Met ready to cough £150m to IT bods who'll help coppers go digital London's Metropolitan Police is seeking a systems integrator to help tackle its creaking IT in a deal worth up to £150m for "digital policing". The force currently spends 80 per cent of its IT budget maintaining legacy systems, according to its Total Technology plan for 2014-17, published earlier this year. Under plans for a …
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Wouldn't it be a good idea for this to be done in house. A very large strategic infrastructure and all that. If it is in house you would have full strategic control and all that management bollocks/consultancy.
I am sure that the project will plod on though. Sorry had to do it. I'm off.
In house means you need the expertise at every stage to manage the software, from design to maintenance. That isn't cheap; having worked with the police on a number of projects none of them have been run 'in house', what engagement we did have with the staff confirmed that if they'd had more control it would have gone worse than it already did.
Many many many years ago, a police force had problems booting a server with a certain very old OS (they openly admitted they had done something wrong during the install), they would not allow remote access and did not want someone going onsite due to security.
They offered to send us the server which they did. On receipt it did have a boot error, but this was different to the reported one, they had taken out the HDD with the bodged install and destroyed it.
We sent them the chassis back, they put in a new drive and installed the OS which worked fine and they were very happy with the service they received from us.
i.e. you may not want to rely on the internal expertise.....
OTOH I have just updated the call script for my hell desk ops. Call stats are well down today. thx
Remove <Have you tried switching it off and on again? Y/N>
Insert <Have you tried removing the hard disk and destroying it, installing a new disk and reinstalling the OS? Y/N>
5 year contract costing £200million, and saving £60million a year = £100 million saving over 5 years.
BUT add in standard 50% public sector cost overruns, and subtract 50% from wishful thinking savings estimate, costs = £300 million, savings = £150 million. Net loss £150million. Plus ca change...
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