Why killing 80,000 desktops is worse than careless
Published: 26 Nov 2004 15:15 GMT
What do you see as the alternative to these massive outsourcing deals?
We [The Liberal Democrats] and the select committee have argued that you need a smaller scale, more manageable contract –- bigger is not always better. By going up to these mega-contracts you take certain risks and one of those is that there are only a small group of suppliers who can bid in for this work so you are left with a less competitive market. But also you are left with a risk that if something does go wrong it goes wrong more dramatically then where you have networks of people responsible for things in bite-sized chunks.
The other thing we have called for is for there to be far more in-house expertise. For any organisation to think that it can put all its IT out is a mistake, they have got to keep in-house expertise as well. On something like this you are wondering who took the decision to push the button.
Are we going to see more problems of this kind given the Government's commitment to slash civil service headcount and rely more and more on technology?
You need people -- the idea that you can cut people out altogether is a mistake. There is a lesson that if you are going to try to depend more on technology you need more technologists. I think the problem is that they are trying to do both at the same time. They are trying to save on the general staff by introducing more technology but also save on the technical costs by going for these cut-to-the-bone contracted-out things.
As they move to becoming more technology dependent, the question that has to be asked is are they doing enough to support the technology? Or are they going for low-cost contracts on a massive scale that aren't going to deliver the kind of quality that they need? And the more dependant you are, the higher quality the service needs to be.
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7 comments
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The Lib dem guy is not stupid!!
EDS are a bunch of... myles -
Everybody has had enough of Microsoft and other in... Anonymous
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The 'Personal Computer' has no applicability... Robert Palmer -
LOL....the comments here are amazing....its a... Anonymous
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I think youll find, Mr Liberal Democrat... Anonymous -
The real problem is that just about everyone consi... Arthur B.
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The technologies are available to secure and insta... Dennis Meharchand
