This way more serious than a 'huge disappointment'.
The platform seemed to be based on some weird 'forms' based application builder when it was released ten years ago. It is flakey as hell. Ugly I can deal with, we have ebay and it still works fine, but even the most basic things you would expect, for example when you press tab the cursor to follow the order of forms on the page, does not work. Often when you submit a form the focus ends up on some text field.
The integration with other services, such as Medicare, barely work. I have spent endless calls on the phone to near useless support staff trying to get emails reset for old mother. The support staff are friendly but don't seem to have any ability to do anything but reset things that take several hours to complete.
The tax and business functionality is completely senseless. They got the paper forms designed in the 50s for batch mainframes and coded them into web forms. You have to do things like copy the same value into multiple fields marker T8 and T2. The instructions say just that: "Copy the value from T8 to T2". If you don't it fails.
The article mentions the huge problem with them having no in-house expertise so they bring in consultants. I work here in Sydney and I know, from first hand experience working with them, these large consulting companies have the same or less technical expertise. What they do have is huge sales teams and even larger teams of project managers. The odd technical person they have is spread across so many projects they are pretty much useless. They employ hordes of off-shore developers that are managed people with little or no clue about anything.
I currently work in NSW Health. The quality of what we deliver is to the bottom. Millions of dollars spent on project that have 0 unit test, 0 integration test where we as developers don't have any ability to talk to users. Every piece of code I see has inconsistent style with nobody bothering to write clean code. I am trying hard to bring more best practices and less cow boy programming but this might be a lost cause if you're not a professional politician. Everytime I hear my wife talking me about budget cut in her hospital as a nurse, I cringe of the absurd waste that happen on the application development side I'm involve with.
Your mileage may vary, some team in the gov are doing some wonderful things like service nsw which has been creating component libraries available for most popular framework and mock tools: https://www.digital.nsw.gov.au/delivery/digital-service-tool...
Unfortunatly the internal politics make it we can't use any of the stuff they do in the part I'm involved with
>these large consulting companies have the same or less technical expertise. What they do have is huge sales teams and even larger teams of project managers.
This is correct. Consulting is 100% marketing. It appears the problem is, how does a team of actually skilled engineers who wants to get a start in this business compete with these sales companies? The people hiring them have no clue, hence why the marketing is the most important thing, and many of these companies have inertia from a bunch of previous projects they can use in their marketing.
I feel like actually good engineers have the least social contacts, and it is these social contacts that provide all of the opportunities to start building a client-base. This seems to be the case with society in general. Everything is decided by social relationships, and the best engineers are the worst at creating these relationships, or are actively excluded from them as some sort of defence mechanism for social people to maintain power. Hence why we end up with a bunch of terrible products and software. It is all bundled up in a cocoon of social contracts.
There was also a pretty basic SSO security issue a few years back, and I tried and tried and could not find anyone to report it to beyond regular customer service. Maybe they've fixed it but basically you click to look at tax stuff, it takes you to ATO online services, you click back to mygov then sign out. Sign into another account and click and now you're looking at the original person's tax stuff since it's still signed in. Not a problem for myself and my wife, but potentially an issue for abusive relationships or shared resources like a library computer.
I think this is all a bit harsh. Compared to having to front up to the tax office or Centrelink or (in NSW) the RTA to do things, MyGov and the Service NSW system are a modern miracle.
You can quibble over what needs cutting/pasting or whatever on the ATO forms but the system it replaced (the execrable desktop app), the ATO MyGov interface is so far ahead it isn't even funny.
However, I've never had to deal with their helpdesk.
Sounds like a classic government IT project failure. They basically codified their internal Kafka-esk bureaucracy in UI form and projected their collective incompetence by insisting the project must be built exactly according to their (wrong & incoherent) requirements. I can imagine the long documents. This is classic waterfall. They would have insisted on that even. The project was doomed as soon as they started writing those documents.
So, they got exactly the thing they insisted on. And now they are blaming the consultants. Bureaucracies work like this: they are full of useless people defending their existence by participating in endless meetings that will find creative ways to deflect any form of responsibility and accountability. So, bonus points for meetings with consultants. The more expensive the better.
