Army spaffed millions up the wall on flawed Capita online recruiting system - report The Ministry of Defence's implementation of a computer system for an online recruitment drive has reportedly been far worse than the "teething problems" the UK government coughed to in December. According to The Times (subscription needed), the British Army's £1.3bn scheme to allow the MoD to privatise its recruiting and move …
Another great private sector trick.
Imagine the scene................
Hi we are money grabbing IT/IS provider (might be Capita, Serco, G4S, EDS, Cap Gemini, Atos or.....) we know and can do very little but we will be your Prime Partner cos we have ex Govt and ex MOD people who can ensure we are the prime contractor even though we know and do nothing.
Then we will bring in experts in the field e.g. Kenexa or as it is now IBM and they will deliver the solution along with our many other value adding leeches.
We will mark-up all their costs which already include their profit and provide absolutely no added value other than billing your sad Govt ass's.
If you are nice to us we might take our contract awarding friends from the Govt out for expensive meals to congratulate each other on another great deal for the UK Public and Govt.
Sound familiar to anyone?
I did this once -- a process similar to recruitment and pretty complex, as I also needed to cover several languages, currencies, and so on. I was the design/usability person and I had two 'old lags' in IT who used old-but-seaworthy code to build an absolutely brilliant solution. Worked correctly right from the get-go, and cost the company only our salaries and a project management person we all ignored. It was my first in-house, hands-on big bit of work and my respect for IT professionals shot through the roof. They simply are a breed apart from the consultants (Capita, etc etc) I've had the non-pleasure to work alongside since.
Everything paid for by public money should be FOSS by design. Pay companies to develop it, but all source remains in the public. No proprietary formats that cannot be exported. Contracts should be used to pay *people* to do work, not make $profits for massive corps.
Sorry I've had my coffee, I am making Hydrogen bond plots, and this stuff just seems sooo broken....
P.
But if you make it FOSS then you can't charge the government twice for delivering the same pile of cack I mean software again.
Not to mention that the general public could point out bugs, rather than allowing you to charge a lot of money to fix the mess you made in the first place. Oh, and you hardly want everyone being able to see the shoddy excuse for code that you've just delivered do you?
You really have no clue about government procurement. One would almost think that you think the whole point of the process is to provide the government with something that works...
;)
when you have 1.3 billion to blow, would be to buy a new naval war ship. Sail it around the uk with lots women in just their bras and combat trousers and station the recruitment centers on board ship.
I'm sure that would be a lot more cost effective and drive recruitment up, and when the campaign is over, the boat can passed on to the navy.
Why, why, why do these companies keep getting contracts? It beggars belief, there can only be a healthy amount of backhanders going on to explain this?
Minister: But why should I give you the contract, you've fucked up every one you have ever had.
Capita: I'll quote you half of whatever everyone else has quoted and here's 10% of the extra 500% I intend to charge the government in 'overruns' before failing to deliver anything useful.
Minister: You've got a deal!
Or is there a lesson here? Never attribute to corruption what can more easily be attributed to our Government being run by a bunch of f**king idiots!
How did we ever manage to recruit enough people to turn up at previous wars without this £1.3 Billion doohicky? is one question that springs to mind.
Another is, how many military personnel have been made redundant to pay for this white elephant?
Lions led by donkeys
Whatever happened to the human touch during recruitment and gut feeling which is distinctly missing from any computer system
Whilst it may be said with hindsight this money could have been better spent on bolstering the security of our systems that widely use internet connections.Which in the event of conflict will clearly be open to attack from other countrys as a preemptive attack on infrastructure and the military's ability to even launch a counter strike.
The US Army dumps piles of cash for recruiting, and shovels more money trying to keep Army Knowledge Online afloat (with diminishing returns on both). Having worked shortly with the Recruiting Command here in the US, I'll say that if some joe or jane isn't smart enough to figure out where the nearest recruiting station is located, they probably shouldn't be carrying a firearm or put in charge of multimillion dollar pieces of equipment.
Really, it shouldn't should it, but then I guess we are all singing to the choir.
How do they get the contracts, that's easy. Everything is "too big" for anyone other than the established players to compete with and if an enterprising individual broke the big contract down to a series of smaller contracts (along the lines of Simple Iterative Partitions theory) then the big boys complain as they have the ears of the very top of government.
So once again monumental waste. The large corporate multinationals are no better, hence the plethora of PWC, CapGemini, KPMG types in all those organizations too.
No one ever got sacked for choosing <insert establishment here> isn't it about time someone did?
My son went through the process for army recruitment last year and it was slow and confusing. You never saw one person to speak to as Capita took all the actual face to face contact with a careers adviser away from them. The system was confusing and slow for both the applicant and the company with Capita not returning calls and emails. Shoddy at best.
Please don't confuse British Army with MOD.
Where one is heroic, astute, brave, courageous and has tenacity existing over many years the other probably gets nose bleeds at the thought of a paper cut getting stuff from the printer (there) to the shelf (0ver there) without tripping up over the wire (there) and don't get me started on the delays on the tube dah-lingk no?
Warriors v wimps
body bags v claim forms
integrity unto de-ath v mincing escapist apologies
no?
...when the Government had it's own in-house project programming and consulting team. Which had world-class experts on it, and didn't cost them a penny more than standard civil service wages.
It was called CCTA - The Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency. In between supporting government computing projects, it wrote things like ITIL and PRINCE.
It was closed down in the 1990s after the Computer Industry lobbied government to get rid of it. One of the arguments they used was that the Government were unfairly competing with their industry by using government cheap experts.
I also asked myself the question of why wouldn't they look at :
Totaljobs
Monster
or any other mass market recruitment portal which already has the tech and processses baked in
what about HR and Recruitment BPO players like Alexander Mann......
Why reinvent the wheel with a player plainly not up to the job
Certainly without a shadow of doubt the Public Purse should not be paying for failure; and PAC should be all over this ensuring that we do not throw good moeny after bad.
I at least gave G4S some credibility after the Olympic fiasco; they were contrite and waved some costs proportional to the screw up they caused.
I may possibly once have worked on the previous incarnation, for the small subcontractor that actually did the work behind many layers of bureacracy. One change was to add a checkbox to a form and save the field in the database - no special logic involved. The bill for that (no idea what the total was including the layers above us) was heading in the direction of 6 figures..
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