I was told a story a little while back, by a local council employee, about how the tendering system works from the perspective of both the council and prospective vendors. He seemed to think that vendors were managing to get "IT" contracts running with the council, failing to deliver on time, claiming specifications had changed, then either calling for contractual compensation for having the contract canceled, OR, demanding more money to finish the contract as initially agreed.

At the time I thought it was a great story, from the vendors point of view brilliant if you could pull it off, especially as the government seems to piss money away on IT projects without a second thought, but surely just a story.

Or is it ...

I has heard 'similar' stories about a company called EDS and generally wrote them off as Urban Legend, but the more I hear, the more I wonder.

There's an interesting piece on The Register today about the government's Offender tracking system, which was apparently estimated to cost £234 million. However, it seems that the final bill is now looking like it will be more like £950 million, which is quite a change.

And if course it gets better, if they cancel the project, they get to pay £50 million compensation!

Hell, is it me, or is this just a jumped up database?!

With 80,000 criminals to track, they're looking at £12k per criminal, talk about the cost of crime!

I'm wondering what would have happened if that money had been spent on projects to keep people from offending in the first place .. and I'm also wondering exactly what sort of database requires that sort of price tag. I can't think of much that you couldn't implement with £1m, let alone £950m!

Personally I'm inclined to think they should  be putting money into building new facilities, hiring more staff, and looking at ways of keeping people out. Then have someone knock up a little web based system in MySQL that everyone can use it'll probably do the job quite happily.

Anyone got a list of government projects that have been serviced by EDS - I've love to see their track record ...