One example - I created Help Desk system for the public finances of entire country using Redmine and other FOSS tools. The cost was 0, the time to implement it was single year of not so focused work and it served hundreeds of thousands of people. Then IBM took over with its service desk, implmenting it for years and costing infinity. They could get into tender, I could not since I and my team are small company. The funny thing is that stakeholder subteam abandoned it and returned to my solution (with 0 maintenance since I left the company).
This is typical. You need to know how government works to understand it. I understand it, but do not approve it. I am also not frustrated about it, its just how this world works currently, in majority of the countries as far as I know.
Same experience, also in the private sector.
> This is typical. You need to know how government works to understand it. I understand it, but do not approve it. I am also not frustrated about it, its just how this world works currently, in majority of the countries as far as I know.
Yep, I mean the issues with unnecessary jobs and inflated projects and budgets is not exactly news, I think it's just part of society's struggle to adapt to a post scarcity economy, while not shortening the amount of working hours. It's not really surprising that it also affects software.
I see the project paid for few willas of ppl involved at the top and was discontinued due to missed deadlines and missing functionality.
Noone was fired, sued or even scolded for wasting millions of taxpayer money.
All you can do is laugh. This world is a joke.
The licensing/certification stuff basically creates monopolies.
My spouse worked at a digital agency a decade ago, that it turned out was basically a near-monopoly provider of certain types of software for the local government.
The thing was, none of the work was actually done by them. It was all subbed out to 3rd party dev shops who couldn't qualify themselves for the required licensing. Further, they subbed out all the dev offshore.
So the government was both overpaying for offshore devs, and thinking they were spending money locally because the intermediary happened to be local.
They could have gotten the same work for 40-50% cheaper just skipping the front company, or spent the same and hired actual local devs they thought they were.
If that was so, countries would not work at all. There is always a service that needs to absolutelly work, or your government is fucked and lots of its people. For those projects you absolutelly need to hire those that will provide desired outcome without failure. Most of the services are not so crucial and in those you can have such failures without much of a problem, it even seems "good" sometimes as you must employ number of people to fix service mistakes constantly.
It have not fallen apart „yet” because there are really hard working ppl with duty in their heart.
We're currently busy throwing away solid pieces of open source software that have worked well for years in favour of enterprise garbage.
Yes, government tender has rules. And if the decision makers don't follow the rules, they can suffer all kinds of consequences, including personal bankruptcy and jail time. Obviously they wouldn't bend the rules just because it would save government money and lead to a better outcome.
The usual outcome of the investigation is uncovering a bunch of people just saying that they were doing what they were told to do, and no one taking the common sense approach of looking at the current vendor. It might push one or two incompetent middle managers into retirement.
That said, it may get fixed for the next round of bids. It may have long term change depending on which congresspeople were involved.
The only result of this would be millions more dollars "investigating" version 1, led by the bureaucrats who made the decision to build a v.2, including paying an army of consultants to find every possible flaw and non-compliant feature, in order to justify their decisions. The horns will really come out then... v.1 did not achieve 100% accessibility according to OSHA, cookies had the potential to leak data, the JS packages underneath were not vetted and compliant, no guard against denial-of-service, the list of possibilities is endless... point being, when you force gov't officials to find a flaw in something because their job is being questioned, they essentially have unlimited resources to find that flaw and justify their own existence.
Reasoning? Hah-ha. Haaaaa...
It was an open government tender process, for which I, or the company I worked for was not eligible, despite the tender being "open". You see, a decade-long pedigree of actually having implemented the software used for this purpose did not qualify us for replacing it with a v2.0.
There are rules, you see? They have to be followed! Or else.
Or else bad things might happen, like money being wasted.
The fact that the end-result of this process was that a 9-digit sum was spent on something I spat out in my spare time in under a year -- and was used for a decade -- was of no relevance.
> what did decision makers truly believe about the whole thing?
Their concerns started only when the whole thing blew up and started making headlines. Then nothing happened to them personally, so their concerns evaporated along with the taxpayer funds they had wasted.