Gives an insight into what happens inside a government department when it is forced to merge with another while having its IT outsourced.

In today’s paper it said the cost of producing the sample requested (hopefully involving nothing more than writing “select field1, field2, field3… limit X” instead of “select *”) was £5000! Five thousand pounds? Just to replace a few characters in an SQL statement? Is that a lot, or what?

Is anybody else irked that the data keeps on being described as “lost”? It’s not lost. They’ve just open sourced it. They still have a copy of the data. If they had deleted the records from the database so they don’t know who’s claiming child benefit any more then fair enough, that’s lost.

Has anybody else noticed that quite a lot of this data could do with being open sourced anyway? How many of the 25m names that could now be in the hands of criminals are criminals themselves? Are my neighbours upstairs claiming child benefit? For how many children? One, which they have? Fifteen?

The underlying cause? It could be because of this: competent civil servants don’t like being made subordinate to incompetent outsiders from private corporations. The civil servants retaliate by not being exactly, uh, helpful. When asked, “So how do things work around here?” the civil servants aren’t inclined to give particularly good answers. Or they could go beyond that, and give the wrong information.

Could that be how the enormous cost overruns get generated? In HMRC’s case they had a big contract with EDS which got scrapped, and then another contract with someone else that promptly tripled.

Did anyone else think that merging Inland Revenue and Customs was a dodgy idea?

The public reaction reminds me of the Michelangelo computer virus in 1991. People were scared their computer was going to be destroyed by Michelangelo. So they went round checking their computers for the first time and finding every virus except Michelangelo.

Today, people reading their bank statements for a change, and finding all kinds of unauthorised direct debits that have been there for ages. Changing their PINs for the first time ever. Overall, security boon. The Government should do this more often.

It is when it returns the same article 5 times for your front page

Kidding aside, you have to wonder if incompetence is a requirement for winning government IT contracts.