practice across their business units. Maybe their business as a whole is insulated by the other better performing parts of it's corporation.<p>It seems to me that these "Governments" should investigate anyone who touched these contracts.<p>To the widespread corruption present in Eastern Europe. It does exist. However this article goes to show that corruption is present at a larger scale in some of the "most" developed nations on earth.
I you think this is an 'IBM' only problem, you're in for a surprise. I've worked on very large projects with other very large service companies, and the experience is very much alike.<p>From day one the client company gets swamped by an army of vendor analysts, the prime reason for this is to establish that it is the clients fault the project will fail as they couldn't respond to requests for information fast enough. Any information you manage to supply will be scrutinized for 'discovery' of 'change requests' to pad the meters and CYA.<p>Meanwhile, a 'technical specialist' room chock full of developers is installed to (a) put on extra time pressure and (b) start the billing engine in top gear. When you went into that room there were literally people sitting at desks watching the vendor's equivalent of CS 101 video courses.<p>Also, a team of lawyers is already preparing the documents for the 'settlement' in case of the (very likely) project failure.<p>All status information to the project's steering committee gets 'green shifted' until the supplier is ready to shift to litigation mode and then overnight the project's near unrecoverable disaster gets revealed alongside a proposed 'rescue' plan that is priced so ridiculously it makes the 'settlement' look cheap.<p>In the private sector these train-wrecks are often settled with non-publish clauses as making the press would make both parties look bad. In our case the supplier dropped a small percentage on the billing. The client was left with a room (literally) full of boxes of A4 'analysis' documents and 25M€ out of pocket. (this was in the financial industry, so it was basically pocket change)<p>All involved, both supplier side and customer side seem to have not suffered career wise from this disaster, moving swiftly to new clients and new projects.<p>P.S. Am I the only one that finds the author's sweeping generalizations of nationalities a bit in bad taste?
Does anyone else remember the days when "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was true? You might pay a little extra, but it was never a total fail to use IBM products.<p>I'm not sure when that changed, but I feel like these days, IBM is closer to Oracle than AWS.
Seems like a baseless article that is pulling fake facts out of thin air to supplement a couple of real ones like the cost basis and failures of large government projects.<p>It's not uncommon for large government projects to fail with all the bureaucracy and politics that is in play. I am not saying IBM is great, but this article is just not worth it.
IBM is a horrible vendor, but the author is obviously clueless about the levels of incompetence, irresponsibility and indecisiveness of the stakeholders on client side for this kind of projects. All governmens should simply always pick the cheapest vendor because 90% of their projects fail regardless of who the implementers are
I'm hesitant to just blame IBM and call it the day. What about the U.S. healthcare.gov website? Do we also blame CGI Federal and Accenture?<p>There's probably blame on both sides, but it seems nowadays that "it needs to be a roaring dumpster fire until we do things the right way". Unfortunately, either no one _in_ government seems competent to know that right way or be empowered enough to fight for it (maybe they've all left).
It's not just IBM: any of the larger enterprise consultancies should, at best, be regarded with suspicion. I well remember the EDS/UK Inland Revenue fiasco of the late nineties/early noughties, and there are plenty of other examples involving other big players.
I really didn't understand this piece. Did anyone else struggle to follow it from sentence to sentence?<p>Did this article really compare FreshBooks to the payroll needs of the Government of Canada? Whatt??
Wife worked for them as sales something, sometimes I saw the tools she had been using, couple of presentations - real nightmare fuel.<p>I remember once talking about how they (big blue) see Atlassian as a competitor and how they have to try harder to convince companies to use IBM products... the very moment someone replaced Jira with some IBM shit or Gmail Business or even Outlook with Lotus Notes I would quit.
All of the big consultancy firms are bodyshops in some sense. But in my experience IBM is truly one of the worst. And people still keep falling for it.
It's not just IBM. Dutch government IT projects also have a tendency to fail big, and those are handled by other companies. It seems governments are easy marks for mediocre IT companies.
