Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte creating app to register 3m EU nationals living in Brexit Britain The Home Office has inked a deal with a coterie of consultancies and system integrators to create a digital app intended to register the three million EU citizens in the UK post-Brexit. The department confirmed to The Register that Accenture, BJSS, Capgemini, Deloitte Digital, PA Consulting and Worldreach had been signed up to …
we need to make sure as much care goes into supporting the users than will no doubt go into developing a good app
Really? That is getting perilously close to making the environment not hostile to immigrants. Your thinking is subversive, the black van will transport you to Lark Hill shortly.
In any case - looking at who is involved, it will be something abominable that will score between 1 and 1.5 on Google Apps. If it scores above 1.7 I promise to print this page and eat it without mustard.
Really? That is getting perilously close to making the environment not hostile to immigrants. Your thinking is subversive, the black van will transport you to Lark Hill shortly.
No risk of that. If it follows the usual pattern, the existing 85 page form will be reduced to a 190 page one before the project is abandoned in a decade or so because of massive cost overruns and a total lack of usability.
No risk of that. If it follows the usual pattern, the existing 85 page form will be reduced to a 190 page one before the project is abandoned in a decade or so because of massive cost overruns and a total lack of usability.
Followed by the project being taken over by Crapita, so they can poke their snouts into what's left in the trough.
1) Deloitte "Consulting" state that they always claimed that bringing in CapGem was a bad idea.
2) Accenture (post Edinburgh council fiasco) agree with Deloitte
3) CapGem repeat RoyalMail contract with 2 year overrun and produce a Drupal 7 site (unpatched)
4) Capita agree to step in and 'help rescue the situation'
5) Costs remapped and escalate from £15m to £1.5Bn with a 3 year delivery window.
6) End product fails to work at all and Capita CEO "at a loss to understand why".
7) Departmental internal inquiry fails to find any party to blame.
Calm yourself citizen.
As a recognized "Centre for Evil" in the UK the Home Office is working tirelessly to ensure that will not be the case.
App defaults will be chosen to be as inconvenient as possible.
Error correction after entry will be almost impossible to carry out.
Multiple fields will be inexplicably interlocked with out proven "Kafkaesque maze" technology.
And of course the app will follow SOP for all phone apps and demand full access to your address book and email, GPS and IP address.
<signed>
The Home Office.
We take evil seriously.
I'm unsure if a mobile platform would be the absolute best interface for such an involved process. On the other hand, 90% of the information required is already known to the Government, such as address, tax, employment history etc, so if the process can be simplified, it might just work.. but that's a big IF.
But if the experience of a friend of mine is anything to go by, the Government cannot (or will not) help the process by accessing those records.
She was required (after paying the £1000+ fee for indefinite right to remain) to provide copies of all the documents that HMG should have already had - and when they asked for tax records she didn't have, she requested them from the Inland Revenue for them and they said they didn't have them.
The newspapers have many stories of people caught in similar traps - the government asking for data that they should already have, but declining to provide records. It seems we are required to keep paper for ever while HMG gets to destroy it or lose it after a few years. Heaven help you if your records get lost or destroyed in a move, cellar flood, attic leak, fire, etc.
My friend moved her residence and business to Norway after spending many years in the UK running her own consultancy (which she had set up after studying at University in the UK). Norway was happy to have her as an EU national, paying taxes and contributing to the economy.
> Making this run on a mobile phone might be trendy, but is it secure ?
> I'm unsure if a mobile platform would be the absolute best interface for such an involved process.
How else would you propose getting easy access to their contact lists and GPS location, and the right time to alert them with directions to the nearest patriotism re-education camp?
(I pondered using "joke alert" but I think devil's advocate is probably more applicable these days)
For a simple form filling app with a database behind it holding a few million records? Nice work if you can get it.
Plus this is just the starting point, since the really big bucks come from the extra bits the client will decide they want bolted on as the project progresses.
I think that £10-15m is indeed just for an app on the phone and a database. The comment from an unnamed source "I guess the complexity will be integrating with other databases," is accurate, but sadly suggestive that nobody has stopped to consider what it needs to integrate with and how, nor what they will do with all the validations, exceptions, errors, updates, and therefore all of that work will be a pricey extra at the consultant's generous day rate.
