This fails to stop corruption and just introduces further red tape.
It seems that you're looking for a sanity check to veto insanely out of date and silly practises, but having read the synopsis of the petition I would say that you are introducing further ability to have private industry act corruptly and direct more tax payer money into their pockets without actually providing the sanity check you're looking for.
I say that speaking as someone who has taken part in a number of multi-million pound bids for work in the past.
What you've got to do is stop the vendors from being the decision makers. Government lacks the knowledge of how to do things and keeps asking private industry, who then write their wish list of work that keeps them flush for another 10 years. Nothing in your proposal stops this, and all it seems to do is to make this corruption even more official as they would just pay another 3rd party to approve the proposal.
The panel cannot take part in the bid itself, just scrutinize the bids they come and question their budgets. The bidders do not know who the panel is so they can't influence it. The panel doesn't have to know who the bidder is as well. They just get a spec and a budget attached. All I'm after is not seeing so many multi-million-billion failures when I know the initial budget was way overkill.
(If 'multi' was 1,5 or 10 million I would have understood. But 100, 600, 20,000 million is a bit much).
Just like I always knew which company had written the proposal from the technologies and choices made, I would also know if I were on a panel all of the possible bidding companies and the solutions.
The panel would have to be vetted and trusted, right? In which case there would be record of who was vetted and trusted and you would know who to suck up to and bribe in other ways.
And the panel would definitely spot the SharePoint vs Clarity choice and know who was the bidding consortium or vendor.
I applaud your intent, but think it fails to address the problems with IT acquisition and could actually make it worse. If I can see how to abuse the process, you can be certain that a vendor will take advantage of it even for a contract worth a couple of million.
OK, I hear your point but its still a technicality that can be over come - how to shield the panel from the bidder and vice versa. Perhaps the decision on who's in the panel is random form a large pool of professionals and decided on the day? Perhaps its like a Jury duty where the panel is removed from their environment for a day or two?
Its a logistical technicality. The idea I think still stands - those budgets are a blatant misuse of public funds due to misdirection and misinformation, and at the scale of those budgets its disastrous in the state of the current economy.
The only thing that reduces corruption is choice. Being able to choose whether you are going to participate in a scheme gives you the ability to walk away from situations where you are being taken advantage of.
And that is not what government gives you. Its what government takes away.
It doesn't have to be that way, of course. We could be governing our affairs through voluntary cooperation not coercion. But that would mean a distinct lack of jobs for those unable to produce anything of value.
The UK government allows people to create e-petitions which will be debated in parliament if enough signatures are collected. I created one which I think can save billions if government IT projects will be scrutinized by a panel of internet start up pros. At the moment those projects go to huge corporations operating under silly budgets just because they can and the government will pay them that much. Many of these projects fail to the tune of millions and sometimes billions of pounds.
I know of one huge govt IT web project (+$100 million) soon to go live that is being delivered, believe it or not, from their mainframe. I wonder what your panel of experts would think about that approach. :)
$100 million project is just insane. Even if that app directly serves every man, woman and child of the United Kingdom every single day, that is still 60 million visitors a day. Not unheard of. I'm sure 80% of that budget is fudge by the company who bid and won it, mainly allowed due to the lack of understanding of how these things can work within government. I wouldn't give a toss but its my money being spent at the end of the day.
The organization is already treating it as a smashing success, although it's a couple of years late and much of the most useful functionality has been pushed back to later releases.
It's amazing how little your hundred million gets you in the government.
I should also mention that this is not the UK government.
I think all governments are suckers when it comes to technology they don't understand. There will always be someone who does and can scoop up their/our cash.
To clarify - it will be considered by a parliamentary committee whether it warrants a debate in parliament - so the signatures are not guarantees of a debate.
Sadly, the cultures are not compatible. By their nature, start-ups are risk takers. You can experience a few bumps along the road to a successful launch.
In many government/large organizations, failure of any kind is not an option. The reason for the large contracts and bidding processes is political. The idea is two-fold. In the event of a failure, you have fingers to point and contractual obligations to use for re-mediation. There is also a political shell-game in place such that the decision makers in the organization can use to re-define failure by extending deadlines (at higher cost), changing requirements (at higher cost) and managing expectations (my favourite!).
The money is not being spent on hardware or software. It is being spent on thousands of person hours in consulting, lawyer fees, salaried staff, hotels and meals etc.
But they do fail, often and to the tune of billions.
How can an internet based project rack up a 100 million budget. How can any IT project rack up 20 BILLION pounds:
I'm not saying to run the project like a startup and I'm not saying to have startup type people implement it. Just that those bids, which are often a ten thousand page manuscript nobody actually reads is passed by professionals from the startup world so that they can mark up the bullshit that those companies use to generate such bills..
You can build Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter, to 1:1 scale for 20 Billion pounds...
