€100 million down the drain on new IT system and counting...

Cork

DublinWriter wrote:

Sounds like this project suffered from the classic Public Sector big IT-project issues:

1) Project Creep/Fuzzy project boundaries
2) Unclear lines of responsibility (11 Health Boards, anyone?)
3) Over-ambitious implementation expectations

SAP R/3 is a complex system. It's run successfully in 1000's of companies worldwide. But if implemented badly it can be a total disaster. US Drug-distrubutor FoxMeyer went Chapter 11 in the US because of a failed SAP R/3 implementation. In Denmark, both Lego and Bang & Olfson nearly went under from bodged implementations of SAP R/3.

However, €150m is chicken-feed compared to the estimated 1bn Sterling lost in failed Government IT projects in the UK in the last ten years.

You'd swear that large IT projects are always successful. There is no gaurentee.

Even with the motor tax online system - you still cannot tax a commercail vehicle.

The public services broker is being awaited.

IT projects fail as well as succeed.

Hobbes

DublinWriter wrote:

IBM implement a lot of Oracle s/w, including Oracle applications as well as Oracle's database.

IBM implement DB2. The only times they would implement Oracle if the requirement is requested by the customer or is a limitation of the software being sold (which might be what SAP needs).

My IEEE mag came in the door, funny enough appears the FBI have the same problem.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep05/1455

NewDubliner

Cork wrote:

You'd swear that large IT projects are always successful. There is no gaurentee.

Actually, 80% of IT projects fail.

Some organisations are better than others at damage limitation. That's the real key to success in IT.

Thomond Pk

There is a reasonable level of failure but surely 1650% over budget is inexpliciple:

"The real problem is the fact that in the health service, we have a jumble of incoherence as far as work practices are concerned, we've thousands of pay variations, thousands of rosters, many different grade structures and individual working arrangements," she said.

http://home.eircom.net/content/irelandcom/breaking/6443859?view=Eircomnet

If the government was still in their first year this would be entirely legitimate but the Tainaiste is blaming the serving Minister for Finance and the serving Minister for Ent, Trade & Employment for the problem. They have been in office for eight years and four months.

I tend to agree with the INO

The Irish Nurses' Organisation welcomed the decision to suspend the rollout of PPARS, which it described as "an unstoppable, out of control project which took precedence over all other issues including patient care".

Unfortunately it is not only this project that is out of control

1> Port Tunnel 444m
2> South Wharf 350m

There is no accountability whatsoever in this Country; when will the electorate actually learn?

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Thomond Pk

In Dublin it was done by a company called dataconversion

MrPudding

DublinWriter wrote:

Have you factored in software license costs, hardware costs, backup facilities etc into your calculation?

I would expect basic stuff like licenses, hardware and backup facilities to be included in the initial quotation received.

MrP

Captain Trips

FergByrne wrote:

In the light of the eur70m spent on 'consultancy' with IBM and Deloitte and Touche for the health service payroll, has anybody taken a look at the timesheets? Even charging eur500 an hour, how could you account for 140,000 man-hours consulting on a payroll system?

The problem is that management consultancy firms basically employ overpaid MBAs with little or no accountability. The people who make management decisions are either business "managers" (i.e., non-skilled morons who are most defintely not leaders but with a 50 grand MBA jack-of-all-traders) and politicians (almost the same - no specific skills in anything and no accountability).

Is anyone goign to get fired for this?

The Luas overrun I think was okay, as the result is basically an excellent service. However, the Garda project and the Health computer project are basically methods to squander cash and produce nothing at all - simply transfer taxpayer funds to friends of friends who work in the management companies/consultancies.

Did they ask a single nurse or porter or anyone who actually does anything in a hospital - the guy who does the payroll for isntance - what would work best? Or did someone with no accountability or experience but witha freshly printed MBA diploma decide what would be best?

There's your answer.

bonkey

DublinWriter wrote:

However, €150m is chicken-feed compared to the estimated 1bn Sterling lost in failed Government IT projects in the UK in the last ten years.

Actually, its about 10%, and if you compare the size of the two countries and take into consideration that this is by no means the only disastrously over-budget IT project that the Irish government has been involved in over the past 10 years, you'll quickly see that this is no way to brush it aside.

All it shows is that we're arguably in the same disastrous boat as other governments. I don't see "you're only as crap as the rest of them, not actualy worse" as being any sort of mitigation.

Just out of interest does anyone know what happens if they did stop the rollout of PPARS as the INO ask? Is there an existing system there that can cope.

Its a payroll system. Are they not currently being paid?

jc

bonkey

Captain Trips wrote:

The Luas overrun I think was okay, as the result is basically an excellent service. However, the Garda project and the Health computer project are basically methods to squander cash and produce nothing at all

Is that because you can't see any direct benefit from the Garda system (taking the one thats in production), or because you can show that there isn't one?

jc

oscarBravo

Mailman wrote:

The stuff described above is fairly standard and would have needed practically no customising and what customising is needed would have already have been done for other countries health sectors already.