Can anyone explain what's so complex about a "payroll system"?<p>Presumably you just have a table with people with salary, and every month you wire the money and record information about the wire or otherwise have a way to record when the person has taken cash.<p>You might want to have more complex rules for determining schedule and amount of salaries, and support for contractors, unpaid leave, taxes, etc. but that doesn't seem particulary complex either.<p>How can this possibly take more than 100 person-years (i.e. < $30 million) to make even a truly extravagant version of?<p>Not to mention that presumably such software already exists and could be used instead of writing a new one.<p>[obviously my explanation would be corruption, but I wonder if I miss something]
If you've never worked for a team responding to RFPs/RFIs for large projects then it's difficult to know what's mismanagement and what's "normal".<p>Generally you respond with a proposal that on the surface ticks ALL the boxes. Later you show the proposed product and state that all the missing parts will be implemented or altered during implementation.<p>You get a bunch of senior people or architects to estimate the work +/- 1000% (mostly for the time estimates). The difference between what is charged to the customer and the actual cost of the work is swallowed by the bidder with the idea that it will be gouged back during additional work that wasn't in the initial scope.<p>Then you present your proposal and if you win the bid you then try everything to make it profitable from that point on.<p>ps. None of this is compatible with agile.
Oh, but the con-census is that they did such a brilliant job in Australia!<p><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-in-compensation-for-census-fail/8057240" rel="nofollow">http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-i...</a><p><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and-on-could-have-prevented-census-outage/7963916" rel="nofollow">http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and...</a>
“IBM instead sold the Canadian government someone else's software (Oracle's Peoplesoft) on a sweetheart contract which did not require delivery of a working solution. Then IBM failed to successfully implement while taking payment all the way along.”<p>So they outsourced the work to Oracle which is known to churn out garbage. Also just a lot of blame shifting between garbage-quality companies.
Global American consultancies are paying 25-40k USD annually in post-Communist EU countries. The teams are run as little dictatures by the "directors" who are facing the outside world. What are you expecting to extract from such arrangement? BTW There is no place for IBM in Germany, they have their own three-letter named IT moloch.
> IBM instead sold the Canadian government someone else's software (Oracle's Peoplesoft) on a sweetheart contract which did not require delivery of a working solution.<p>Okay, so Canada signed a bad contract and didn't make IBM promise to delivery the goods.<p>> In cases like this in the past, the Canadian Government would just be able to tell IBM to deliver the goods as promised or IBM would be banned from doing business in Canada - effectively frozen.<p>But you just got done telling us that IBM <i>didn't</i> promise to deliver the goods.<p>> Under NAFTA and similar trade pacts, governments have lost all leverage and these sweetheart deals continue to be pushed through.<p>NAFTA and similar trade agreements neither require governments to sign contracts that don't require delivery of working solutions, not require governments to not sue to enforce contract terms once signed. If IBM broke the contract terms, Canada can sue. But if Canada signed a really dumb contract, there's a number of remedies here, but violating the contract terms and just demanding other parties do things they have no obligation to do to make up for your mistake doesn't seem like a good choice. You know, "rule of law" and all that?<p>> Why should the Canadian taxpayer foot the bills for corrupt contracts with devious suppliers? The<p>They shouldn't. But, well, <i>was</i> it corrupt? Prove it in court, and the contract can be voided. NAFTA won't stop that either. If you can't prove it in court, they maybe it was just dumb (and not bribery), in which case yes, the taxpayers should foot the bill. If they don't like it, they can vote in a better government. That's democracy.
There are very similar stories from Australia, with IBM being sued for being late on major (billion dollar) government projects and releasing products that just don't work.<p>IBM produced a $1.2 billion payroll project for Queensland heath that just never worked.
With the recent demise of their stock, I wonder if we've finally reached an era where "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" will no longer be true.
Is there a breakdown of where the $780M went? As in, how much to engineer salaries, how much for hardware, operational support, etc?<p>I have a really hard time wrapping my mind around a project that expensive
<i>Historically Slovakia gets lumped with Eastern Europe in popular perception - Slovakia is nothing like Romania, the Ukraine, Albania or even Poland in turning out petty criminals or promiscuous online fraudsters. Not to forget Western Europe, France has a far more unhealthy work culture and fraud at work and as a way of living is far more acceptable than in Slovakia. Germany and Austria tend to value probity far more highly than the Mediterranean countries. Hundreds of years of late Roman Empire corruption left an undying footprint.</i><p>This attitude is shot through the whole piece (essentializing not just Europeans but also Indians), and it's weird and creepy.
Is there any proof that the technical work for IBM is sent out to Indian boiler rooms with very high turnover? Or is this just based on some belief that any software in India must automatically be shitty?