UK.gov told: You're not very good at collecting quality data, are you? UK government bodies collect data "as an afterthought" or when they've been caught off-guard in a grilling, Parliament's Public Accounts Committee's chairwoman Meg Hillier has said. In her annual report, published today, she describes poor quality data as "the perennial bugbear" of her committee, saying that it has seen repeat …
I guessed I'd always figured HMG collected all kinds of internal stat so they could scope the problem.
Y'know, because being able to measure it's size and growth rate (whatever "it" is) gives you some idea if you can get a tender in from a £1m year business or if you need one of "The Usual Suspects (TM)" and their decades long multi £Bn contracts
But obviously the reason why departments don't know this is because they can't be f**king arsed to collect the data in the first place.
That really does make them astonishingly fu**witted.
Special mention to the Home Office and its role as a designated "Center of Evil" in the British government.
Pathetic.
I suppose it’s a bit early to be drawing conclusions, but two that jump right out at me are that maybe turkeys don’t like voting for Christmas- ie, services at risk of outsourcing don’t see why they should make themselves easy to replace and secondly, if the stats are all badly off and it turns out that the replaced public service was doing much more than its paymasters thought for the money, maybe they weren’t such poor value and could usefully have remained in-house?
Regardless of a persons’ political views on private versus public sector for service delivery, there are a number of very searching questions to be answered here. I’m not very impressed with the ‘business brains’ in charge...
I’m not very impressed with the ‘business brains’ in charge...
I think you misunderstand their objectives, delivering efficient public service is so far down the list it's somewhere after knighting the Loch Ness Monster for services to tourism.
No the objective is get get as much money as possible into the private sector so when they leave Westminster they can cruise into a nice sinecure at one (or more) of the companies that benefited.
On that metric they are doing a splendid job.
Its like when we get a council hosted with us
Council: We only need a server spec'd and priced for 50 users as we will only have a max of 50 users logged on at a time
Us: OK no problem, here is a server that will accomodate 50 users
Council: Hi, the server is slow and it wont let half our staff to connect
Us: You currently have 75 users logged in and the server is out of resources
Council: This is very poor service, what do we tell the media?
Us: Tell them you are going to pay to upgrade your system to accommodate more users
Council: Sorry we cant do this
Council to Media: We are working with our IT provider (named) to resolve the issue
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Media: IT Provider (named) cockup causes Council systems to run slowly
So you see, IT providers get blamed for a lot of stuff, and sure enough it is the IT provider sometimes, but other times its the customer that fails to fully tell us what they want and then expects way more than what they have paid for. But then the media grills the IT provider for the failings
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