It's been several years since I got my R/3 certification, and I haven't kept it up to date, but...

In my experience, the extent to which R/3 needs to be customised is inversely proportional to the extent to which the organisation is prepared to change its work practices to fit into the SAP mould. The implementation I worked on was in an environment where we decided to more-or-less throw away our existing business practices and re-engineer them to fit the (admittedly very good) SAP model. Most of the unsuccessful implementations I've heard about were as a result of attempting to over-customise R/3 to work with less-than-logical workflows.

From what I've heard about the HR situation in the HSE, it fits firmly into the latter category.

ishmael whale

oscarBravo wrote:

Most of the unsuccessful implementations I've heard about were as a result of attempting to over-customise R/3 to work with less-than-logical workflows.

From what I've heard about the HR situation in the HSE, it fits firmly into the latter category.

Indeed, its hard to see in principle why the health services should find it especially hard to implement a payroll system. Harney is pretty much confirming what you are saying with the statement below. Clearly a computer won’t bring coherence to the management of the health services.

http://www.examiner.ie/pport/web/ireland/Full_Story/did-sgJXBnlRjAfxI.asp
Ms Harney argued that PPARS had successfully exposed huge 'incoherence' and inconsistencies in wage and rostering arrangements among the country's 100,000 health employees.

Incidently, has anyone any idea what Deloitte’s IT consultancy turnover would be in a year? Just to get a handle on what proportion of their income is account for by PPARS.

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/front/2005/1005/574573571HM1PAY1.html
Overpayments to health service staff have multiplied since the partial introduction of a controversial new payroll system which has cost millions and which Minister for Health Mary Harney admitted yesterday may now have to be scrapped, write Eithne Donnellan and Liam Reid.
The Irish Times has learned that overpayments to staff now total several million euro and informed sources confirmed last night that efforts to recoup the money from staff have been unsuccessful in some instances.
It also emerged that the Department of Finance raised serious concerns about the cost and management of the computerised payroll system, PPARs, last June.
Following a meeting with officials from the Department of Health and Health Service Executive, computer experts from the Department of Finance wrote in a memo that they had "serious concerns at the nature and cost of the support services" being provided by the consultants on the project, Deloitte, which has been paid €13.5 million in 2005 alone.
"We could not determine from the meeting what the nature of the value added being provided by Deloitte was," the memo said, suggesting the pay rates for the consultants might be too high.

souter

A very good expose of the whole consultancy scam can be found here

www.consulting-moneymachine.com

It's very readable, and although the author unmercilessly exposes the blatant rip offs and inherent flaws in the system, he does appear to have been at his job and retain a certain affection for it.

The PPARS project ( just look at their blissfully ignorant web-site www.ppars.ie ) appears to have been a spectacular collision of rapacious consulting companies and political incompetence (at the health board level, in fairness) .

Hobbes

Its being canned...

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/news.nv?storyid=single5477

Similar threads merged

bonkey

Hobbes wrote:

Its being canned...

The very first paragraph of that link says " is to recommend to the HSE board of management this Thursday that the system rollout be suspended."

How do you make out that "it will be canned" out of "it might be suspended" ???

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Hobbes

bonkey wrote:

How do you make out that "it will be canned" out of "it might be suspended" ???

Taking bets?

daveirl wrote:

This post has been deleted.

Yep they have been using it. Numerous people have been over paid by 1000's or a million in one case. Some of them are not giving back the money. I know if I got overpaid a million I would be slow giving it back (just to get some interest on it )

ishmael whale

I came across reference elsewhere questioning the choice of the HR module of SAP as a basis for PPARS. Essentially, someone proporting to have SAP expertise said this module is rarely used and its payroll system is not based on Irish legislation. This half ties in with a comment I saw somewhere to the effect that PPARS is the largest implementation of the SAP HR module in Europe. Given the kind of heavy hitters that use SAP, including multinationals with turnovers that probably dwarf our national income, it would seem puzzling if the Irish health services are the largest organisation in Europe using this particular module.

oscarBravo

ishmael whale wrote:

I came across reference elsewhere questioning the choice of the HR module of SAP as a basis for PPARS. Essentially, someone proporting to have SAP expertise said this module is rarely used and its payroll system is not based on Irish legislation.

It's a payroll system. By definition, it has to have a customised version for the legislation of whatever country it's deployed in.

The last I heard about it was in 1996, at which time there was no Irish customisation available, but I seem to remember hearing that IBM had been awarded the contract to develop and maintain the Irish variation of the module. I have no idea whether or not that actually happened.

On another note, I worked for a couple of years for a software house that developed time & attendance systems. Developing software that can cope with a wide variety of rostering arrangements is a non-trivial prospect. The point is, that's something that should have been known before the project was undertaken. The more logical approach would have been to restructure the work practices in the newly organised HSE, and then to introduce a uniform HR system.

lucernarian

What about the nurses and other medical staff who lost wages during this mess? It's not all stories of nurses recieving a million euro.

