It Giants 'ripping Off Whitehall', Say Mps

[R K]

Problem is, the private sector generates money and contributes to GDP. Public sector soaks it up and spends it. You might not agree with the state of the world, and how things are run, but the profit motive does tend to keep people in jobs that they pay taxes on so the public sector can be funded.

I guess posting on here that I work for a big-4 fim as akin to saying I'm a banker. Again, you might not like the description but it's a statement of fact rather than opinion or boast. I'll keep my head down...

Break up your cosy little cartels and hive off the work to Chindia. I don't mean the grunts, I mean you and above.

Cut the cost burden for the productive sector of the economy.

GDP is a rather pointless measure. Like measuring turnover.

Public sector as you must know is running a massive deficit - i.e. it's funding organisations like yours who are paying too little in taxes. Public sector deficit = private sector surplus. The bigger the deficit the more you're benefitting from the state.

Don't keep your head down on my account. It's refreshing to learn just how much these private sector cartels are stealing from the country. Hopefully we can do something about that...........to get the countries cost base down and free up capital for productive purposes rather than pointless IT implementations/upgrades.

Btw, I'm talking to you and it's not costing me >£750 a day plus expenses. How difficult can it be to link a few computers together?

Edited July 28, 2011 by Red Knight

[The Inside Man]

here is a job description for a Technical Architect.

As a technical architect you have an important role as the project manager overseeing various IT assignments that are aimed at improving a business. It's your responsibility to make sure that all strands of the project run smoothly and come together as planned at the end when the project goes live.

The kinds of projects you might oversee could range from planning the structure of a large-scale patients records database for the NHS to the redesign of a shop's online shopping site.

You'll spend a lot of time liaising with people from all backgrounds - from management to designers and programmers in the IT department - to make sure the project meets the needs of the organisation and the people who are going to use the new system.

You'll most likely be employed by an IT firm which specialises in the delivery of these kinds of projects to clients, or in-house at a large organisation which has its own team. Depending on your seniority you'll either oversee one part of a system's framework or you could be in charge of the whole thing.

Your role will therefore vary from project to project but the core set of tasks you'll cover include:

• Identifying the organisation's needs
• Breaking down large scale projects into manageable chunks
• Working out which IT products to use based on cost benefit analysis and research
• Agree plans with the client
• Explain to designers and developers what is required and overseeing the progress
• Producing documents that monitor progress and ensure the quality of the project
• Advise the client on managing future It needs

Sounds to me this guy should be working FOR THE CLIENT....not the contractor...

If he works for the contractor, and the Government org has none, then no wonder the projects fail.

Agreed. Half of our business is trying to help clients build this capability in house. Quite often they don't have it. The other half is doing it with them... we aren't an IT firm so we sit alongside the client and deal with the IT firms.

Might also be worth looking at why projects fail. I'm biased, but most often is is because the requirements were so badly written that the estimate was poorly formed, and the contract was written so tightly that it leaves both sides with nowhere to go. We see that ALL the time. Very rarely is it becuase a technical solution doesn't work (since most things can be made to work, even if they aren't 'optimal').

[winkie]

I did an apprenticeship with a local council about 5 years ago and the waste that goes on is staggering. You would get people who would have a desktop pc, a laptop and a tablet PC all at the same time. For one person they ordered this really expensive specialist equipment as the person had eye sight problems and when I checked the PC the last person to have logged in was the previous apprentice who left 2 years prior!

They were also on some contract with Dell so got brand new replacement PC's every 3 years at about £400 for each unit. Every private sector place i've worked at the PC's have been about 5 to 7 years old and still going. I think one of the reasons they ordered all this unnecessary equipment is because if they didn't spend their entire budget for that year then it would be reduced the next so every April we would get an order for some expensive equipment that they don't really need just so they use all their budget up.

There has always been a lot of that...I hope it does not still continue....managers should be getting a bouns for saving money not spending it.

[The Inside Man]

Break up your cosy little cartels and hive off the work to Chindia. I don't mean the grunts, I mean you and above.

