It was announced today that EDS has effectively won a £4bn project to upgrade the MoD's networks. These networks are some of the most complicated I have seen. Given EDS's tack record I wonder how long it will be before something truly disastrous happens.

For those that have forgotten EDS were involved with:

• CSA Waiting times hitting 5 months. In a document given to a commons select committee by EDS, the system was described as "badly designed, badly developed, badly tested, badly implemented". Zero out of four isn't bad!
• 75-80% of the DWP's PCs were paralysed for four days when an upgrade was applied. At the time, this was one of the largest outages in the UK Government's not entirely impressive IT history.
• Hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers suffered short-term hardship when their payments failed to arrive as expected.

Still Fujitsu must be rubbing their hands for getting the Failure Clause in the contract. This allows them to immediately take over any systems that crash.