How to get a job as a government advisor
Appear on a "reality" business type show.
Job done.
TV rudeboy and Outsourcery boss Linney joins Gov.UK SME panel
The government has enlisted the boss of an SME yet to win any business via G-Cloud to advise on ways to, er, oil the wheels of commerce for other small traders that have similarly found public sector contract success elusive. Dragons' Den star Piers Linney, joint head at AIM-listed, cloudy infrastructure biz Outsourcery, is …
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Tuesday 29th July 2014 11:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: How to get a job as a government advisor
Yes, God forbid they'd actually set up a panel of possible providers who could tell them that the massive paperwork required to go near governments is not something your average SME has the resources for. Trying to go for government work would burn any profit a SE makes (a ME, maybe, but but a Small Enterprise, red tape equals death.
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Wednesday 30th July 2014 10:50 GMT 20 Years in IT ..
G-Cloud - Great Idea Badly Executed
John Suffolk drove the creation of the G Cloud and then had the floor pulled from under him when it was announced that it would not be compulsory for govt departments to purchase servcies via the G-Cloud.
Without mandatory use of G-Cloud it will never scale and if it does not scale then the costs will never fall.
The concept of forcing govt departments to standardise and share infrastructure clearly makes sense. The commercial opportunity to reduce costs by combining expenditure, for commodity services, is clear.
However the criteria for joining , leadtimes and the purchasing framework makes it too diificult for SME organisations to offer services. The fact that you can only procure these services for les than 2 years makes no sense when you are trying to plan long term strategies which typically look at 3-5 year periods.
Sales over 2 years are less than £200m (many sales are for services over future years), which represents < 4% of total govt IT spend. By any measure this is a comemercial failure.
But the biggest issue for those suppliers who have joined G-Cloud is that the infrastructure they have built is just sitting there depreciating. When it comes time to refresh this infrastructure in the next 1-2 years, they will not be able to justify it against the low sales. So even the customers that they have picked up will risk having no G-Cloud servccee when it comes to the refresh time.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