Cut the cost burden for the productive sector of the economy.

GDP is a rather pointless measure. Like measuring turnover.

Public sector as you must know is running a massive deficit - i.e. it's funding organisations like yours who are paying too little in taxes. Public sector deficit = private sector surplus. The bigger the deficit the more you're benefitting from the state.

Don't keep your head down on my account. It's refreshing to learn just how much these private sector cartels are stealing from the country. Hopefully we can do something about that...........to get the countries cost base down and free up capital for productive purposes rather than pointless IT implementations/upgrades.

Oh I see, sorry, I didn't get from your earlier posts that you are a troll. Never mind, was nice exchanging messages with you for a while. I'd better get back to running my business and helping my clients now. Cheers.

[OnionTerror]

There has always been a lot of that...I hope it does not still continue....managers should be getting a bouns for saving money not spending it.

My old IT Manager boss (after insourcing the IT) decided to lease the machines over a three year period...pay a fixed amount, then after three years - refresh..He managed to screw the costs right down...

[R K]

Oh I see, sorry, I didn't get from your earlier posts that you are a troll. Never mind, was nice exchanging messages with you for a while. I'd better get back to running my business and helping my clients now. Cheers.

Interesting response.

>£750 a day of other people's money ffs. What a total mess this country has got itself into where we're all burdened down by this nonsense.

The world's gone to sh1t since Windows 3.1

[phead]

This sounds like total rubbish to me. Every government contract I've worked with was able to get prices for both hardware and software well below what our own company could. Of corse if you want a pc with 3 years on site support in iraq it does tend to raise the price.

[papag]

Both my lads work in IT and they both say Feb/March is the best time when Managers in hospitals as well as other government depts spend the budgets, if the don't they wont get the same for the next year, best one last year was a doctor /specialist ordering a very high spec machine who couldn't even type, would be funny if not true so many other examples as well to make you cry.

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

Sorry, that's twaddle.

The office of government commerce (OGC) agreed rates with the IT vendors for the provision of different grades of staff, including architects. This comes under a contractual framework called Catalyst. Catalyst rates for a typical architect are around 750 pounds a day. The fully loaded cost to the consultancies for this person is about 500 a day, either contract or permanent, so the margins are not as massive as people think. When you then take into account the risk that the businesses are taking, and the costs of bids/proposals/management overheads, government contracts are typically not that profitable.... unless you can get a large one. The OGC and Whitehall are pushing back against these, so they are likely to find themselves in a position where they get "no bid" responses to a lot of small unprofitable pieces of work soon.

For us, I'd rather put people into Banking/Telco/Media/Utility jobs where we can make a far better margin. Government contracts are very hard and expensive to win, soak up resources and make feeble margins.

I left banking to run a technical consultancy for a big-4 firm so I'm painfully aware of this.

Perhaps a chance to dispel a myth for us :

My general impression is that there is no risk on these contracts, hence the NHS records one balloning to 30 billion or something stupid. What risks does the consultancy bear ?

And more facitiously :

Why are these people called Technical Architects ? Just sounds like marketing buzz speak to justify grossly inflated salaries to me.

How much did the Labour government pay some marking agency to come up with the word Catalyst ?

[Trampa501]

A Technical Architect can earn 400 to 600 per day working for one of the big IT consultancies but will be hired out by that IT Consultancy for 2,000 to 3,000 per day to the public sector organisation.

If the TA tried to work direct for the public sector he/she would find it impossible.

The public sector procurement process is hugely flawed and biased towards the big firms.

Post of the week. Thank you.

Not to mention poor purchasing choices over the years, so that govt bodies are tied into computer apps that could be done far more effectively via Saasaplications and/or bespoke adapations of frameworks (think cake, zend, grails or even wordpress). Ok for larger systems you have to consider scalability etc., but I do wonder if govt IT systems are always going to be 15 years behind the loop.

[montesquieu]

It all depends what the requirements were. If the requirement was "Deliver me any functional PC and leave it there for me to deal with" - then it's expensive. Adjusted for inflation, I've spent more on a single PC's hardware - and I spent a month scouring price-lists to buy every component from the most competitive vendor!

