Re: Part of downsizing government, enriching the corporates
What interests me here, from a UK local govt experience, is that the level of waste by frontline staff who are allowed to get on and do the job is is usually not very high because the available funds are dedicated to getting the job done, But when public bodies try to make cuts by seeking out (often imagined) waste it usually seems to end with fewer people doing the work that needs to be done and more managers with overlapping responsibilities, such that no one is fully responsible and the management to frontline cost ratio increases. (Think NHS administrators). Or else departmental spending is done in a hurry to meet arbitrary deadlines or claw backs that fail to bother with financial planning or long term needs. I've suffered in the past from having a chunk of carefully balanced budget whipped away from me because I'd only spent 80% of it at the 80% stage of the year. I inherited cupboards full of envelopes when I took the job. Because past managers had learnt the same thing the same hard way and stored their budgets by buying things they would need eventually. And I've seen other spending decisions made in a rush, without full information because of the worry that the beancounters would see that the money hadn't been spent yet and suddenly conclude that it couldn't be needed enough (or someone higher up had done some ear bending to get a favoured vanity project funded instead). The beancounter mentality can easily create perverse incentives. And the increased layers of management give an increased pressure for pet projects that don't necessarily meet the needs of frontline working. I also have a suspicion that some essential spending is deliberately kept below an arbitrary cost level, then the missing bits retrofitted at a later stage at higher costs because the beancounters don't accept the business plan. A good example, a small departmental computer network with no shared area (let alone a server) for shared documents that the team needed to share. Effectively just a bunch of stand alone PCs on a network. The budget for the computers had been cut back so there was no money for any shared storage whatever.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