Pass it up the chain to the politicians who will be long gone by the time the whole thing blows up. They absolutely love that; do what the expensive consultant says. Which is of course echoing what they were told by the incompetent bureaucrats. The bigger the egos in the room, the dumber the plans get. Usually these projects start off fine and then some moron pulls rank and derails the whole thing by insisting on adding their own requirements to the pile. Big expensive projects attract that kind of behavior; it's almost inevitable. And then some politician signs off on it. Job well done.
The consultants bill by the hour so they don't mind the endless bullshit and they take notes. And then they do as they are told to take the money regardless of whether that makes any sense. There's almost no way for a happy end in such a situation. Don't blame the consultants; blame the career bureaucrats and the politicians for being absolute idiots, again. This outcome was 100% predictable 20 years ago.
“The argument has been that you employ consultants and commercial providers to do this sort of work based on the fact they have skills you don’t, but had it not been for the fact we’ve lost so many skills we wouldn’t have needed to do that.”
This. How can companies/governments still think that you can "outsource" IT, when technology is not only tightly integrated into the fabric of what a modern company is, but nowadays a solid technology capability sets the high performers apart from the laggards. It's just as ludicrous as outsourcing the HR, sales team or the executive office.
Unfortunately unlike in the real world where these companies will become uncompetitive and dissolve, we are stuck with our government and their outdated operating models...
> you employ consultants and commercial providers to do this sort of work based on the fact they have skills you don’t
The irony is, it's nearly exactly backwards.
I have literally never seen effective use of consultants and outsourced work like this except in one situation: where you DO have the internal skills. Pretty much the only way to get any value is when you have highly knowledgeable and skilled people with strong engineering background managing the process.
Of course, convincing highly skilled engineers that it's a valuable use of their skills and time to simply manage a bunch of outsourced consultants when they could be directly managing a team somewhere else is a challenge in itself.
When I consulted for Fortune 500s, I was regularly proposing in-house solutions that would be carefully tailored to and integrated with corporate KPIs.
They'd nod their heads in agreement, pat me on the back for the sage advice and themselves on the back for bringing in that sage advice, excited about things that would clearly bring in billions in revenue.
Which then never actually happened.
But you could have the crappiest most conartisty 3rd party offering at a ridiculous price tag that they'd gleefully throw money down the drain with, and then the next year I'd get brought in I'd be met with reluctance to work on whatever I was proposing because "oh, we tried that."
No, no you didn't.
Eventually I got tired of being a professional Cassandra and left the industry.
Really, this article is just a whinge. I'm an Australian. MyGov is fine, I interact with it as a citizen regularly. Government needs to outsource implementation of this kind of stuff because it's extremely hard to build software teams and manage their performance in permanent government roles. And those costs are reasonable - particularly for anyone that builds teams of software engineers and knows what aggregate team costs are like in Australia.
The hard part of the MyGov platform is the inter-department stuff, and I don't think that's a software issue, that's bureaucracy.
I mostly second this. I use MyGov mainly for taxes, and it is fine in that regard.
To be honest, my interactions with the Australian government websites + apps has mostly been positive. There are some truly horrendous websites from other nations' governments out there.
You mean it's extremely hard to hire a full team of competent people when you're tethered to the APS pay scale and the federal government won't let you increase public servant headcount.
Agreed, I’ve linked several services over the years and it all works when I need it. I can’t imagine the struggle it would’ve been to get all the various ancient systems and bureaucracies working together
I think you're missing the point. For the amounts paid given the relatively small tasks involved this whole thing is outrageous from a tax-payer's point of view: how much of even your personal tax dollars went burned on this? What else could that money have been spent on?
Australian here, I think the comments here overstate how bad MyGov is. I'm in my mid 20's, and I have literally never had to call any federal government organisation, visit any service centre or post any forms. For my entire adult life, all of my interactions with federal services have been through MyGov. This includes taxes, welfare, healthcare and education...
