MPs slam government's 'obscene' IT spend

Oh look there's a number lets focus on that

Sometimes people make me laugh.

Forget the cost of the PC and look at some of the other statements here for exaple "some sources" and "doesn't collect the information" and "an SME". Excuse me but I think I really need to get the facts which this article seems and therefore one assumes the report, seem very short on. We can all make allegations and comments but without facts we can't actually deal with things.

So for example I bet the cost of PCs for MOD and particularly MI5 and MI6 aren't cheap. I bet the FCO also has quite expensive PC requirements and I am sure there are others. Either way that covers off the average price in "some" departments.

Day rates for consultants are massively over priced compared to an IT consultant from an agency. Of course that one man band will stand up to the costs of getting it wrong assuming he has Professional Indemnity insurance of greater than £1 million.

I have seen all this before from Govt and civil servants who seem not to understand a)how businesses work and b)why it is better from a risk perspective to choose a large supplier than a niche market player (a) = to make money and not like the civil service to consume it and b)'cos the big company has deeper pockets when it all goes wrong).

The reality is that big companies and govt don't get on well because most of the time they don't recognise each others strengths. I have seen to many projects where the govt dept throws a project out and expects the supplier to perform magic to fix all the problems that come with the deal at no cost. At the same time I have seen plenty of contracts where the customer outsources the work and then retains the bulk of the staff who used to do it, to keep doing the work because they don't trust the supplier. Farcical

But if no one wants to actually collect facts and data and understand the inter-realtionships around the why things happen or are done then the likelihood is that will continue to see big IT spend and lots of failing projects.

Abandon hope all ye that enter...

There is no hope of improvement in this sector until the government makes it easier to employ people from outside more frequently rather than the SC merry-go-round they have today.

I have worked in and around the "big names" in IT for nearly 20 years. Last year I worked as the lead architect for a data centre refresh. My team (Me, 4 SME's and 8 engineers) virtualised over 500 servers and migrated to two new data centres in 10 months start to finish. (God bless the private sector)

My current gig is government based, with half the scope of my last role, but I have been on the job since April and we still have not achieved a single thing. Although somehow the project has accumulated several TB of protectedly marked documents relating to want they want to do, if they make up their mind...

The team involved on this project is now over 300 strong, and no one is at all bothered that nothing is moving.

The government customer is dishing out a lot of pain for the supplier at the moment. (A bunch of petulant children pushing for their own way, springs best to my mind.) but they just don't understand that their behaviour will bite them back. You can't show them the errors of their ways. They just can't comprehend it...

So the contract is set to recoup the losses made in the bid and transition stages...

One day in the near future, all of the clients servers will be sat in the suppliers data centre's. All the staff that ran the service will be gone (dispersed into shared service elsewhere). Every change will cost 8 times what the the last one cost, and the termination clauses will make a bean counter weep. All because the government went in with their big balls out, set on beating up the supplier to get everything for free in the name of value for money...

Missing Fifth Recommendation

How about a fifth recommendation - to use buyers who have a clue about what they are buying.

My experience in a large comapany is that the knowledgable people are all pre-occupied with the main business (heavy engineering) while things like finance and purchasing are left to clerical-type middle aged women.

I remember when an average PC cost about £1000. A company note came round from Purchasing Dept that all future PCs were to be obtained though them "because they had negotiated a contract with [major PC company] to hold their prices for the next 5 years".

The idiots were really proud of this. The rest of us read it with dismay as everyone knew that PC prices were falling like a lead balloon at the time.

When I was an independant contractor at the Rural Payments Agency:

I bemoaned load and often that Accenture had basically fitted little more than a faucet into the government coffers to be turned on and off at will.

Unsurprisingly, I wasn't overly popular with senior RPA management - they did keep renewing my contract though, I assume because I (like most of the other independent IT contractors) was actually delivering value.

I have to add that there were a small number of Accenture staff who managed to both give a damn and be competent - but this was utterly not representative.

I will never forget being told by a senior RPA manager that I had to realise that the 'solution' was only one part of the 'contract'; and the 'contract' was the authoritative bit. That's how incompetent they were - this civil servant manager - who kept getting promoted - could not comprehend that her precious contract ONLY existed to facilitate the implementation of a functioning, workable solution.

I can kind of excuse the incompetence of RPA's management - to an extent - it wasn't malicious, just tragic (AFAIK - one Accenture guy once told me [+ one other independant consultant] he was very uncomfortable with something he had learnt about the way the programme was being controlled at the Accenture end, but wouldn't be specific).

But Accenture could not have not known what they were doing - it often seemed they were determined to put in systems and components that seemed virtually designed to guarantee future complex change requests, when it would take LESS time and LESS development to support the necessary options from the start.

As final proof - I offer that they resisted, HARD, ever utilising or delivering a data dictionary of any sort, for a long long time - and when they finally did, it was a useless, incomplete, retrospective document - that they charged a fortune for.

Sad :-(

The above are solely my opinions and impressions, informed from being engaged by the RPA for several years of mind numbing frustration. I used to think that if the chance ever appeared to see Accenture dragged into court and sued by HM Govt for what they did, I'd document as much as I could to help see them pay for what they did. These days, I can barely be arsed writing these posts every once in a while when the topic cycles through the news again.

Oh, and please, there are a lot of hard-working civil-servants at the RPA, who don't deserved to be knocked as being 'jobsworthies' or the like - they are just powerless against the culture.

With Gov IT policies, they're lucky it _only_ costs £3,500

Depends on if we're just talking about Hardware, or adding software, service and network charges. At which point £3,500 is a bargain for what Gov agencies expect.

- Standard Hardware costs (minimal costs)

- Licensing for basic software (minimal costs)

- Licensing and customisation for weird and wacky gov software (obscene costs)

- Permanent right to call Gov IT Service desk for ranting and support (moderate costs)

- Lease arrangement to perform hot-swaps at any stage (minimal)

- SOE/IMAGE overheads requirements because agencies all want different hardware to run all their software packages (moderate costs)

- Data connection costs (permanent 100/1GB data connections aren't cheap)

- etc etc

it's not a cheap exercise, but it's all pretty logical. Just depends on what this report is actually saying about capital costs vs ongoing/running costs..... sounds a bit vague to me...