Capita immediately suffers over government cuts Shares in the outsourcing giant Capita are being offloaded in response to the new government's first round of cuts. At time of writing the firm is trading down almost two and a half per cent at 780.5p, in a market down only half a per centage point. Capita investors have reacted gloomily to the Treasury's announcement this …
Maybe should have deliverd a bit more and provided better value for money rather than riding the golden goose into the ground!
Like everything from the last Government - Rubbish and no longer required.
Rejoice Rejoice the Wicked Witch is Dead -
Not quite that good but 'Mandy' is looking for another job - No that bad either
Good. They're a monolithic waste of money, having delivered little of any use to our public services at enormous expense. It's not for nothing that Private Eye reports on them wasting our tax almost every issue.
2% is a start, let's hope the other 98% ends up in the toilet soon. It couldn't happen to a more deserving cluster of morons.
Crapita only employ Monkeys that is why they are loosing out, now they are having to compete on an even footing with real technical staff they don't have a chance.
Crapita IT will disappear being as Crapita is an investment group, money was their only motivation for being in the market in the first place.
I hate to come over as all Capitalist but I think you'll find *all* companies are in it for the money. If they're not, they fail to be companies for very long.
Mind you, I gather Private Eye call them Crapita. Hardest company I've ever tried to deal with - Capita, that is: I've never worked with the 'Eye.
Everybody who thinks about getting into bed with a large IT consultancy should ask themselves 1 question: what do they sell - billable hours or a working product? Once they're in you'd better have a rock-solid and unambiguous spec written, cos you add or alter any of the details and it's time to re-cost the job with breach of contract hanging over your head. I've seen this happen in pretty much every job I've been in where my employer partnered with a consultancy.
Anonymous because, let's face facts, if they wanted me as a contractor I'd happily suck on Capita's satanic teat. What can I say? I'm a filthy IT man-floozy.
The Capita business model is to undercut everyone, and then screw the customer on change control, and they are very, very good at that. They even make money on undersold systems by implementing Profit Recovery Plans from day one, that's code for if we don't deliver this, will anyone notice and an unbelievably strict interpretation of the contract.
So if they continue to sell cheap, then I'm sure they have a rosy future. Never mind the quality feel the price.
Mind you, I don't know what optimism bias the Treasury puts on their bids. That's the difference between what the supplier and department say something will cost, and how much and how long the Treasury really think it will be. So when you bid for government work the cost = Supplier Cost + Contingency + Profit + Department Cost + Contingency + Optimism Bias. You actually want a negative or low value, it can be as much as 200%. Accept a bid with that bias and you can kiss your knighthood goodbye.
lolz!
But seriously, have you seen that news a few weeks ago about some guy in the south east I think that formed a co-op of farmers that now provide all the food to their local NHS PCT? I;ve harped on about this for years now but please God can we have something similar for Gov IT contracts? Please, please, pretty please with sugar and sprinkles on top?
If they designed the jobs properly they could unitise many large contracts and save a fortune by having smaller (and probably better) companies involved, whilst keeping jobs in the UK. Ok, time for the pills....
Writing crap in .Net and C# combined with politically targeted and motivated donations makes a strategy only in the short term. In the long term, things have to work and perform up to a specified performance standard and not like the TFL congestion charge system which violates basic web security reqs. Also governments change so donations to a chum end up your bum.
@AC 24-May 1455, quote: "The Capita business model is to undercut everyone, and then screw the customer on change control, and they are very, very good at that."
This is Outsource 101 approach - applies to all of them. Also the use of expressions like 'on time, on budget, fit for purpose, and value for money' are buried deep in their contracts, in small print, and usually in 'white text', which is brilliant since its printed on white paper. (Note that colour printers don't print white text unless it the original text has a highlighted background)
Readers of my SITFO.org blog will know, that for some years now, I have been trying to draw attention to the rather cosy relationships between IT suppliers and civil servants. I have given detailed accounts of senior civil servants knowingly working against the public interest on the back of nailing some short-term, lobby-fuelled tactical target. You would have thought, wouldn't you, that after Stephen Byers's revelations about being able 'to get to the civil servants', there might have been some media focus on exactly which civil servants were 'get-attable'. Not so, Sir Humphrey rolls on unmolested. Meanwhile, my discussions with Conservative-supporting, cloud-based suppliers in 2009, demonstrated them to be equally disinterested in the public good.
Outsourcing suppliers are all much the same but they do serve a purpose in the public sector, the main part of which is to mitigate personal risk to low-skilled business managers. I too have experienced the change-control ploy but not just from Capita. At a time when the private sector is bringing everything back in-house, the public sector continues to tolerate outsourcing and refuses to empower senior, strategic architects and CIOs with the skills to define coherent in-house strategies. Why? Because this would represent REAL change and threaten the established civil service empires. You can count the number of local authorities with a real IT Director / CIO on their chief officer board on the fingers of one hand, yet these are some of the most complex, IT dependent organisations in existence. Similarly, Whitehall is bereft of any empowered strategic IT input.
The jury is still out on whether the coalition government understands the need to define a coherent UK IT strategy (rather than the previous list of policies that have masqueraded as strategy) but before doing that, there is a more pressing need for real governance to be put in place for public sector IT. To do this, there needs to be investment in skilled senior IT strategists.
We can all live in hope...
I remember once trying fruitlessly to explain to a Crapita call centre supervisor that if they really felt it was important for me to change my TV licence to direct debit, there were likely to be more acceptable ways to do it than TEN cold calls in five days.
Crapita stinks and it would give me great pleasure to see them go down the toilet. Futile though it would be, I know - incompetent, crooked trough-snuffling pigopolies like this are like buses, there'll be another one along in a minute.
Had a similar issue (not with Crapita), but you can stop it long before it reaches 10 calls.
Call 1: Tell them that you're not interested
Call 2: Tell them that you're not interested and they should make a note on their system not to call you again and that you will feel harassed by any further calls.
Call 3: Mock the phone-monkey for not knowing that "DNS" stands for Do Not Solicit and point out that they are committing an offense under the Protection From Harassment Act 1997 by doing something that they have been told causes you to feel harassed.
There's something about quoting the section & full name of an act (including the year) that lends an air of authority. It'd probably never stand up in court, but they don't know that and it's fun to hear them panic.
You are deluded if you think Crapita are dead. Who do you think own most of the shares in the company - your loyal Labour members or Conservative voters ?
They will undercut Accenture, IBM, HP, CSC, Fujitsu, will maintain their contacts with the Civil Service mandarins and continue to deliver crap and get away with it because their lawyers are better than the governments.
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