It won't help that as usual members of the Thieves Guild have been awarded a contract tor work in which they have either a poor reputation, or none at all. I'm surprised that Crapita didn't make it into this money laundering syndicate.
"Plus this is just the starting point, since the really big bucks come from the extra bits the client will decide they want bolted on as the project progresses."
That's a given anyway with all government IT projects, even when the policy isn't dependant on a future Brexit agreement that's still in the process of negotiation. This one is absolutely guaranteed to have policy changes before it's ready.
No, the app will cost a few hundred thousand, and its' own database and hardware will take it up to about a million. The other 14 million will be required to yet again re-animate the body of the 1970s system administrator who they keep in a bubbling liquid filled cylinder fttled with electrodes into his brain, who is the only person left on the planet that knows how to wok with the rusting customised VAX systems with hierarchical databases that are still actually running the core systems the governmen relies on that the app will have to interface with.
Either that, or iit's Accenture, BJSS, Capgemini, Deloitte Digital, PA Consulting and Worldreach taking the fucking piss again at our expense.
"The other 14 million will be required to yet again re-animate the body of the 1970s system administrator who they keep in a bubbling liquid filled cylinder fttled with electrodes into his brain, who is the only person left on the planet that knows how to wok with the rusting customised VAX systems with hierarchical databases that are still actually running the core systems the governmen relies on that the app will have to interface with."
Technical note. The first VAXes didn't appear that early.
The VAXes are there so that the even older ICL and IBM mainframes can talk to each other.
Thanks for the knowledge there, thought it may have been the case, but was not sure.
However, it has reminded me that my first paid work on computers was on a VAX system in the late 80s (doing data entry for a summer), not the UNIX systems a few years later after university (beginning of "proper" career). I have indeed had a few chortles in recent years when encountering younger colleagues who have just mastered the ssh command, and telling them how much harder it used to be typing the 4 letters "call" instead 30 years ago. And the thriill of the efforts of the day's labour thundering out of the dot matrix printer.......aaah!
I do object however to your suggestion that anybody ever got an ICL and IBM mainframe to talk to each other, in any meaningful and useful sense of the phrase.
"I do object however to your suggestion that anybody ever got an ICL and IBM mainframe to talk to each other, in any meaningful and useful sense of the phrase."
Objection noted. A VAX equipped with SNA/RJE was a good way of talking to IBMs, and that apparently included getting two IBMs to talk to each other.
I suspect that many comms projects involving disparate mainframes of the era were quietly shelved in favour of existing tape based solutions.
If they don’t have a supported mobile phone, they won’t be able to install the UK approved “Big Brother” backdoor required for unlocking the phone by authorities.
Do you honestly think Theresa May will approve anyone not proving themselves to the UK by forfeituring their right to privacy.
>And even more curious as to what the Mail and Express would make of such a thing ?
Would they be more outraged by Accenture (USA but now Ireland), Capgemini (France) and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (Ok, UK but doesn't sound it!) having the contract?
1) Started building an app without the policy it needs to reflect...
2) Using off the shelf components
3) Costing 10-15 m
So, they don't know what they want yet, but they started building it.... a national immigration app is sooo common that there is going to a sample app on Themeforest for deloitte to buy at $15...
but it still costs government 10-15 million.
Its all true or none of it is..... (im banking on none).
1) The policy is decided, if the app doesn't implement the policy as expected by the EU, its a bug and we'll fix it, promise
2) Deloitte once made a form based website (i know i coded it)... they can resuse that tech, can't they? (No, no they really couldn't).
3) Its going to cost 20 to 30 million at least.
1) Started building an app without the policy it needs to reflect...
Where've you been this past nearly-two years? It's the new normal now.
Just look at the Northern Ireland border: technology will provide a solution, no political agreement required.
And it seems the EU now agree: they've joined wholeheartedly in the Russian spat designed to distract attention while the "transition" agreement was put through.
Ah the old we don't want to spend money employing people to do this so we'll make an app and on the plus side it isn't transparent. How would you know the information entered on the app is legitimate? will it be used to prove to employers you have the right to work? Will it ever work anyway? So many questions.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
