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constantcryingyesterday at 8:22 AM5 repliesview on HN

I think that is a question of architecture.

What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you. Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare. That you can get all in one from Microsoft is one of their biggest strengths in the market and you must compete with that.


Replies

alias_neoyesterday at 8:46 AM

> there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you

While I understand what you're saying, isn't that surely the problem?

Putting all of your eggs in one basket may give you a nice vertically integrated system you can buy off-the-shelf with little effort, but then you're wholly dependent on that org for everything from the platform you're hosting your infra on, to the tools you communicate with and the software suite running on your workstations; having your org use _everything_ Microsoft might be easy, and a little bit spendy, but the moment Microsoft is off the table, you're left without an org.

Disparate systems from all over the place might very well be more effort, and also likely cheaper/free in terms of licensing costs, which you can then spend on creating jobs and/or contributing back to those systems. The larger your org, the more you'll save and the more you can spend on creating jobs, and more importantly, those jobs can be created locally.

Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.

rglullisyesterday at 11:26 AM

> What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you.

This is what gets us in this mess in the first place.

> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare.

Then scale down the bureaucracy and bring back the decision-making power down to the leaf nodes. Have each institution working as a "microservice" which is responsible only for defining the interfaces on how to interact with them, but leave the internal implementation completely up to the department. You can of course have some collaborative structure where these departments can use as a reference guide, but they are completely free to override those decisions when it best suits them.

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sam_lowry_yesterday at 8:37 AM

I work for a government institution and I assure you that we have more than 20 vendors for IT.

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repelsteeltjeyesterday at 8:48 AM

> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare.

Let's suppose that is true, because it is. But how is that different from any other entreprise, commercial or public?

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mvanbaakyesterday at 8:34 AM

Add integration between all the parts to it and you will see why those big companies stay successful.

Not only is managing 20 vendors a nightmare, they all live in their own bubble and moving data from one to the other is normally not that easy.

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