Is it? “New government IT-Project launched with no problems” normally does not make it in the news.

Vaccination registration opened for my age group. System crashed immediately, and was down for 1 hour

I can’t speak for other countries or other US states, but from things I saw in the past here in the state of Florida, USA, when the state would put out a request for proposal (RFP), the RFP would lay out the requirements of what needed to be done, and then go on to tell you what software and hardware you were allowed to use in order to accomplish it!

That was 15 years ago, and back then most of the time they wanted Dell hardware & a Windows Server OS, but the budgets were astounding! If you could manage to get a contract, there was plenty of money to be made.

Here in Florida, back in 2013, they spent $63 million USD to build CONNECT, Florida’s new unemployment system which failed in a spectacular fashion when COVID hit. And as usual, plenty of finger pointing and blame to go around. In 2020, during the COVID pandemic, they spent an additional $25 million USD patching it up to make it halfway work. Now, the price tag to replace it and build a whole new system is $70 million+ USD. It’s just unreal!

I look at something like Florida’s CONNECT failure and think, “Gee, I could have done that better with Elixir & Phoenix and a few Linux containers!” LOL But then I remember those old RFPs and think “Nah, they have you set up for failure before you even get started!”