was RickRussellTX @ reddit
First of all, congrats! Your business must have become pretty successful. How exactly did CF decide to “ask” you to switch to Enterprise?
Maybe…
* You violated their terms of service…
I wouldn’t say Cloudflare is innocent, here, but this business handled Cloudflare the cudgel that was used to beat them. They admit to doing something with their domains that was expressly prohibited in the service they were paying for.
Not always. Sometimes it’s pivoting to whatever is making them the most money. Or eating their own dog food to prove their product, even if that product sucks.
Sure. The ability to pivot has a lot to do with whether the process is fundamental to the way they make money. The more fundamental it is (part of their “core competency”, as Weird Al would say), the more likely they will have a “secret sauce” that they can’t change (or even openly discuss until you are contracted, onboarded, and NDAed).
think they can just do it the same way they did it with State X and hope that State Y can just map terms
With respect, that’s the same error that I’m accusing the article of making. You can’t just tack on complex bespoke development on an open system and expect to get the results you want for cheap.
Have you even seen a government RFP? They tell you. Every. Single. Requirement.
Ehh… I respectfully disagree.
I work in the US, and I’d say that what you just said is true for a subset of well-specified federal contracts.
But at the state and local government level? It’s not true at all. I’ve done requirements gathering at the state and local government level and it’s like herding cats. The contract itself will have high-faluting language about “the contractor shall implement an information processing system to X, Y, and Z”, but as for HOW you’re going to X, Y, and Z, figuring that out all comes after the ink is dry on the contract. And there’s no guarantee that X, Y, and Z actually make any sense in light of the data and capabilities that the state or local government actually has. That language came from legislation, or the mind of a high ranking bureaucrat, not any of the people who do the literal day-to-day work.
I mean… the headline is basically wrong. There are plenty of purpose-built tools for public administration, often configured and supported by the same big players (e.g. IBM). I’ve worked with several of them.
But I think the article hints at the real problem:
They are more complex, less well funded, more prone to change as democratic needs evolve
Governments have requirements, often legislative in origin, that making no f*cking sense and that are incredibly tricky to model in software, because they’re written by legislators who have a poor understanding of automation and how to write clear prose. And those requirements change with the stroke of a pen. Keeping up with them means the constant attention of a large team of software developers.
By contrast, most commercial enterprises can pivot to line their processes up with whatever the industry common practice is. Governments rarely have that freedom.
This statement seems incredibly naive to me:
Build an equivalent stack as a conceptual framework for local government needs and processes, and the things they all have in common will create a huge market for sustainable services despite no two organizations being the same.
The entire reason that governments go to companies like Oracle and SAP for help is that building, maintaining, and changing bespoke applications, and the full stacks to support bespoke applications, in a way that is compliant with government-grade change management is incredibly expensive. The entire selling point of tailoring a commercial ERP system is that it should nominally do a pretty good job of handling “the things they all have in common” at least as well as anything you build yourself. The projects still fail because accomodating the stuff that IS different ends up being a bespoke software project all of its own, and because things that appeared to be “in common” turn out to require bespoke configuration, because the government bean-counters didn’t tell you about a bunch of the nitpicky requirements up front.
The prosaically simple explanation for these failures is that companies like Oracle over-promise, but they do that because almost ANY contractor has to over-promise and under-price to get a government contract.
Source: I work for a company like Oracle, and I work on projects for regional governments.
I don’t like Worried Al. I want Weird Al back.
The Poop Warrior shall live on in our memories.
Same. I support dessamines on Patreon and I’ve dropped donations in several other places.
I’ll pay for Sync again, eventually. But I’ll stick to the ad supported version until it stabilizes.
Err. Wasn’t that already true? He’s chief executive officer, not chief some shit that doesn’t include security officer.