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On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 12:37:49PM +0100, Simon Waters wrote: > > I've tried to compete for government projects that mandated 2 CISCO > certified engineers to a very high level of certification, even though > the proposed solution featured no CISCO kit what so ever, and would have > involved cheap free software based appliances that didn't require a guru > to (buy!) install or operate. Maybe they had some sort of boilerplate standard set of requirements and whoever put together a specific set of requirements didn't have the first clue what was and wasn't actually relevent. > In the end the public sector buys from the SEMA's and EDS's of this > world, who supply the cheapest person they can to fulfill the contract > requirements and buy in expertise from small companies and individuals > on an "as needed" basis. Somehow the people controlling the purse strings never appear to work this out. > This puts at least two (and usually three or more) layers of ass > covering burocracy between the users, and the people who understand what > is technically possible. Also these companies have established > relationships with current suppliers, and so the bosses will continue to > specify what they have done before until something major happens like > they are no longer competitive at the bidding stage. > > Innovation in such circumstances is usually when the techies get called > in 12 months down the line, and say "why not do it this way?", but there Assuming they get "called in" as opposed to "find out by accident". > is no way after a huge 1,000,000 pound bid a SEMA or EDS is going to > say, oops we found a way to do it for 15,000, here is the extra 985,000 > quid back (less several hundred grand for administrative costs). > > Whilst we'd like to argue that it is a risk calculation, very few > companies have any concept of proper risk management in IT projects, in > the software world we dealt with only a handful of companies who had any > meaningful quantification of risk (usually project deadline related). In Some proprietary software licences come with some very nasty risks attached. As far as I know no vendor forced Plymouth and Torbay to re-licence software they already had, but it's perfectly possible. > most cases it is just inertia, and ignorance, "lack of support" is just Thing is that the "techie" definition is along the lines of "how to fix it when it breaks/stop it breaking in the first place" where as other people's definition appears more along the line of "someone else I can blame if (when) things go wrong". > a convenient excuse that is used to hide the fact that people didn't > even bother exploring the option. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.