I can only imagine how colossal the undertaking must have been. MyGov ties together our largest, most bureaucratic organisations. Imagine being tasked with such an project, building the web application is the easy part, you also need to convince a country's largest organisations to change how they operate.
Considering this, I'm actually surprised how good MyGov is.
I don’t want to make assumptions about how you use the services in MyGov, but the experience of my family and friends has been that, if you require any service which is at all out-of-the-ordinary or needs a pair of human eyes looking at it (whether or not it should - there are plenty of broken processes at Centrelink, some might say that’s by design) then you need to make a phone call, because the function to perform self-service is simply not there. I have also had fairly good experiences with MyGov - but my interactions with social services are fairly boring compared to the needs of many people.
Edit: the problem here of course is that if you make a phone call you can expect to wait in a queue for many hours.
This seems to be mostly talking about the 'new' mygov.
The new goal was to provide a unified front – users would navigate through MyGov based on their needs and goals and be sent directly to the relevant forms and info from all departments.
EG – instead of going to Centrelink and seeing only JobSeeker, or going to the ATO and seeing only JobKeeper; you’d go to 'COVID relief payments' and see a clear explanation of both, and you’d be able to apply for either one directly.
But in the beta… it’s basically just Centrelink. In the entire 'Health' section, the only medicare service mentioned is the proof of COVID-19 vaccination.
Let me provide some background information for people who aren't familiar with the agencies involved in this (Centrelink, Medicare, and the Australian Taxation Office).
These places have some of the worst-run IT departments on the planet. I can say this with more than a little evidence. As a consultant, I've worked on over a hundred customer sites, all the way from tiny private companies up to federal government, including all three of those agencies. I've seen how IT is done at just about every state government office in my state, and two dozen in other states.
There just is no comparison. Centrelink especially is so fucked up that people think that I made up my stories about my experience there. It's crazy beyond belief.
The sheer scale of it is amazing. They have over 1K IT staff in one building, and spent $2B on a single software upgrade project! They have huge teams for obscure tasks that other large enterprises might have just one or two people doing. There are Big Name consultants everywhere. Direct vendor support, often flown in from the US, which is otherwise rare around here.
Despite all these people, money, and support, nothing works. Nothing. It's all broken. Everything. Every part. It's a sight to behold.
I wrote a report for them about a key security system where I pointed out that out of something like 50 settings, 47 were incorrectly configured. The only reason it "worked" is because the errors cancelled out. That is, it was incorrectly rejecting valid access, but another error meant that the rejection was being ignored. And so on.
Similarly, their core authentication system was supposed to be distributed and highly available, but the main architect put all of the servers into one rack, one on top of another. He said with a straight face that a product that is well known in the industry for its efficient wide-scale replication is "bad at replication" and only works if the "network cables are really short". He meant 30cm, not 3000km. A power outage took out all three "redundant" controllers, and so something like 80K staff spent several days staring at login prompts on their monitors for a few days.
I could go on, and on, and on. I have a whole collection of stories like that.
The most amazing part is that I was only there for a couple of months, yet this short time period yielded 8 of my top 10 horror stories from the field.
It's also the only workplace setting where I had ever seen a man cry. For work related reasons. Several men, on several occasions.
I honestly feel that whoever complains about MyGov never had to perform these bureaucratic operations in a country like Greece. The fact that one can interact with some of the biggest and slowest-moving agencies in the Australian government from the comfort of their home was mind-blowing to me when living in Aus.
Maybe having to queue up for 3h in the cold to be greeted by a grouchy underpaid public servant that would have you queue up again next week (the Greek experience) until you have to call some person you know to do basic things like renewing your passport has lowered the bar too much for me.
Let’s not forget software is hard in the best of environments and archaic governmental offices and processes aren’t exactly conducive to development velocity and quality
I spent a year working in Melbourne, Australia a decade ago. I loved pretty much everything about the experience, except one thing: the "she'll be right, mate" attitude. I saw a fair bit of complacency. Strange experience.
Personally, as an Aussie, I don't have any massive gripes with MyGov specifically.