The key questions that need to be raised are: What was the specification that was mandated? Who was responsible for that? Where's the evidence of price-discovery? Where's the evidence that the specification was questioned when the price fell outside expected bounds?

My suspicion is that the requirements asked for features that either do not exist, or are provably impossible to supply... so... the supplier has been forced to take whatever action they see fit to avoid a claim that they failed to supply being upheld... and the costs for this are passed on.

Absolutely spot on.

Actually the Government are paying for is a piece of hardware, fully loaded with disks, RAM etc with department appropriate applications loaded or accessible (the typical deparment has more than 100 of these), on a network secured to Restricted, Confidential, Secret or above (GCHQ's Government security branch, CESG, set these standards), plus standard productivity apps (Office, Outlook etc), fully supported with hardware and applications help desks which run anything up to 24*7. Most contracts include refresh every 3-4 years.

The idea that anyone is paying £3500 for the sort of stand-alone PC you can get from PC World merely demonstrates the ignorance of anyone commenting on this basis. £3500 sounds to me looks like a ruggedised machine (ie the sort of thing you'd give to a squaddie) secured to Confidential or above. Standard desktop prices providing all of the above are a fraction of this.

Actually much of this is standard practice in the private sector, I know when we bid the desktop costs are pretty much the same as they tend to have their own security and accreditation arrangements that are every bit as thorough.

Large Government contracts can cost literally tens of millions to bid - one major procurement, dropped by the Coalition, cost one IT contractor I'm familiar with more than £10m in bid costs over the 18-month 'competitive dialogue' procurement (that's where IT companies pitch ideas that are firmed up as the bid progresses - typically meaning the Government hasn't much of a clue what it wants, so this is free consultancy from anything up to half a dozen consortia).

The amateurs among the SPADS in No.10 with their man bags and their Linux games machines at home, really don't have a clue about real world corporate IT. This was the same for Lab's first couple of years after 1997 - they thought they could come in and develop piddling little apps on toy software running under their desks, which did indeed impress their ministers for a while. These turned out to be impossible to scale up, make resilient against server failure, or make adequately secure, and most were switched off pretty sharpish after being re-engineered properly.

The coalition will find that the small IT vendors they go to will be cheap at first, get their fingers burnt when they realise the true expectations in Government, and then charge the same, or likely more than those firms who have sent years paring costs to the bone to meet ever tighter Government requirements at prices as low as possible.

It should be no surprise to anyone here that thick, grandstanding MPs should put out a report that demonstrates ignorance rather than insight.

[Bloo Loo]

My old IT Manager boss (after insourcing the IT) decided to lease the machines over a three year period...pay a fixed amount, then after three years - refresh..He managed to screw the costs right down...

I was "outsourced" by a client doing one of these....they paid a fixed fee every month and would get a new PC every two years.

Sadly, as their own business went into decline, they still had to pay the fees and take the new PCS even though they didnt have a use for them.

next they outsourced the back up.....lost 15GB of emails 6 months in...and this is an FSA regulated firm...theyve blown their record keeping requirements by "saving" the £2K on a backup tape regime...

Still the online firm had a slick website and salesman.

Shame I lost a client prematurely.

[Bloo Loo]

Absolutely spot on.

Actually the Government are paying for is a piece of hardware, fully loaded with disks, RAM etc with department appropriate applications loaded or accessible (the typical deparment has more than 100 of these), on a network secured to Restricted, Confidential, Secret or above (GCHQ's Government security branch, CESG, set these standards), plus standard productivity apps (Office, Outlook etc), fully supported with hardware and applications help desks which run anything up to 24*7. Most contracts include refresh every 3-4 years.

The idea that anyone is paying £3500 for the sort of stand-alone PC you can get from PC World merely demonstrates the ignorance of anyone commenting on this basis. £3500 sounds to me looks like a ruggedised machine (ie the sort of thing you'd give to a squaddie) secured to Confidential or above. Standard desktop prices providing all of the above are a fraction of this.

