Say 250 work days, 8 hours a day, 550 changes an hour, 9 changes a minute, a change every 6 seconds or so.

1 change every 6 seconds.

That's not 600 transactions a second, or even 6, thats 0.16 transactions per second.

Gentlemen we have a new level of incompetence! Some sort of crown is in order.

Let me guess, it was outsourced?

Da don't run RON RON, da don't run RON ;)

Seriously though, has there ever been a government IT project that has worked and come in on or under budget?

You have got to be kidding me, right?

As an IT contractor working on state-wide systems in Australia with over 600 concurrent users (100 concurrent at night) and an average of 8 complex *transactions* a second processed without even breaking a sweat...

This is apalling!

The requirement for a register of Births, Marriages and Deaths is basically a souped-up card index - family historians have been converting the 'Victorian' system entries to databases for years. Any half competent programmer should be able to develop a working system in a few days - so divide £6million by 3 and that's a daily rate of £2m - high even for government contractors!

Some time ago I spoke with someone from EDS, a major government IT supplier. I commented upon a recent c*ck-up they'd made and his reply was, "Oh, we've got lots more projects to mess up yet!"

How much of the 6 mill went on testing ? about as much as went into the design - maybe a tenner...

Please stop having babies, getting married or dying until we have sorted out this problem. Otherwise, it may affect your mental health !!

Please put down that blunt object !! PLEASE PUT DOWN THAT BLUNT OBJECT !! PLE........Argh !!

UK Gov + IT = expensive disaster (again)

It's all very well blaming UK Gov for the problem, but it's the suppliers like Siemens who are failing to deliver.

They sit on their fat arses knowing that they've got the government by the balls and that the taxpayer is a cash cow.

I've experienced this myself and it's very frustrating to be working with a third party supplier who simply can't be bothered, because they think that we won't dump them and go elsewhere (because it's political suicide to admit that your third party supplier can't or won't deliver).

It's time the government started using heavy penalty clauses in their IT contracts.

I had need to use the registry service two weeks ago. After cancelling two appointments due to 'resource storages' caused by the new computer system I finally got to see them. The registrar basically complained for 30 minutes how crap the system was (to be honest, it looked pretty unintuative) and how they will still need to re-enter all the information once the system has been fixed.