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Another botched IT project

Hands up anyone who remembers the infamous INCIS project?

Yes, INCIS was a disaster of an IT project where almost anything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

Millions of dollars were spent and all we had to show for it was a mess of buggy, near-useless code that didn't come close to delivering on the promises made for it. Eventually it was just abandoned and left for dead, only a few fragments of it being scavenged for future use.

Anything organised by a bureaucracy as large as a significant government department or agency is bound to have issues but when you throw a large software project into the mix, there is huge potential for disaster.

Well guess what?

The ACC, one of our worst government-owned bureaucracies, has reinvented the spirit of INCIS, or so it would seem.

According to This RNZ report the ACC ProviderHub project has gone so badly off the rails that they've had to call in help from around the world to try and salvage it.

You could tell this project was doomed from the start -- given that they didn't even do a needs analysis or a business case to justify its existence. WTF?

Sounds to me as if a bunch of people thought "we have a snot load of excess money around here and playing with computers is fun so let's create a system we don't need and probably won't even work". I'm not kidding... that sort of mentality does exist within bureaucracies that are funded by way of taxes or levies -- after all, they have to do *something* with all that cash.

Here's a tip for ACC... how about not trying to dodge every claim that is made?

Do I have an axe to grind against ACC?

Well yes, but I'm far from alone.

When my wife suffered a treatment injury that left her with lasting brain damage her claim was denied. They said we didn't qualify because the gynecologist they sent her too couldn't see anything wrong with her.

It was only after more than a year of us forking out a fortune for *real* neurologists, MRIs and the like that they accepted her claim but but that meant the crucial first six months after such an injury had passed so it was more of a "oh well, too bad, nothing we can do now" response.

Since then I've seen a myriad of reports in the media of others who have suffered similar fates, being denied legitimate claims and being left to pick up the pieces themselves. Likewise I've met many of these people and heard first-hand their tales of denial by ACC.

Yet, it would seem... they have plenty of money to waste on follies such as ProviderHub, a project it seems that nobody asked for, nobody needs and (at least in its current state) nobody wants.

These are the dangers associated with any service that is funded from taxes or levies -- there's little responsibility because the assumption is made that our pockets are bottomless and shortfalls can be met with "just a small increase" in those levies or taxes.

Sounds a little like local body rates doesn't it?

However, I digress...

How best to solve the problems facing this project that has jumped the rails?

I'm wondering if AI might not be a much cheaper and ultimately more effective solution than bringing in very expensive rescue-programmers from around the globe.

Now that AI has the ability to rapidly analyse and understand existing chunks of code then document, debug and modify that code then surely we could harness that power to our advantage.

In fact, doesn't AI offer a huge potential to avoid giant stuff-ups like INCIS and ProviderHub in future?

Ask any programmer which job they like the least and they'll tell you that it's maintaining old, poorly documented legacy code. It can be incredibly difficult and there's little satisfaction in hunting down other people's bugs or trying to introduce new functionality without breaking a teetering tower of dependencies that are not documented anywhere.

Surely this is the perfect job for AI?

As the last COBOL programmer bites the dust, maybe even those really old bits of code running on a System 370 somewhere will last just a few years longer thanks to some AI system :-)

Carpe Diem folks!

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