On 25 Jan at 16:01, Tickettyboo <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2015-01-25 12:57:21 +0000, Tim Powys-Lybbe said: > > > On 25 Jan at 0:04, Tickettyboo <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > <snip for brevity> > > > > > You couldn't make this up if you tried. Two days 'after' I > > > downloaded the will and grant, I finally get the email telling me > > > they are ready to download. Gosh it makes the price hike of 66% > > > seem almost worth it for the entertainment value! > > > > It sounds to me as if the whole exercise has been done by in-house > > IT people with no previous experience of running a large database > > for consumer purposes. > > > > If a commercial firm had been involved, it would presumably have > > been put out for tender Did anyone see any such thing. > > > > In some ways I would congratulate them for attempting a probably > > low-cost project after the large scale projects that have failed and > > cost the taxpayers megamillions. > > It is a commercial firm, Iron Mountain, http://www.ironmountain.co.uk Then it is a disgrace. Shades of Quockup and the 1901 census. -- Tim Powys-Lybbe [email protected] for a miscellany of bygones: http://powys.org/

On 25/01/15 21:12, Tim Powys-Lybbe wrote: >> It is a commercial firm, Iron Mountain, http://www.ironmountain.co.uk > > Then it is a disgrace. Shades of Quockup and the 1901 census. It may be a commercial firm -- am I'm only going on the reports on this group that it is -- but it will be the result of a government contract and all that red tape that entails. I don't know whether you have any direct experience of the government's IT procurement procedures. If you have, you won't be surprised by the result; or perhaps you'll be surprised that it's functioning as well as it is. The problem is that the procurement process is so tortuous that has become a specialism in its own right. Companies wishing to tend for such contracts rarely do so themselves: instead they use teams of consultants who understand the procure process, but that lack detailed knowledge of the relevant fields. The cost of tendering spirals, and the companies tendering charge on the basis that they will win only a fraction of the contracts, and must recoup the significant costs of tendering the lost contracts from the successful ones. And because the process has been handled by generalists without the relevant technical experience, they can end up committing to something that the cannot feasibly be implemented. This increases the value of the contract to account for the probability that they'll either have to pay penalties for failing to achieve what they were contracted to do. By this point the contracts are so expensive that the government thinks its necessary to monitor in detail compliance with the contract and check that it had a good cost-benefit ratio. Of course this costs money too. The end effect is to inflate the cost by an astronomical amount: in some cases I've seen, by a factor of a hundred. And it works less well than it would have done had it been implemented for a hundredth of the cost. The whole thing is a criminal waste of money. Richard