Re: Big IT

[DavidR5317]

Tim:

2 questions:

<<Let's see: if one per cent of the US$1.8 billion budget were allocated
to an independent risk management strategy involving a FOSS approach -
that's US$18 million. That's more than enough to complete the design,
build and testing of OpenEHR, construct all sorts of interfaces and
front-ends for it, and probably develop a large number of archetypes,
all on very acceptable timeframes. >>

Question 1:
<<an independent risk management strategy involving a FOSS approach ->>

If you use a FOSS approach as an independent risk management strategy, then doesn't the final product of the FOSS approach have to match the functionality set that was planned in the Big IT project to begin with?  I suppose the risk management strategy here could be to "fall back" to less functionality than originally planned in the event of main project failure and one has to use the risk mitigation solution since one doesn't expect the original project to fail.

Question 2:

If one assumes that the risk management strategy has to deliver some level of functionality that was originally planned for then I'm curious as to how you think that US$ 18 million is enough to do all of what you list above i.e., complete design, build and test of OpenEHR and construct all sorts of interfaces and front-ends for it, including archetype development in an acceptable timeframe (assuming as above that it has to deliver a significant amount of the planned for functionality)?  Do you use a formal estimating methodology? or is it just a guess?

The bottom line for the senior management to buy in to this approach is that they can deliver the requisite functionality in the timeframe for a given cost and at an acceptable level of quality as measured by software defect removal efficiency  (or some such metric).  All I see above is some wishful thinking about how if you only had a small percentage of such a large budget you could finish some open source project.  To make the business case you have to show how it solves their business problem not how it solves your problem.

Cheers:

DaveR