Bear in mind that it's mainly (only?) a portal to other departments (ATO, Centrelink, Medicare?).
I don't actually see why we're bothering to "upgrade" it at all, the mention of not being able to deploy a styling change, who gives a toss honestly, styling is way down my list for something like this.
When I had to get a MyGov ID for my son, it did the facial recognition off his passport (no idea if it would have allowed someone else...) fine, set it all up just fine in Covid lockdown so that's a +.
My main gripe is that unless you want their crappy app installed, the only MFA option is SMS, which as this audience knows is just not secure.
Considering the enormous and complicated design-by-committee standards [0] that the services are now all required to implement, it's a shocker when any part of myGov continues to even function. (Though it does have its fair share of unexpected outages...)
Especially when there's breaking changes [1] every two months or so.
Part of the problem is that there's no real negative feedback in a government project. I've been attached to government work in the past, and the whims of the PMs change day to day because the people there were often just promoted to get them out of the way of another team.
There's no real leadership or technical ownership of the product, and I've found that the PMs will often just quickly blame the user for not using the software correctly rather than actually reflecting on why they may be getting that feedback.
The consultants may have fucked up, but they were only able to because the people in charge fucked up first.
Honestly it's not too bad. It does some clever things (like upload and scan a photo of your birth certificate for identity verification), and yes, for a lot of small tasks it saves you having to get on the phone and wait on hold for hours.
However, my birth certificate is from a small country hospital and in a non-standard format that it doesn't recognize, and now that myGov is the standard channel, it's so difficult to apply for anything. And I can't just .. be re-born at a different hospital .. so that the system will accept my application to become a chartered engineer.
The main thing I use mygov for is doing my tax, and it works fine.
Given all the complaints I see here about the lack of a US government online tax app, we seem to be doing better in that regard, although I imagine the US tax landscape is much more complex.
While I didn't work directly on myGov, I knew quite a few people on the team that did (at all levels) and had a fair number of depressing pub sessions with them lamenting the entire project. This article doesn't say much that the people working on it weren't saying throughout the entire delivery.
I'm not going to defend the ludicrous cost of the project; we all know that outsourcing to private consultants to save money is a neoliberal pipe-dream up there with "trickle-down" economics. Many of the contractors for government agencies are former public sector workers who have been driven out by the laughably uncompetitive wages and the government's hostile attitude towards the APS.
And can you blame someone for leaving a job where they aren't supported and are mocked by the governing party in the media, when they can do essentially the same job with less bureaucratic oversight and twice the pay as a consultant or contractor? Why would they stay? A sense of civic duty? That's called "being a gullible c*nt" here in Australia.
The article even points this out:
> "Agencies are somewhat compromised by no longer having lots of these skills in-house."
No shit. Who knew systematically de-funding your own public service meant it would lose efficacy? Starve the beast[1] is a toxic political strategy that never should have made it across the pacific.
So that's why myGov is expensive; we're paying to support an entire ecosystem of middlemen. But if you want to know why it's a shit-show these quotes from the article point to (imo) the biggest cause:
> Responsibility for the "enhancement" of myGov was transferred from the DTA (Digital Transformation Agency) to Services Australia (formerly Department of Human Services/Department of Social Security) in late 2020
> "Individual agencies continue to do their own thing [...]"
MyGov was meant to integrate government services, but none of the agencies would actually expose a single endpoint for the myGov team to integrate. Months and months were spent just trying to get agencies to accept that for an integrated platform to work they would need to support a common authentication system. Doesn't leave much to do except polish the UI, does it?
This quote from the article literally made me laugh out loud:
> "What's so hard about making these improvements? I don't understand why it has taken that long and cost so much money to do that."
> The main goal of myGov was to integrate a range of government services from different departments seamlessly on the one platform. But the new beta version of the platform still doesn't do that effectively
The problem wasn't technical, it was institutional. The Australian tax payer just spent millions of dollars hiring consultants to try and herd cats. They weren't outsourcing for developers as much as they were outsourcing for mediators.