When purephase said "they can't fail", (s)he was not saying that it is impossible for the process to produce an outcome that an outsider would consider failure. It is impossible for the process to produce a result that an insider would consider failure, and all necessary damage to the budget, original spec document, and yea verily the very laws of time and space itself will be done to make sure this result occurs. Plain reality will be denied, if necessary, such as confident declarations that yes, it's OK if entering someone's name, birthdate, and address takes 40 keystrokes and half an hour, yup, successful outcome!
BTW, this does precisely bupkis to solve the problem. Having competent people around makes it harder to pretend that everything went great and the job is done, so the competent people would simple be ejected at the earliest available opportunity and everybody would know it. If you really want to fix this problem you have to go a lot deeper at striking at the incentives. Lack of competence is a second-order effect of much, much deeper pathologies.
(Actually I'm honestly uncertain of a way to structure incentives in such a way that this outcome won't occur in a government project. And I mean, actually won't occur, not a handwaving fairyland theory about how it might not occur, but an actual process that will produce real engineering results in the real world. The incentive mismatch in government goes all the way to the top. This is a non-trivial part of the reason behind my libertarianism.)
The sentiment of this petition that government IT projects are ludicrously expensive and often fail due to a lack of internal technical knowledge I fully agree with.
However the world of the 'internet startup' and large scale software development are somewhat far apart. And you have learn to walk before you can run. Perhaps the government should start by making more use of IT / software sector experts, and encouraging career development and training for in house staff to help retain the young budding quality developers rather than have them disappear into the private sector. I'd happily work for something more constructive for less money if I knew I would be allowed to make full use of my skills and help the public sector to be more innovative with technology.
I would have classified big internet projects done by startups as 'large scale software development'.
Maybe my use of 'start up' is not really accurate when you look at it from within the industry but I was trying to make it easy to digest to people outside who will think 'early google, early facebook' and apply the scale of these now to the moniker 'startup'.
I'm not talking about small web apps with 1000 users. I am actually thinking 'google like' and 'facebook like' in terms of volume of interaction. Those dwarf any scale of government initiated project, and in contrast they actually work.
I don't think you can compare even the most successful startups' web apps to government systems. Yes there are some things government could learn from a variety of private sector software and web development businesses, but there are some major differences between things like social networks and b2b or government software.
Although they manage it most of the time Facebook offer no guarantees about functionality or uptime. They don't have built into their 'contract' with users clauses that state that if something fails, Facebook are liable pay to huge costs to the users. For these sorts of issues, the government are surely better off seeking advice from businesses that develop software for the finance, engineering or manufacturing industries.
I used to architect solutions used by the social services and those concepts of data integrity, security, guaranteed deliveries etc. are something I came across everyday, and I think those same aspects are valid in public enterprises. The fact some people ignore those points doesn't make them less valid. And it doesn't change the fact that a failure in government IT is 100 million pounds and private startup failure can range between just lost time to a few millions private/VC money: calculated risk (usually, I know there are exceptions like boo.com :)
Sorry to be all nit-picky, but the title of the submission here is significantly different from the title of the petition. The title here suggests running government IT like a startup (and a number of comments seem to be addressing that idea), while the petition is for government internet projects to be approved by a panel of startup pros.
I'd rather see the government providing a standard set of easy-to-develop-against interfaces (e.g. a RESTful government) and encourage entrepreneur to build competing useful end-user applications on top of these services.
government isn't like an internet start-up. it's like doing consulting for any big company. they are completely different jobs, and what works in one doesn't work in the other (in my experience, having done both).
a startup is all about getting something fast and pivoting. it's technical + marketing (a numbers game with a fluid set of customers).
big company work is all about creating win-win situations (with a smaller number of fixed customers) and then building on that.
you might argue that if you "did a startup" in a big company it would gain traction. but i suspect it would more likely be ignored or sabotaged.
I worked in both as well, and I know a lot of those budgets are fluff. See my other comment as well - I'm not saying it should be run by startups or as startups - just that the bids themselves are scrutinized by the same pros that run facebook, rabbitmq, mongodb etc, to weed out all the bullshit. Think of it like a paid version of Jury duty for geeks.
Another approach might be to fast-track technically competent people through the levels of management within government organisations so that those organisations can become more intelligent customers.
An excellent suggestion, I mentioned this type of approach above. Acquisition, development and retention of technically competent staff would go a long way to helping the situation. I think this type of discussion is really what the government needs to encourage better practice, and also possibly stimulate the industry in the UK.
It seems that you're looking for a sanity check to veto insanely out of date and silly practises, but having read the synopsis of the petition I would say that you are introducing further ability to have private industry act corruptly and direct more tax payer money into their pockets without actually providing the sanity check you're looking for.
I say that speaking as someone who has taken part in a number of multi-million pound bids for work in the past.
What you've got to do is stop the vendors from being the decision makers. Government lacks the knowledge of how to do things and keeps asking private industry, who then write their wish list of work that keeps them flush for another 10 years. Nothing in your proposal stops this, and all it seems to do is to make this corruption even more official as they would just pay another 3rd party to approve the proposal.