Turkish Hi-Tech Efficiency

[Colwyn]

I have been listening to the news about H.M.Govt. having to pay £250m for "sacking" the US IT firm that had a contract to create "E-Borders" for the UK. The piece concluded with the continuing scandal that the UK is still unable to calculate how many people are coming into the country and check this against the numbers leaving. Whatever position you take on immigration - can't say it bothers me much - knowing what is actually happening is surely a proper starting point for decision making. But the UK can't do it.


So how come the Turkish border system is able to tell instantly, on you presenting your passport, whether you have outstayed your 90 in 180 quota?

[JohnF]

The answer to this question actually addresses the reasons why so many online services etc are a lot further advanced than those in many large, first world countries.  There are no legacy systems to overcome - their installations are all fairly new and they did not have massive IT systems in place that had to be migrated/integrated to within the new systems.

Best example is with banking.  When the online banking was set up in Turkey they did not have to take into account a previous, less powerful system - they started from scratch using what technology was available at the time.  Even now, I can do transactions with Finansbank that RBS can only dream about - not because they cant implement from a technical perspective, they can, but the cost factor to integrate with the current setup would be huge.

When the Turkish local councils moved away from ledgers and biro's, they were able to integrate their systems with the Turkish banking systems because they were starting from scratch.

Hope that makes sense!

JF

[Colwyn]

It does make sense, and thanks for posting it.

But, cynically, I have heard IT folk offering similar explanations since the 1970s. The people to blame are the IT people/company who did your job before you and have now escaped with the proceeds of their nefarious activities. Still, that is better than another line that was popular "All the technical systems worked perfectly but the customer wasn't satisfied simply because they didn't like/couldn't understand the front end".  And that, in turn, was better than the once ubiquitous GIGO - garbage in, garbage out that placed the entire responsibility for failure upon the shoulders of the user who were too stupid to use the technology. This carefully avoided the uncomfortable facts that the mainframe cooling system was liable to failure, any lightening strike on your building would disable the entire system and that the fault that was plaguing you was an unfortunately designed-in defect created by a sandal wearing, long haired and bearded, mathematics genius, high on speed and other narcotics, at 2.00am in the morning, under immense time pressure because he had been partying for the previous month instead of doing his job.

At one time I used to attend Systems Analysis business seminars that had a familiar refrain - "Some very good reasons why our super mega-system, costing x zillion pounds, didn't work - and why it wasn't my fault".

[JohnF]

In a nutshell, many of the issues you've mentioned are as a result of beancounters being responsible for IT strategy and not suitably qualified and experienced systems analysts.  Like me   

JF