The DTA was meant to be the solution to digital integration of government agencies in Australia by setting up an internal government digital agency. But the large entrenched agencies (such as Services Australia) had no real incentive to listen to a word it said and every incentive to resist relinquishing control to it.
The agency is for all intents-and-purposes now dead. It's only remaining responsibilities are "advisory". Even the official design system inspired by the highly praised GOV.UK one was decommissioned practically before it got off the ground [2]
The myGov and DTA story isn't some simplistic private vs public sector issue. This is a fundamental culture issue within Australia (and it seems the whole anglosphere at the moment). No one is happy except the ministers and executives rorting record amounts of cash out of the system.
Turkey actually has a very good online portal [1] for a lot of interactions for the government. Anything from obtaining official letters to checking statuses of court causes, etc. can be done over it. Pretty decent iOS app too. Credit where credit is due. Wish the US had as decent of an online portal to all governmental things.
[+] [-] mianos|3 years ago|reply
The platform seemed to be based on some weird 'forms' based application builder when it was released ten years ago. It is flakey as hell. Ugly I can deal with, we have ebay and it still works fine, but even the most basic things you would expect, for example when you press tab the cursor to follow the order of forms on the page, does not work. Often when you submit a form the focus ends up on some text field.
The integration with other services, such as Medicare, barely work. I have spent endless calls on the phone to near useless support staff trying to get emails reset for old mother. The support staff are friendly but don't seem to have any ability to do anything but reset things that take several hours to complete.
The tax and business functionality is completely senseless. They got the paper forms designed in the 50s for batch mainframes and coded them into web forms. You have to do things like copy the same value into multiple fields marker T8 and T2. The instructions say just that: "Copy the value from T8 to T2". If you don't it fails.
The article mentions the huge problem with them having no in-house expertise so they bring in consultants. I work here in Sydney and I know, from first hand experience working with them, these large consulting companies have the same or less technical expertise. What they do have is huge sales teams and even larger teams of project managers. The odd technical person they have is spread across so many projects they are pretty much useless. They employ hordes of off-shore developers that are managed people with little or no clue about anything.
[+] [-] throwaway897987|3 years ago|reply
Your mileage may vary, some team in the gov are doing some wonderful things like service nsw which has been creating component libraries available for most popular framework and mock tools: https://www.digital.nsw.gov.au/delivery/digital-service-tool... Unfortunatly the internal politics make it we can't use any of the stuff they do in the part I'm involved with
[+] [-] volcanok|3 years ago|reply
This is correct. Consulting is 100% marketing. It appears the problem is, how does a team of actually skilled engineers who wants to get a start in this business compete with these sales companies? The people hiring them have no clue, hence why the marketing is the most important thing, and many of these companies have inertia from a bunch of previous projects they can use in their marketing.
I feel like actually good engineers have the least social contacts, and it is these social contacts that provide all of the opportunities to start building a client-base. This seems to be the case with society in general. Everything is decided by social relationships, and the best engineers are the worst at creating these relationships, or are actively excluded from them as some sort of defence mechanism for social people to maintain power. Hence why we end up with a bunch of terrible products and software. It is all bundled up in a cocoon of social contracts.
[+] [-] denkmoon|3 years ago|reply
Just so we're all clear here, this is by design.
[+] [-] hnick|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway-aogS8|3 years ago|reply
Not for government contracts. This fuck-up is true blue 100% Made in Australia.
[+] [-] smackeyacky|3 years ago|reply
You can quibble over what needs cutting/pasting or whatever on the ATO forms but the system it replaced (the execrable desktop app), the ATO MyGov interface is so far ahead it isn't even funny.
However, I've never had to deal with their helpdesk.
[+] [-] PickledHotdog|3 years ago|reply
Nope. Had to nuke the whole account and start again. Had to relink all services. Lost all communications in the "inbox".
I had to laugh. The alternative was too frightening.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|3 years ago|reply
So, they got exactly the thing they insisted on. And now they are blaming the consultants. Bureaucracies work like this: they are full of useless people defending their existence by participating in endless meetings that will find creative ways to deflect any form of responsibility and accountability. So, bonus points for meetings with consultants. The more expensive the better.
