TAFE's troubled tech terminated

The NSW state government has squibbed in its valiant bid to operate the country's most wasteful IT catastrophe, canning part of a miserably-awful SAP-based enrolment system from the TAFE network after spending over $100m dollars on it.

The Learning Management and Business Reform (LMBR) network TITSUP (Total Inability To Support Usual Performance) managed to do absolutely nothing required of a big-bang educational IT rollout: it couldn't enrol students, couldn't bill them for enrolment, couldn't cope with variations to enrolment conditions (such as fee exemptions for students with special needs), couldn't record student results, and couldn't issue certificates upon completion of courses.

For example: as recently as May, a student told Vulture South his teacher was unable to confirm whether or not he was enrolled for this year's course, or if he would receive a certificate for this year.

It was, in other words, a total brick that the Baird government inherited from its predecessor, but for reasons unaccountably obscured from public view, doggedly pursued regardless of its evident incapacity.

Until now: the combination of a federal election in which education is a serious issue, a string of private vocational colleges charged for a double-play scam (taking money from both students and governments for nothing at all), an upcoming state budget, and a golden-boy premier acquiring feet of clay – all of this persuaded NSW that there's no good reason to keep pouring money into an utter disaster.

The Register has only managed to chronicle part of the astronomical balls-up that the LMBR represents.

But with the idiotic system now ditched with the loss of slightly more money than governments in Australia now want to recover from private colleges that are almost as dodgy as the IT industry, it had to happen: LMBR must die.

The announcement fell to a minister who would be hard-pressed to manage brand recognition two streets away from his home, John Barilaro, who says a new system will be in place by 2018. ®