back to article BT health problems will cost more jobs

BT shares fell sharply this morning on rumours that it is to cut another 10,000 jobs and take a massive hit on the cost of its NHS work. The telco is preparing to cut 10,000 more jobs - alongside the 10,000 which have already gone. It will also use next month's results announcement to write £1.5bn off the value of ongoing …

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  1. john loader

    BT didn't learn from its own experience

    In the 1980s BT developed what was then the largest IT system in Europe with its Customer Service System. In the pilot District it wrote off millions due to an inability to bill for many months and delay followed delay initially. BUT they finally achieved rollout and it appears much of the original design is still in place. The trick was change control - if it wasn't a show stopper they didn't do it. And as it was designed by the most experienced users they could find and then checked with the rest of the user community, the specification was generally of a very high quality in the first place.

  2. Fluffykins Silver badge

    And there's still hope it'll get a kicking over Phorm

    That's all

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    BT->IT

    Bt announce 10k more cuts the same day it announces backdoor aquisition of satyam.

    Is this 10k of people who will quietly be replaced with cheap satyam contractors the same way they axed all their other uk works to replace them with tech mahindra offshore people?

    They should be forced to remove the B from their name. There is nothing british about BT any longer.

  4. Camilla Smythe

    Hah hah hah

    Burd Turglers

    As a member of the Masons, Nights Templar and a staunch Tory Voter my cut was small.

    Still I suppose being poor hurts. Should it be my problem we decided you were not worth much anyway.

    Hah hah hah

    Thanks for the fish, bye.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @John Loader

    Nothing like taking something out of time. CSS is now ancient technology - it's still in BT, it runs reliably, but it is a lot of expensively hand-coded Cobol with very limited flexibility built round a very rigid customer model associated with phone lines.

    Modern IT systems aren't like that - they are vastly more complex servicing dozens of different types of users in ways inconceivable 25 or more years ago. Scale up the development and hardware budget that was spent on CSS into a new application and the amounts would dwarf the current NHS contracts. Dealing with the NHS was always going to be a nightmare job for any company - remember that there are two IT companies have fallen on their financial swords trying to deliver the NHS system (Fujitsu and Accenture).

    Delivering an IT system within the scope of one company and it's various departments is bad enough. If you plug into that the incredibly complex nature of NHS politics, local trusts, independent-minded consultants and so on and capricious politicians and you have a nice little problem. If you want a simple job with the like of the NHS - do a simple job. Stick to looking after the infrastructure. I relative of mine now works for a US outfit looking after the electrical installations in local hospitals, and he says he's never made so much money on soft call-out fees...

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    I want to...

    ,,,take redundancy from BT but because I'm on long-term garden-leave, (due to 'health issues',) they won't let me!

  7. Nick
    Thumb Down

    Does not compute...

    And yet... when we try and put business to them, they go out of their way to make life extra difficult. We recently bought Virgin Media Business circuits in our company because we just couldn't get them in any kind of reasonable time/cost despite BT Openreach engineers then supplying the circuits.

    I suspect that maybe one of their ex employee's has stolen a page from their script's and now nothing computes.

  8. alan lovedog

    no they didnt fall sharply.

    they fell by 5% - for about an hour.

    then they rose - and ended up 2% higher than they opened - finishing the day in positive territory too.

    so in other words the market thought it to be good news.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Don't worry

    21CN with their WBC and WMBC is just around the corner apparently - all will be well again for the ailing BT group. (tongue firmly in cheek)

    Makes you wonder who in BT will be doing all the servicing of faults when the proverbial hits which if DSL max was anything to go by it most definitely will.

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