Actually much of this is standard practice in the private sector, I know when we bid the desktop costs are pretty much the same as they tend to have their own security and accreditation arrangements that are every bit as thorough.

Large Government contracts can cost literally tens of millions to bid - one major procurement, dropped by the Coalition, cost one IT contractor I'm familiar with more than £10m in bid costs over the 18-month 'competitive dialogue' procurement (that's where IT companies pitch ideas that are firmed up as the bid progresses - typically meaning the Government hasn't much of a clue what it wants, so this is free consultancy from anything up to half a dozen consortia).

The amateurs among the SPADS in No.10 with their man bags and their Linux games machines at home, really don't have a clue about real world corporate IT. This was the same for Lab's first couple of years after 1997 - they thought they could come in and develop piddling little apps on toy software running under their desks, which did indeed impress their ministers for a while. These turned out to be impossible to scale up, make resilient against server failure, or make adequately secure, and most were switched off pretty sharpish after being re-engineered properly.

The coalition will find that the small IT vendors they go to will be cheap at first, get their fingers burnt when they realise the true expectations in Government, and then charge the same, or likely more than those firms who have sent years paring costs to the bone to meet ever tighter Government requirements at prices as low as possible.

It should be no surprise to anyone here that thick, grandstanding MPs should put out a report that demonstrates ignorance rather than insight.

you are assuming of course, that the cost of £3500 DOES include all the other bells and whistles which we hope and pray, they do.

The article does say its the cost of a PC.

[Guest sillybear2]

I briefly worked for EDS on their DWP contract, we were installing Windows 2000 machines some three year after Windows XP was released! Even more shocking was the fact we were about the only people in the entire building doing any real work

£500 per day? Sheesh, I wish.

[montesquieu]

Perhaps a chance to dispel a myth for us :

My general impression is that there is no risk on these contracts, hence the NHS records one balloning to 30 billion or something stupid. What risks does the consultancy bear ?

And more facitiously :

Why are these people called Technical Architects ? Just sounds like marketing buzz speak to justify grossly inflated salaries to me.

How much did the Labour government pay some marking agency to come up with the word Catalyst ?

Your impression is wrong. What you don't hear about (because of commercial confidentiality) is the many contracts that run at a loss to the contractor due to taking a punt on meeting contractual requirements that turned out to be more expensive than anticipated. Yes there are risks.

The NHS contract was a spectacular example of how to do things the wrong way - but thankfully it's far from typical. But seriously - we are one of the few countries in the world still shuffling bits of paper around hospitals. The argument should be how do we fix this, not should we do it.

You clearly have no idea what technical architects do, or the differences between business architecture, solution architecture and enterprise architecture. 10% of the National Grid now runs dataccentres (powering them, cooling them). Where do you think all the data you surf actually lives? in the wires?

Large enterprise IT is very, very big, and much more complex than you can imagine I'm sure (hundreds of networks with associated communications, virtualised servers running thousands of applications, tens of thousands of desktops). Mapping the enterprise architecture of, say, Barclays or the MoD is I'm sure a dam sight more difficult than drawing up an office block with pencils or CAD software.

The amount of uninformed pish talked by ignorant toss*ers on this site really annoys me at times.

[thod]

I recall one such project where they consultancy had hired a load of graduates and was charging them out at £1500 a day. Out bit was being done by IT contractors, 10 year+ experienced guys. We had to have one of their consultants in the team too. He was decent enough but nothing special. He was charged out at more than the entire rest of the team of IT contractors, who earn good dosh themselves. I later found out he was not even an employee of the consultancy. He was a contractor too and the consultancy were just quintupling his charge rate to the client.

I was once employed by a consultancy in a similar arrangement. Very important that I pretend to be an employee of the consultancy and not someone they hired last week on a three month contract. I am not an actor and was having none of it, my team knew my status and this really made the consultancy angry.

