That exists already (and has for a long while): the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, https://www.brz.gv.at/en/). They do a lot of public facing government websites and portals. If you lived in Austria, there’s a good chance that you’ve used at least one of them. The question is, why haven’t they been tasked with this migration?

The savings on bureaucracy and time spent analyzing puvlic offers alone would be immense over a decade.

The problem of course is that using someone else's proprietary, closed-source code makes you beholden to them. That's a problem for consumers but it's an even bigger problem for sovereign nations. Would be a great outcome if greater awareness of this problem lead to more state resources being invested in open source alternatives to proprietary software.

If that were true, then all these government IT projects from these infamous consultancies would all come in-time and under budget, but that's never the case, because every government wants things completely different than the other government, so it's never a just a copy-paste, fire-and-forget type of job.

corruption requires costs you cannot verify after delivery. for construction it's the exagerated foundation which they only actually deliver what's needed and pocket the difference. for software it is the hundreds of rewrites that may or may not have happened and are now in the past.

No, that is plain fraud. Corruption is paying so that no one notices or cares about the the costs that can't be justified after delivery.

If there was a government IT office, it could build this in house, and after the initial investment in building the base infra, re-use it almost for free in every government agency in the same country. In the context of the EU, they could even make moves to share this code with other governments, passing on the savings there as well.

I mean sure if it wasn't for the fact that those bigger players are going to be looking at this as a way to print money.

If you want to attract good talent, there are successful models out there now, but you have to start by paying them way more than the average government salary. But the contractors throw lobbying money at these things and try to stop them every step of the way.

So IT IS technically possible to gather the labor force to build the project in house, it just isn't much political motivation to do so when you have lobbyists swaying leaders in the other direction, and the investigative journalists and voters are too tech illiterate to understand this type of grift because when the government pays a billion Euros for a bridge or a tunnel and after 10 years the bridge or tunnel is not there, everyone notices and someone needs to go to jail or at least loose their job in politics for that obvious theft.

But if you spend a billion to consultancies on a government IT project, and it's an offshored clusterfuck that barely works and could have been done better by a local shop for 1/100 of the cost, then the journalists and taxpayers have no clue they've been robbed blind because nobody understands the nitty gritty and costs of SW development, and unlike bridges and tunnels, the public can't see the source code in the open as they walk to school to see that there's nothing there, which is why government IT projects has now become the best and easiest way to funnel taxpayer money into private pockets.

That doesn’t make much sense. Governments don’t have that much software integration to do. Especially when you consider that these projects generally require specific knowledge of what’s integrated. What will these people do the rest of the time? Are you suggesting hiring specialists of every piece of software the government is likely to use full time?

I mean when faced with something you completely fail to understand there are two solutions: it’s all a scam or you are missing something fundamental. Here I think a lot of people are completely misunderstanding what integration is about.

Consider that these are not IT issues which push all these departments to ask for different feature sets and customisations leading to every integration being different and these are not problems programmers will solve.

Consider also what happens if projects fail. With an integrator, you sue them or breach with penalties and move on to a competitor. No harm, no foul. If it’s internal, you have a full on restructuration on your hand for something that is not even your core responsibility.

Anyway, I would like to see the face of some you when you learn that it’s highly likely that’s the people managing the integrators from the customer side were probably mostly consultants for a big consulting firm because that’s another thing government agencies don’t know how to do.

...What? Most European governments rely on herds and herds of pachidermic, segregated software systems and databases. There's surely enough to keep a whole team busy for years, if not decades. And I'd be surprised if the final costs would be higher than hiring consultants again and again.

Projects are driven by business requirements and values not a desire to share more or rationalise. Segregation is more often a matter of governance and processes.

That's not things you will solve using a bunch of developers. This discussion makes me realise that most of the people commenting on HN probably work for software companies and have very little experience of how big projects, be them IT or organisational, are conducted in traditional companies and what are the challenges they face.

Case in point: in Italy, different towns used to have different systems for their resident registrations. I doubt there was an extreme need for customization in this context, it was just that bigger/wealthier towns had a chance to digitize earlier and so on, leading to extreme fragmentation. Moving to a nationwide register took literally a dozen years or so, for a single service of a single country.

Since only the government is doing these, there is no real gain from outsourcing - either way you pay the full costs (it need not be that way, but that is how it typically is). For IT lots of others also need that work and so you can share the overhead costs if you outsource.

Opening up a whole department requires skills. If you don't have such skills, please hire the "parasite". I prefer that. At least they provide a service, overpaid, ok, but they have at least some knowledge in the business.

With all due respect, setting up a Nextcloud instance for a government entity is not really rocket science requiring a 150 IQ, Stanford grad, PhD, galaxy-brain labor force, but it's a skill that's easily abundant in Austrian and can be easily transferred to more of the tech labor pool to achieve the same results of what Atos did.

We're talking about a Nextcloud instance here, not building an entire hyperscaler from scratch, like AWS or Equinix, which is indeed a skill next to inexistent in most of Europe, which does indeed require contracting FAANG corps to build because we lack that capability in Europe.

I am talking about politicians that are supposed to create the conditions to set this up in a proper, honest and "good" way. As soon as this becomes a "department", nextcloud is not an option because it lacks xyz.

So let's reimplement it worse. All this to justify the need for having an IT department at all.

This is why sometimes I prefer that they just hire some company and that's it. One and done. (More or less).

Also, on a more disturbing note: how do you reduce the costs, when you have public employees....? You can't fire them, or it's nearly impossible to do so. Atos, on the other hand, you can switch.

An in-house development department on the other hand doesn't have to stick to the strictly disconnected way of tenders and the development team can actually work with the stakeholders to develop and evolve the spec throughout the project. They also don't need to guarantee future business for themselves through vendor lock-in or boost their corporate partners through technology choices.

This is an unprecedented case where a private company decided to go the open source route for a government project, usually it's only the in-house teams that pick open source.

Not a comment on Atos directly, but I am betting that its an opex/capex thing.

Government departments see ongoing maintenance as internal, opex driven activity and right size their infrastructure teams to handle the ongoing workload.

Government departments see a large implementation project as an opportunity to save money through capex. Rather than increasing their resourcing internally to complete the project, they send it to tender. The tender document will require that the vendor hand over to their internal team for ongoing maintenance and support at the completion of the project. No ongoing impact to department opex budgets or headcounts.

Even if it blows out by like 50%, they probably still save money by not managing the labor costs internally. And they can force the vendor to take a hit on some overruns.