[LINK] IT can lead to big savings: Tanner

[Craig Sanders]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2008 at 09:36:45AM +1000, Tom Worthington wrote:
> Rather than create a huge project for a recruitment system, the Finance 
> Department could simply identify this as a potential corporate 
> application and give ABS a few extra resources to take wider needs into 
> account. ABS would implement the system for themselves and if that worked 
> okay, the system could then be made available to others. Along the way 
> the sums could be done to see if it is worth having the system open 
> source.

that's no good at all.

sure, a small team of good programmers could make something that worked
extremely well for very little money in very little time on inexpensive
hardware running open source software like apache, perl, python,
postgresql, and similar programs.

but that would make it impossible for each department to give several
hundred thousand or a few million dollars to corporate IT consultants,
for over-complicated, under-performing, over-budget, and over-deadline
web apps that don't work very well (if at all).

what's the point of a government project if it can't transfer vast
amounts of tax-payer money to giant corporations? and then do it again
and again for each minor variant needed by some other department?

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>