If this was a trial, then which staff or health board areas were involved in it?

Sarsfield

SAP HR is available configured for the Irish system.

NewDubliner

oscarBravo wrote:

The last I heard about it was in 1996, at which time there was no Irish customisation available, but I seem to remember hearing that IBM had been awarded the contract to develop and maintain the Irish variation of the module. I have no idea whether or not that actually happened.

It would be interesting to know who owns the modifications made at the state's expense?

For example, when Accenture developed ROS, onsite and at state expense, for the tax office, Accenture retained the right to sell the technology to other governments.

So, the consultants get paid twice or more for the same work.

DublinWriter

NewDubliner wrote:

It would be interesting to know who owns the modifications made at the state's expense?

For example, when Accenture developed ROS, onsite and at state expense, for the tax office, Accenture retained the right to sell the technology to other governments.

So, the consultants get paid twice or more for the same work.

As happened with PULSE - Accenture sold it on to the South African police afterwards.

gandalf

So basically these firms got paid for the research and development by the Irish Taxpayer and then sold the products elsewhere without the Irish Taxpayer getting a return. FFS we might as well sign away all our Natural Resources, oh wait Rambo already did that :rolleyes:

ressem

Think they should carry out an independent evaluation of all the large computer systems used by the state?

There's a computer system that's meant to be rolled out to the probation svc/courts/prisons, so far in use by the probation service for a year while scaling up. While the hardware & networking setup is sensible, updating the web application page after making a choice from a selection box anecdotally takes 5-10 minutes during working hours. So people stick with paper records, and delegate someone to do the computer entry out of hours.

Estimated numbers of users are in the hundreds only, and even in trial stage there were complaints. So they've created a committee to look at the problem.

Though they probably do need a consultant to sort this out. (My guess, with experience in oracle admin to log the queries used & database response times, and development to suggest the most important optimisations)

bonkey

gandalf wrote:

So basically these firms got paid for the research and development by the Irish Taxpayer and then sold the products elsewhere without the Irish Taxpayer getting a return.

To be fair, its standard practice when developing an IT system that it costs extra to buy the IP outright. The larger the system, the more expensive - you're talking large percentages of the original cost added on again.

Its only fair to surmise that if our government were found to have paid (just picking a number) 150% of what they could have paid, just to own the IP, they'd have been slaughtered at the time. Any justification offered for owning it would only meet with cries that it is not our government's job to be a business. Not only that, but because our government isn't a business, we have to accept that they may not have had the resources, ability etc. to be able to a) sell and b) localise the product for foreign markets.

Its lose, lose either way. Don't pay for the IP and get bitched about when the product gets sold on. Pay for the IP, get slated up front for paying vastly more than was necessary and for presuming to enter business, and then very possibly get slammed again when attempts to sell the product without the relevant experience result in a botched job.

So is the criticism really that fair gandalf? Are you sure you'd rather have seen them pay more to try and become businessmen as an international IT -system vendor, localiser and supporter?

jc

bonkey

ressem wrote:

Though they probably do need a consultant to sort this out. (My guess, with experience in oracle admin to log the queries used & database response times, and development to suggest the most important optimisations)

A consultant? That would seem to suggest a small system...

Incidentally, I'd put money the DB layer isn't the problem.

uncivilservant

bonkey wrote:

To be fair, its standard practice when developing an IT system that it costs extra to buy the IP outright. The larger the system, the more expensive - you're talking large percentages of the original cost added on again.

Its only fair to surmise that if our government were found to have paid (just picking a number) 150% of what they could have paid, just to own the IP, they'd have been slaughtered at the time. Any justification offered for owning it would only meet with cries that it is not our government's job to be a business. Not only that, but because our government isn't a business, we have to accept that they may not have had the resources, ability etc. to be able to a) sell and b) localise the product for foreign markets.

Its lose, lose either way. Don't pay for the IP and get bitched about when the product gets sold on. Pay for the IP, get slated up front for paying vastly more than was necessary and for presuming to enter business, and then very possibly get slammed again when attempts to sell the product without the relevant experience result in a botched job.

So is the criticism really that fair gandalf? Are you sure you'd rather have seen them pay more to try and become businessmen as an international IT -system vendor, localiser and supporter?

jc

all fair points, but perhaps some royalties would have been a nice thing to negotiate?

gandalf

bonkey wrote:

So is the criticism really that fair gandalf? Are you sure you'd rather have seen them pay more to try and become businessmen as an international IT -system vendor, localiser and supporter?

jc

Oh I do believe its fair. If the system was developed and tested using Irish Taxpayers monies then the Irish Taxpayer should see some form of return when the system is sold on.

Anyway we are going off topic.

Good Article in todays indo about the whole mess. Didn't realise that Biffo was also caught up in this.