[Downside]

Well if the PC came loaded with Autocad thats ovwer a £1000 alone for 1 licence and you need a half descent PC to run it plus any other software they might need so 3.5k for 1 PC doesn't sound that unreasonable. although it if its just a bog standard desktop PC then they truly have payed over the odds.

[OnionTerror]

I was "outsourced" by a client doing one of these....they paid a fixed fee every month and would get a new PC every two years.

Sadly, as their own business went into decline, they still had to pay the fees and take the new PCS even though they didnt have a use for them.

next they outsourced the back up.....lost 15GB of emails 6 months in...and this is an FSA regulated firm...theyve blown their record keeping requirements by "saving" the £2K on a backup tape regime...

Still the online firm had a slick website and salesman.

Shame I lost a client prematurely.

It was insourced by another part of the same company, who dealt with defence contracts (the company has contracts with the MoD)...you had to be very careful about what data could go where...the insourcing company were shocking run, and its a scary thought that they were involved with the old ID card system..

The insourced company didnt know their **** from their elbow, and didnt even know that three members of the desktop team needed to be TUPE'd in (which wouldn't have factored into their numbers)..then the redundancies started to happen...

Edited July 28, 2011 by Dave Beans

[Bloo Loo]

snip

Large enterprise IT is very, very big, and much more complex than you can imagine I'm sure (hundreds of networks with associated communications, virtualised servers running thousands of applications, tens of thousands of desktops). Mapping the enterprise architecture of, say, Barclays or the MoD is I'm sure a dam sight more difficult than drawing up an office block with pencils or CAD software.

The amount of uninformed pish talked by ignorant toss*ers on this site really annoys me at times.

sounds complex..I suppose what they really need is something you could sort of browse onto, enter a password and access a few screens of information, add data, make entries and print stuff out...

[Downside]

sounds complex..I suppose what they really need is something you could sort of browse onto, enter a password and access a few screens of information, add data, make entries and print stuff out...

You mean like a mainframe connected to dumb terminals which would give them access to any software they require and only the mainframe has to be updated

[Guest sillybear2]

sounds complex..I suppose what they really need is something you could sort of browse onto, enter a password and access a few screens of information, add data, make entries and print stuff out...

http://oldcomputers.net/ads/square/polymorphic.jpg

Only $3250, less than the government currently pays

Personally I can't wait for this 2004 "home computer".

Edited July 28, 2011 by sillybear2

[Bloo Loo]

You mean like a mainframe connected to dumb terminals which would give them access to any software they require and only the mainframe has to be updated

yeah, sort of, almost like a, i dunno, a sort of web of computers, all connected up somehow, maybe over phone lines....

[mirage]

But seriously - we are one of the few countries in the world still shuffling bits of paper around hospitals. The argument should be how do we fix this, not should we do it.

Is this true? I have a strong urge to doubt it.

The amount of uninformed pish talked by ignorant toss*ers on this site really annoys me at times.

Yeah, but that's just people, innit?

[Chesnor]

Large enterprise IT is very, very big, and much more complex than you can imagine I'm sure (hundreds of networks with associated communications, virtualised servers running thousands of applications, tens of thousands of desktops). Mapping the enterprise architecture of, say, Barclays or the MoD is I'm sure a dam sight more difficult than drawing up an office block with pencils or CAD software.

The amount of uninformed pish talked by ignorant toss*ers on this site really annoys me at times.

It really doesn't have to be. The problem of course is that it is in the interests of the guys that commission and the guys that deliver behemothic IT systems to make them, erm, behemothic. In the case of the public sector it's trebles all round, apart from the taxpayer ofc.

[rxe]

Is this true? I have a strong urge to doubt it.

In many cases, it is absolutely true. Order a blood test: piece of paper. X-ray: piece of paper. Patient Notes: pieces of paper, that might make it back to the main record. Informing your GP of test results: letter.

Some hospitals have a decent EPR/PAS (electronic patient record/patient administration system) that automates a lot of this, but not all. Even if the hospital is set up properly, there is no guarantee that the GP is connected to it. It gets even harder when you need really specialist (tertiary) care which is yet another hospital involved in the chain.