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Australia's biggest IT project failure/blowout may have started today

Procurement commences for billion-buck Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation

Remember the date – September 18th 2015 – as on that day Australia's Federal government commenced procurement for the nation's Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation (WPIT).

The project will see Australia replace systems founded on flat-file databases installed in the early 1980s and known to have been limping along since the year 2001.

The WPIT project's been allocated a billion dollars, but if it delivers on time and on budget, your correspondent will be mightily surprised. The brief alone looks daunting: Australia's social services agencies have over a million clients, send over 180,000 letters and emails every day and send more than AUD$290m out the door every 24 hours.

And of course it is a government project and for evidence of how well they can sometimes go, consider the infamous Queensland Health Payroll project.

The WPIT's Request for expressions of interest says Australia's government is looking for “... suitably experienced and qualified software vendors that are capable of providing a Commercial Off-the-Shelf Integrated Technology Platform and associated Services to support the Department of Human Service’s Welfare Payments Infrastructure Transformation Programme.”

Criteria that must be met before organisations can participate in the future tender for the gig must show they have a culture that matches that of Australia's public service, own a platform that can do the job, have experience on similar gigs and sufficiently deep payroll and pockets to handle the expected substantial workloads.

At a guess, the likes of Oracle, SAP, Accenture and Infosys have had their responses to this REOI half-written for months because they feel they're in the box seat. None, however, has its own cloud in Australia, which could test the nation's ”cloud first except when cloud's not right for the job” policy.

Forgive us the shop talk, but from a Reg point of view this project comes at the perfect time. If Australia's new Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has indeed done so well that Australia's national broadband network can be delivered over the next few years, the IT media will need another enormous and costly project to pick apart weekly.

Something this big, and this expensive, is odds-on to provide years worth of stories about over-spend, over-reach and under-ass-covering. ®

Bootnote: The Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation's acronym - WPIT - is also a gift, at least to DEVO admirers, as we'll be able to use "WPIT good" in headlines for years.

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