Pass it up the chain to the politicians who will be long gone by the time the whole thing blows up. They absolutely love that; do what the expensive consultant says. Which is of course echoing what they were told by the incompetent bureaucrats. The bigger the egos in the room, the dumber the plans get. Usually these projects start off fine and then some moron pulls rank and derails the whole thing by insisting on adding their own requirements to the pile. Big expensive projects attract that kind of behavior; it's almost inevitable. And then some politician signs off on it. Job well done.
The consultants bill by the hour so they don't mind the endless bullshit and they take notes. And then they do as they are told to take the money regardless of whether that makes any sense. There's almost no way for a happy end in such a situation. Don't blame the consultants; blame the career bureaucrats and the politicians for being absolute idiots, again. This outcome was 100% predictable 20 years ago.
[+] [-] TempestSA|3 years ago|reply
This. How can companies/governments still think that you can "outsource" IT, when technology is not only tightly integrated into the fabric of what a modern company is, but nowadays a solid technology capability sets the high performers apart from the laggards. It's just as ludicrous as outsourcing the HR, sales team or the executive office.
Unfortunately unlike in the real world where these companies will become uncompetitive and dissolve, we are stuck with our government and their outdated operating models...
[+] [-] zmmmmm|3 years ago|reply
The irony is, it's nearly exactly backwards.
I have literally never seen effective use of consultants and outsourced work like this except in one situation: where you DO have the internal skills. Pretty much the only way to get any value is when you have highly knowledgeable and skilled people with strong engineering background managing the process.
Of course, convincing highly skilled engineers that it's a valuable use of their skills and time to simply manage a bunch of outsourced consultants when they could be directly managing a team somewhere else is a challenge in itself.
[+] [-] kromem|3 years ago|reply
They'd nod their heads in agreement, pat me on the back for the sage advice and themselves on the back for bringing in that sage advice, excited about things that would clearly bring in billions in revenue.
Which then never actually happened.
But you could have the crappiest most conartisty 3rd party offering at a ridiculous price tag that they'd gleefully throw money down the drain with, and then the next year I'd get brought in I'd be met with reluctance to work on whatever I was proposing because "oh, we tried that."
No, no you didn't.
Eventually I got tired of being a professional Cassandra and left the industry.
[+] [-] ramoz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistrial9|3 years ago|reply
becuase they have the budget and others do not. It really is that simple.
[+] [-] jkahn|3 years ago|reply
The hard part of the MyGov platform is the inter-department stuff, and I don't think that's a software issue, that's bureaucracy.
MyGov isn't perfect, but it's fine.
[+] [-] The_Amp_Walrus|3 years ago|reply
this problem should be solved by making it not-hard to build the teams etc, not by throwing 10s of millions of dollars at vampiric consultants
it seems it is far less risky to bleed money than it is to make any kind of meaningful change to the way gov depts are run
[+] [-] yen223|3 years ago|reply
To be honest, my interactions with the Australian government websites + apps has mostly been positive. There are some truly horrendous websites from other nations' governments out there.
[+] [-] strken|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tallytarik|3 years ago|reply
Sure. But then why have they spent tens of millions of dollars trying to build a new version - https://beta.my.gov.au - that works the same or worse?
[+] [-] ClumsyPilot|3 years ago|reply
Nk it's not - if we are talking about ordinary 1x develooers making ordinary web services, this is a normal job. Uk government has them.
[+] [-] ab-dm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrmincent|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n-e-w|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebast_bake|3 years ago|reply
I can only imagine how colossal the undertaking must have been. MyGov ties together our largest, most bureaucratic organisations. Imagine being tasked with such an project, building the web application is the easy part, you also need to convince a country's largest organisations to change how they operate.
Considering this, I'm actually surprised how good MyGov is.
[+] [-] kdtsh|3 years ago|reply
Edit: the problem here of course is that if you make a phone call you can expect to wait in a queue for many hours.
[+] [-] blarg1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unlikelymordant|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] systoll|3 years ago|reply
The new goal was to provide a unified front – users would navigate through MyGov based on their needs and goals and be sent directly to the relevant forms and info from all departments.
