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Back in 2016 the Australian Department of Health decided to combine the state and federal Bowel Cancer Screening registers into one register and tendered the contract for the project to Telstra. Telstra is Australia's oldest telecommunications company and lacked experience with managing public health systems. After signing the $220 million contract to build a new cancer register, Telstra promptly purchased companies with experience building health systems. After being chided by the AONO (Australian National Audit Office) for not having a plan for data security, Telstra tried and failed to bring services online, delaying the rollout until late 2019.
Now Telstra has set a date for delivery of the expensive cancer register of November 2019, with caveats for some functionality not to be delivered until 2020. So far, Telstra has received only $18 million of the $220 million promised in the contract as the Health department withholds payments as milestones are missed.
How much would you charge to build a bowel cancer registry for approximately 25 million people?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:39PM (3 children)
I'm pretty sure I could do the whole thing myself in far less time than this has taken. I'd probably do it for not more than $50 or $60 million!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by vux984 on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:46PM (1 child)
Heh yah. Its impossible to quote a project based on a spec of "a bowel cancer registry for approximately 25 million people"
Also 25 million is the population of Australia, not the number of people with bowel cancer, or even bowel cancer screening there. So its likely a much smaller registry.
Still, all in, this feels like it could be done for less than $10 million, possibly as low as $2 million. (and that's after simply quadrupling what i really think for it "being a medical system" and it being a "government" project. With dev costs being in the $400-800k range and the rest being overhead, meetings, audits, validations, red tape delays, compliance certifications, accessibility requirements, and whatever else, etc...
But maybe its a much bigger project than it sounds like. These things often are. So it could be 10x or 100x as much depending what the real specs are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @11:15PM
The original system was built by Medicare for less than 1 million. The Health Department chooses who gets the contract for the work. It's supposed to be done by The Department of Human Services but at the time there was a surge of privatisation. This was one of several systems to be split away from Medicare to prove that private companies could do the same job as the public service.
Cost of extending the existing Bowel Cancer Screening Register would certainly be less than 5 million including ongoing maintenance. They did this for the Child Immunization Register.
Medicare / Department of Human Services already have corporate systems and support. They already have Medicare and other systems. So for them this is just another database, back end, front end to extend what is already there. Like if Facebook decided to make a phone app it would already have most parts in place. Telstra had to build this all from scratch.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday May 24 2019, @09:39AM
The Australian National Audit Office is ANAO. Aono is is a form of tentacle sex manga popular in the Ryukyu Islands.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:39PM (3 children)
That's an insane amount of money. For that much money, the system should be curing the cancer as well as registering it.
It almost as mindboggling as the potential $2.2 BILLION that Canadians are paying for a federal payroll program. [wikipedia.org]
I just can't understand it... How is that even possible?
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday May 23 2019, @05:46PM
Where there's gold, the miners will flock.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday May 23 2019, @09:56PM
I know, eh? They SHOULD say "No more money until it's right, and you THEN owe us some back for incompetence."
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1) by Chocolate on Thursday May 23 2019, @11:18PM
Perhaps because Telstra is a private business that expects to make a profit.
Bit-choco-coin anyone?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @05:25PM (6 children)
Is this the main page or what?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 23 2019, @05:31PM (5 children)
You high, bro? Got bit by an Australian creature?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @05:43PM (1 child)
wait how do you get bit by a platypus. if anything one might get pinched or stung, but bit? that's like being attacked by angry ducks and having bite wounds, it just doesn't happen that way. you instead get assualted by angry quacking and rapid flapping!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 24 2019, @03:07AM
By competing with him for females.
platypus venom [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday May 23 2019, @09:08PM (2 children)
I got bit by an Australian creature once.
Her name was Debbie, and I quite enjoyed it. In fact I bought her a couple of schooners and she did it again.
Good times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 24 2019, @07:39AM
Schooners are good, but - after Debbie - antibiotics are better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 24 2019, @07:41AM
Really? Were you carving your initials in her perhaps?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @08:15PM
One of their colonies cannot stitch up a platform for colon registry? They should ask Facebook Jews to handle the task.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday May 24 2019, @07:25AM (1 child)
Projects like this always bug me.
There should be a metric.
If you were to pay each engineer half-a-million dollars a year, get enough engineers to "spend" the original budget and gave them the original timescale, and just sat them in the place that the system will be implemented in and said "get on with it, do whatever they ask"... would they be able to make a better system?
I think, in these kinds of projects, the answer is generally: Hell, yes. If it's software, the answer is almost always yes. If it's some form of hardware-based rollout, e.g. police radios, then generally the cost of commodity hardware coupled with decent engineering wins out. If it's a case of a "national database", even if you assume that you can't use cloud-services and things, the answer is *always* Hell Yes.
At least in this case, unlike many governments, the contracts have staged non-delivery clauses that mean that the only people it hurts are the people not doing their job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 24 2019, @09:21AM
There re metrics. The Australian government has been building systems like this for over three decades. An existing system could be used as a cost reference for how much this new system may cost. It is called Business Application Development. SDLC and co. Agile these days which may go some way for explaining the cost blowout.
The delays are unacceptable. The lack of key delivery requirements is enough to end the contract. They should just pull the pin now. This lack of delivery demonstrates that Telstra is unable to build and maintain this type of IT system. No different from SAP and IBM failures over the years.