MPs demand answers on Fujitsu's inclusion in lucrative frameworks

Posted by latein 3 hours ago

Comments

Comment by tene80i 1 hour ago

What I never understand with these enormous projects is what proportion is consultancy waste/profit, and what proportion is "genuinely, this is a very large software project".

IT projects that cost billions are incomprehensible to me, outside of frontier work that the AI companies or FAAANG might do. Is the problem really that hard? Assuming building in-house capability is off the table, is there no space in the market for a good software consultancy? Or are they just outcompeted for getting the contract?

Comment by lmm 1 hour ago

> IT projects that cost billions are incomprehensible to me, outside of frontier work

Getting a large bureaucracy to agree on a question where any answer will disadvantage some members of it is frontier work. No-one has a good general solution. Very few people even have approximate solutions for a few special cases.

> is there no space in the market for a good software consultancy? Or are they just outcompeted for getting the contract?

You can't grow big enough to bid on these big projects and stay good.

Comment by 59 minutes ago

Comment by liveoneggs 33 minutes ago

it's a self-created boondoggle designed to extract money - a scam

that's why the culture created the insane issue of jailing people instead of investigating numbers and fixing bugs - the scam must continue to enrich the players

Comment by PedroBatista 13 minutes ago

Don’t forget to mention part of those players are the clients.

“Clients” usually are even worse offenders than these extractive scam companies, mostly because the “clients” are playing with someone else’s money, usually the taxpayer.

Comment by sam_lowry_ 1 hour ago

A little known but amusing fact:

Fujitsu (well, ICL, the UK company that was bought by Fujitsu and then became the UK branch of Fujitsu) is still the supplier of Microsoft software to the European institutions through a long-standing framework contract with DIGIT.

Why EU could not buy from Microsoft directly to spare the embarrassment is beyond my comprehension.

Comment by KaiserPro 3 hours ago

The problem for the UK is the Fujitsu owns the last vestiges of the UK IT scene.

ICT/ICL and a bunch of other were all bought out by them in the early 90s.

But also there are two other issues:

1) there aren't many companies that are able to bid on that scale

2) if you remove fujitsu then you're handing it to either crapita or atos. who are also shite.

The solution to this is develop decent in-house architecture team who are able to drive specs and keep an eye on developments.

But

That requires three further things:

1) long term vision, with enough run way/agency to affect change

2) enough money to pay and keep decent people

3) the ability to terminate contracts when they get into shit. This is policitically challenging because contract termination == the current minister is shite in news term. "FLAGSHIP PROGRAMME SCRAPPED BECAUSE OF POOR PERFORMANCE, here is why $government is bad with lots of input from people with agendas that haven't properly been vetted because the journalist isn't a specialist (or its not a news site)"

Comment by sherr 2 hours ago

Yes, it's all very bad.

> 2) if you remove fujitsu then you're handing it to either crapita or atos. who are also shite.

Yes, agreed, although (at least) Capita are probably much worse. They're currently in a deep hole having screwed over the administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme. It's been causing deep pain for people for a long time now. Where's IBM when you need them, or Oracle? Just joking.

Comment by helsinkiandrew 2 hours ago

> Where's IBM when you need them, or Oracle? Just joking.

Palantir? (Also just joking)

Comment by p_l 1 hour ago

Atos has a history with Universal Credit, IIRC.

Admittedly the one time I felt pity for Atos, given that the orders to screw things up came from the client (government)

Comment by philipwhiuk 2 hours ago

I find hard to agree they are worse than Fujitsu even with that 'deep pain'.

The Post Office scandal is really really really bad.

Comment by Sha1rholder 1 hour ago

Crazy number, crazy software, crazy company, crazy government, crazy scandal, crazy consequences

Comment by haritha-j 38 minutes ago

Why in the world is the ban self-imposed? People literally died because of this, others spent their lifetimes rotting in prison.

A software bug is perfectly fine, everthing has bugs. It was the years of gaslighting, lying and sending people to prison when you could've easily admitted the issue. Ridiculous.

Comment by librasteve 2 hours ago

what fraction of the (slow roll) payout is Fujitsu committed to pay by virtue of their collusion in the Post Office scandal?