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Re: [LUG] The missing tax discs

 

On Friday 23 November 2007 12:47:09 James Fidell wrote:
> Henry Bremridge wrote:
> > As a nontechie, am I missing something?
> >
> > If the details were in a database then all it would require is for
> > someone to delete 3 fields: ie 2 minutes of tech time plus computer
> > time to remove the fields from 25m records
> >
> > £5000 seems a bit extreme
>
> I imagine they'd have to write some sort of proposal, submit it to EDS
> for a quote, get the quote approved by all the necessary people, get
> the work done and pay EDS, get EDS to do the job properly this time,
> pay them again and then extract and send the data.  £5k seems quite
> cheap, really.
>
> James

you beat me to it:

£5,000 seems pretty cheap to get EDS or Logica to advise on how to extract 
data from a database. It is the difference between "Select *", and "Select 
name, ...". Requirements capture, consultation, tendering etc. would come to 
far more than that. The HM Gov staff would need to be trained in using the CD 
burner software, do health and safety risk analysis etc. for the task. Then 
there would be the problem of encoding the data in some proprietary form on 
the disk, to make it compatible with the Windows XXXX tools used by the 
recipient.

They might have felt it was cheaper to contract out the role and pay someone 
to manually edit all the fields, as this was less of a technical hurdle for 
them. This would have taken many hours.

Far better to just pop the whole thing in the post.

:) D

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