Blame game: Not the first time the government has been upset with IBM

THE government is looking for who to blame for the big Census fail and it’s certainly not the first time they’ve been screwed by IBM.

IN THE wake of the Census catastrophe on Tuesday night IBM has become the focus of the government’s ire — and certainly not for the first time.

Queenslanders will remember the bitter taste left by IBM after a billion dollar bungle at the beginning of the decade but now all Australians have a reason to gripe.

The tech giant known as Big Blue was hired by the ABS to provide a bulk of the technology behind the 2016 online Census after it won the nearly $10 million contract at the end of 2014.

Once the hashtag #CensusFail began trending on Twitter when Australians were unable to log on and complete the Census form, it was clear IBM’s report card was a resounding F.

Some have even called for the company to hand back part of the money it was paid for the job.

Malcolm Turnbull went on 2GB radio Thursday morning seemingly to lay the boot into IBM and said the “completely predictable” attacks weren’t repelled because there was “clearly very big issues for IBM — the provider of the systems — and the ABS itself”.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton reiterated the sentiment hours later on the same station saying “the contractors, IBM, will have questions to answer about why the appropriate measures weren’t put in place”.

ABS officials initially said a “malicious” external DoS attack was responsible but the government later walked back the strong language calling it an attempt to “frustrate” the data collection.

SO WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?

According to Patrick Gray, an experienced journalist and host of popular Podcast Risky Business, the ABS and IBM were offered denial of service (DoS) protection services from upstream provider NextGen Networks but said they didn’t need it.

Instead they planned to ask NextGen to geoblock all traffic outside of Australia in the event of an attack.

On Tuesday morning they did just that but when another attack, albeit a relatively small one, later came from inside Australia IBM’s monitoring equipment sent out alerts which were mistakenly interpreted as data being at risk, Gray said in a timeline of events posted to Twitter. That coupled with the failure of a vital router led to the ABS pulling down the site.

So in a nutshell, along with some miscalculations, it’s quite clear that the ABS and IBM majorly skimped on costs and planning.

IBM went to ground in the fallout from the failed Census as the blame game ensued.

The company did not respond to requests by news.com.au for an interview but issued a statement Thursday night saying “we genuinely regret the inconvenience that has occurred”.

IBM thanked the ABS and the Defence Department’s Signals Directorate for their support and stressed that no data was compromised.

“IBM’s priority over the last two days was to work with the ABS to restore the Census site. We are committed to our role in the delivery of this project,” the company said.

“Our cybersecurity experts are partnering with national intelligence agencies to ensure the ongoing integrity of the site.”

Along with IBM, a Melbourne-based firm Revolution IT was hired to perform load-testing on the website to ensure it could handle the weight of traffic.

A spokesman for Revolution IT told news.com.au that the issue was a “security problem that was not a part of the load testing process Revolution IT was paid to do”.

The spokesman said Revolution IT was not in the room on Tuesday night but the testing the company had carried out with the data supplied by the ABS went well and showed the operation “was on track” and the Census site was “ready”.

Meanwhile staff at the ABS were reportedly offered counselling this week and warned to expect backlash.

IBM is still black-listed by the Queensland government.

FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU

Funnily enough, this is not exactly uncharted waters for an Australian government — something which former Queensland premier Campbell Newman was quick to point out on Twitter.

The Queensland State Government previously had such a calamitous issue with IBM that in 2013 it prohibited government agencies from signing contracts with the US tech giant.

The black-listing stemmed from an inquiry into a $1.25 billion payroll failure in which IBM rolled out a flawed system for Queensland Health in 2010, resulting in thousands of pay errors.

What was supposed to be a $6.9 million project cost the taxpayer 173 times that amount.

A commission inquiry in the fiasco found that IBM employees had acted unethically in order to obtain the contract including soliciting leaked information on competitor bids to boost its chances of winning.

As a result, the Queensland government’s ban on IBM contracts remains in place today.

We speak to @riskybusiness about exactly what happened during #CensusFail #TheProjectTV https://t.co/lvrys2zEQp

— #TheProjectTV (@theprojecttv) August 11, 2016

Gray’s Twitter post sparked plenty of discussion on an Australian-focused forum on social media website reddit where one user recalled how the backlash in Queensland remained years after the fact.

“Worked for IBM for three years until recently after they acquired the company I had worked for previously. Given I was QLD based and the stench of the QLD Health payroll debacle was still in the air, I would still use the other business name when dealing with customers in QLD, but IBM in other states,” they wrote.

Much of the discussion in the thread revolved around IBM’s prerogative to deliver exactly what the client asks for, placing the emphasis on fulfilling “customer requirements” rather than the client’s ultimate objective.

News.com.au spoke to one employee from the Department of Social Service who pointed to a number of current contracts awarded to IBM totalling millions of dollars in which IBM’s approach resulted in cost blowouts that he described as “fairly predictable exploitation of opportunity by IBM”.

In 2013, technology journalist Mark Stephens writing under his pen name Robert X. Cringely described the style as a weapon for IBM.

“In IBM’s project management IBM does not care about the ultimate goal. That is their customer’s concern, not IBM’s ... It is the reason so many big IBM projects are failing,” he wrote.

“IBM will sell you hardware, software, programming, and support services. What you do with it is your responsibility.”

IBM IS A MAJOR CLIENT OF THE GOVERNMENT

The $9.6 million the government paid to IBM for the Census is just a fraction of public money the company has been awarded recently.

The Federal Government currently has 132 contracts with Big Blue, with some of the most lucrative deals including a $510 million contract with the Department of Immigration and Border Protection

IBM also has two deals with the Department of Defence worth $311 million and $264 million.

Queensland may be a no go zone but at a state level IBM Australia has $86 million in Victorian government contracts and $357 million in NSW Government contracts.

Malcolm Turnbull speaks at a press conference in the wake of the Census fail. Picture: Mick Tsikas/AAP

TECH SECTOR TAKES AIM AT IBM

As for the latest tiff between the tech giant and the Australian government, the Prime Minister and his cabinet aren’t the only ones to throw shade in IBM’s direction.

Michael Jankie is the chief executive of Australian tech start-up PoweredLocal and said those who supplied the technology solutions for the ABS Census should face financial penalty.

Speaking to the Australian Financial Review, he called the Census fail attempt a “slap in the face to us all” and lamented how the failure had reflected on the industry as a whole and set back a push towards electronic voting.

He was just one of many to take aim at the much maligned company.

The matter was made worse for the government and its contractors on Thursday morning when an ABS insider called into Sydney radio station 2UE and dropped a bombshell.

The caller told the show’s hosts that a colleague from the statistics bureau saw first-hand how the testing systems had repeatedly failed.

He said those working on the project knew it was bound to end in disaster.

“I have a colleague who works in geo-social analysis at the ABS and sits near the testers who work with IBM,” he said.

“He saw some of the load testing that was being done prior to Census website going up and it was failing.

“He knew that it was going to fail, a lot of them knew.”

Mr Turnbull said the government will conduct a review of the events which will include whether the ABS performed adequately and whether contract­ors such as IBM had done enough to prepare for the likely pressure on the system.

It’s believed a particular focus of the review will centre on the failure of some of the hardware provided by IBM.

He also declined to say whether the Federal Government would think about taking the drastic action similar to that previously put in place by the Queensland state government against IBM.