EG – instead of going to Centrelink and seeing only JobSeeker, or going to the ATO and seeing only JobKeeper; you’d go to 'COVID relief payments' and see a clear explanation of both, and you’d be able to apply for either one directly.
But in the beta… it’s basically just Centrelink. In the entire 'Health' section, the only medicare service mentioned is the proof of COVID-19 vaccination.
The end result is that https://beta.my.gov.au/en/myaccount/dashboard/ is basically the old mygov, and the rest of the site is a mirror of https://servicesaustralia.gov.au .
[+] [-] jiggawatts|3 years ago|reply
These places have some of the worst-run IT departments on the planet. I can say this with more than a little evidence. As a consultant, I've worked on over a hundred customer sites, all the way from tiny private companies up to federal government, including all three of those agencies. I've seen how IT is done at just about every state government office in my state, and two dozen in other states.
There just is no comparison. Centrelink especially is so fucked up that people think that I made up my stories about my experience there. It's crazy beyond belief.
The sheer scale of it is amazing. They have over 1K IT staff in one building, and spent $2B on a single software upgrade project! They have huge teams for obscure tasks that other large enterprises might have just one or two people doing. There are Big Name consultants everywhere. Direct vendor support, often flown in from the US, which is otherwise rare around here.
Despite all these people, money, and support, nothing works. Nothing. It's all broken. Everything. Every part. It's a sight to behold.
I wrote a report for them about a key security system where I pointed out that out of something like 50 settings, 47 were incorrectly configured. The only reason it "worked" is because the errors cancelled out. That is, it was incorrectly rejecting valid access, but another error meant that the rejection was being ignored. And so on.
Similarly, their core authentication system was supposed to be distributed and highly available, but the main architect put all of the servers into one rack, one on top of another. He said with a straight face that a product that is well known in the industry for its efficient wide-scale replication is "bad at replication" and only works if the "network cables are really short". He meant 30cm, not 3000km. A power outage took out all three "redundant" controllers, and so something like 80K staff spent several days staring at login prompts on their monitors for a few days.
I could go on, and on, and on. I have a whole collection of stories like that.
The most amazing part is that I was only there for a couple of months, yet this short time period yielded 8 of my top 10 horror stories from the field.
It's also the only workplace setting where I had ever seen a man cry. For work related reasons. Several men, on several occasions.
[+] [-] somada141|3 years ago|reply
Maybe having to queue up for 3h in the cold to be greeted by a grouchy underpaid public servant that would have you queue up again next week (the Greek experience) until you have to call some person you know to do basic things like renewing your passport has lowered the bar too much for me.
Let’s not forget software is hard in the best of environments and archaic governmental offices and processes aren’t exactly conducive to development velocity and quality
[+] [-] tpmx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrixton|3 years ago|reply
Bear in mind that it's mainly (only?) a portal to other departments (ATO, Centrelink, Medicare?).
I don't actually see why we're bothering to "upgrade" it at all, the mention of not being able to deploy a styling change, who gives a toss honestly, styling is way down my list for something like this.
When I had to get a MyGov ID for my son, it did the facial recognition off his passport (no idea if it would have allowed someone else...) fine, set it all up just fine in Covid lockdown so that's a +.
My main gripe is that unless you want their crappy app installed, the only MFA option is SMS, which as this audience knows is just not secure.
[+] [-] shakna|3 years ago|reply
Especially when there's breaking changes [1] every two months or so.
[0] https://consumerdatastandardsaustralia.github.io/standards
[1] https://consumerdatastandardsaustralia.github.io/standards/#...
[+] [-] tonfreed|3 years ago|reply
There's no real leadership or technical ownership of the product, and I've found that the PMs will often just quickly blame the user for not using the software correctly rather than actually reflecting on why they may be getting that feedback.
The consultants may have fucked up, but they were only able to because the people in charge fucked up first.
