Malcolm
I am not at all surprised that the New Zealand Police have lost 31,000 gun records as government departments and quangos have a long record of being hopeless with databases and computer systems.
Until recently I worked in a military organisation, and our engineering group had a drawing department that produced detailed drawings (3D modelling software) of all of the organisation’s equipment and new equipment we designed and built. The 3D modelling software was not only used for drawings but from these, it produced the code for our CNC equipment. Many hours of work went into each drawing, could even be weeks and months for a number of staff.
As running the drawing software is extremely computer intensive we really needed our own dedicated server and main computer, but the IT section knew better and when they moved the organisation’s servers to Auckland the latency just about killed off our 3D modelling software. Worse was to come.
IT moved all of our drawing files to Auckland and killed off the ones in Wellington without checking that they had been successfully transferred to Auckland. Well, they hadn’t, and we lost some 12 months of work that they hadn’t backed up properly as they were supposed to do.
Their response was “it’s only a few drawings, you can do them the again” until our Drawing Office Manager pointed out that this was actually 12 months’ work of 6 staff as well as the drawings that were done by us (Engineering staff) and the cost in time for producing all these drawings was close to $750,000. Needless to say, we got our own server and main computer and were then unaffected by the latency issue with the rest of the organisation’s computer network, servers and users. We also looked after our own backup as we could not trust our IT people. The organisation got the IT staff they could pay for, ie, not the best.
One other government research organisation I worked for had a policy that all data on the main computer system was backed up every night and the data duplicated (tapes in those days) with one copy stored onsite and another offsite in case of fire.
I would imagine the Police would pay similar wages for IT staff as the organisation I worked for did with the same results.
We in the engineering and draughting sections knew more about computer systems, networks and servers than the IT department.