Ten
years ago, we published an article commenting on a large computer system then
being developed for Customs in New Zealand. Here are some excerpts
from that article.
Yet
another big government IT project has gone off the rails. This time it is
something called the Joint Border Management System (JBMS) (...). It was supposed to be finished by the end of 2012 at
a cost of $75.9 million. Three years later, the development is still not completed,
and the budget has ballooned to $104.1 million.
This
is merely the latest in a series of similar debacles. They are practically
unavoidable, given the model used by government for IT procurement. It has been
described as the “waterfall” model. Mike Bracken of the UK’s Government Digital
Services described it as “writing most when you know least.” A group of public
servants write massive tender documents attempting to guess the needs of
end-users years in advance. The scope of the projects is such that only a few
large consultancies can qualify to tender. The selected consultancy then gets
on with over-running budgets and missing delivery deadlines. (…)
Does
it have to be this way? After all, banks do on-line banking, Amazon sells
books, clothing retailers of all sizes sell clothing, Trademe manages an
auction site and airlines sell tickets on-line. None of these well-functioning
systems were developed using the waterfall model. They were not the product of
any grand design and all started as relatively small projects, run by in-house
teams or small-scale contractors. Unlike public servants, the owners of those
businesses did not have access to lavish amounts of other people’s money. Many
of the early versions of these successful applications failed miserably but were soon replaced by others that did not.
Matt
Ridley, a member of the British House of Lords, said in an article published in
The Times,
[The systems that] succeed allow for plenty of
low-cost trial and error and incremental change. It’s the mechanism Charles
Darwin discovered that Mother Nature uses. Rather than a grand ‘creationist’
plan or a big leap, natural selection incrementally discovers success through
trial and failure. From the English language to an airliner, everything
successful has emerged by small steps.
The
current Customs system, Cusmod, was developed around the same time as
trackstock, the Warehouse Management System that we use at DSL Logistics. We
like to say that trackstock is very good indeed, because it incorporates
fifteen years of mistakes. Every time something goes wrong, our small in-house
team of developers comes up with solutions which improve the functionality of
the product. (…)
The
idea that a group of public servants can specify the myriad requirements of
users, years in advance, is nothing short of arrogance. Yet, New Zealand is
awash with very smart developers that deliver solutions to businesses of all
sizes, day in and day out. (…) Customs already records details of every
transaction in a modern relational database. That provides the mechanism for
the collection of statistics and the management of the revenue collection
functions. (...) If the tools that they have at their disposal are not
good enough, then any of the many local software developers can provide them
with query/reporting tools by lunchtime, at a fraction of the IBM costs.