[+] [-] aetherspawn|3 years ago|reply
However, my birth certificate is from a small country hospital and in a non-standard format that it doesn't recognize, and now that myGov is the standard channel, it's so difficult to apply for anything. And I can't just .. be re-born at a different hospital .. so that the system will accept my application to become a chartered engineer.
[+] [-] simonw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macropin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JMS2021|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Krisjohn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n8ta|3 years ago|reply
"We’re supposed to be adopting an agile development methodology"
Ah yes the classic agile setup 2 week sprints where at the end of each sprint you rotate companies.
[+] [-] fphhotchips|3 years ago|reply
If you've never worked in or with government in Australia, I highly recommend checking it out. Then remember that the real thing is worse.
[+] [-] WatchDog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhitza|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cgb223|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway-aogS8|3 years ago|reply
I believe the project actually ran on pretty standard 2 or 3 week sprints.
[+] [-] senectus1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Trouble_007|3 years ago|reply
Thinking Cybersecurity – A/Prof. Vanessa Teague (ANU) : https://www.thinkingcybersecurity.com
blogs and code on github : https://github.com/vteague
Twitter @VTeagueAus
[+] [-] throwaway-aogS8|3 years ago|reply
While I didn't work directly on myGov, I knew quite a few people on the team that did (at all levels) and had a fair number of depressing pub sessions with them lamenting the entire project. This article doesn't say much that the people working on it weren't saying throughout the entire delivery.
I'm not going to defend the ludicrous cost of the project; we all know that outsourcing to private consultants to save money is a neoliberal pipe-dream up there with "trickle-down" economics. Many of the contractors for government agencies are former public sector workers who have been driven out by the laughably uncompetitive wages and the government's hostile attitude towards the APS.
And can you blame someone for leaving a job where they aren't supported and are mocked by the governing party in the media, when they can do essentially the same job with less bureaucratic oversight and twice the pay as a consultant or contractor? Why would they stay? A sense of civic duty? That's called "being a gullible c*nt" here in Australia.
The article even points this out:
> "Agencies are somewhat compromised by no longer having lots of these skills in-house."
No shit. Who knew systematically de-funding your own public service meant it would lose efficacy? Starve the beast[1] is a toxic political strategy that never should have made it across the pacific.
So that's why myGov is expensive; we're paying to support an entire ecosystem of middlemen. But if you want to know why it's a shit-show these quotes from the article point to (imo) the biggest cause:
> Responsibility for the "enhancement" of myGov was transferred from the DTA (Digital Transformation Agency) to Services Australia (formerly Department of Human Services/Department of Social Security) in late 2020
> "Individual agencies continue to do their own thing [...]"
MyGov was meant to integrate government services, but none of the agencies would actually expose a single endpoint for the myGov team to integrate. Months and months were spent just trying to get agencies to accept that for an integrated platform to work they would need to support a common authentication system. Doesn't leave much to do except polish the UI, does it?
This quote from the article literally made me laugh out loud:
> "What's so hard about making these improvements? I don't understand why it has taken that long and cost so much money to do that."
> The main goal of myGov was to integrate a range of government services from different departments seamlessly on the one platform. But the new beta version of the platform still doesn't do that effectively
The problem wasn't technical, it was institutional. The Australian tax payer just spent millions of dollars hiring consultants to try and herd cats. They weren't outsourcing for developers as much as they were outsourcing for mediators.
The DTA was meant to be the solution to digital integration of government agencies in Australia by setting up an internal government digital agency. But the large entrenched agencies (such as Services Australia) had no real incentive to listen to a word it said and every incentive to resist relinquishing control to it.
The agency is for all intents-and-purposes now dead. It's only remaining responsibilities are "advisory". Even the official design system inspired by the highly praised GOV.UK one was decommissioned practically before it got off the ground [2]
The myGov and DTA story isn't some simplistic private vs public sector issue. This is a fundamental culture issue within Australia (and it seems the whole anglosphere at the moment). No one is happy except the ministers and executives rorting record amounts of cash out of the system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast [2] https://designsystem.gov.au/
[+] [-] aemreunal|3 years ago|reply
[1]: www.turkiye.gov.tr