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.
Talkback
The Lib dem guy is not stupid!!
EDS are a bunch of fools as it is, this just furthers that knowledge.
I, as a windows expert, would NEVER EVER want to do a windows UPGRADE remotely. Id certainly do a windows fresh install remotely. But NEVER EVER an upgrade.
Windows is unstable enough you dont want to be upgrading oses remotely too!
Bad management and poor techicians are one of the causes here!
Everybody has had enough of Microsoft and other incompetent IT staff. They are costing everybody money, time and frustration. Professional organisations are already getting smarter to upgrade their Systems to Linux.
The 'Personal Computer' has no applicability
to large network environments. A PC is designed to do boot up ready to do any one of a thousand things, making it unwieldy, unsteady, slow and generally tiresome. Computers have only just become fast enough to make them bearable even for individual use.
A Govt Dept database should be on a dedicated network of hardwired machines about as big as a sony walkman with software upgrades supplied in a form similar to a Secure Digital chip. No remote reboot, you just get the new chip in the post and throw away the old one.
Essence of the argument _ less to go wrong.
The real problem is that just about everyone considers themselves IT expert enough to make 'informed decisions' based on 'facts' presented by persons who are commercially motivated and consider themselves IT expert enough also.
This means that wannabees, never minds, not there yet and real (multi-platform) professionals get equal voting and the latter ones are greatly outnumbered by the former.
As a result overall quality goes down the tube yet revenues for the commercially motivated increase.
Add to that that absolutely no-one (certainly high level decision makers) will really get axed, trialed and executed no matter how big the mistakes, how large the budget overruns, how empty the promises turn out to be and how huge the clean-up costs are.
Then ask yourself what possible reasons the responsible people (decision makers, managers, advisors, consultants and external commercial companies) actually have to change their behaviour and attitude as long as they're not made responsible and realisticly fully accountable for their actions, decisions and advises.
As history has shown: buying into build-in required extra work with zero liability for the ones providing it will not get you what you need. It'll get you what they told you to ask for. And that's only good for them.
The fact of business life is that they won't do what lowers their profits unless there's a real risk of having to pay a fine of some sort that's significantly larger then the probable revenues they gain from just going ahead as they see fit.
As such certainly governments are advised to require from their solution providers at least two total solutions (otherwise you can say you're dealing with a company that doesn't have a clue enough) along with the requirement that the providing party will specifiy a complete and total roll-back plan beforehand which they will be fully accountable for if the pre-arranged delivery conditions are not completely satisfied in time.
On an individual case level that'll increase the price at first but on an overall scale and in the longer run it'll significantly lower cost because it'll require responsible business behaviour and a greater demand for real professionals that can provide more then one answer (thus improving competition which will automaticly provide a lasting better value for money overall).
LOL....the comments here are amazing....its a terrible, terrible thing that happened to the DWP, it speaks of weak change control and poor management, it has absolutely nothing to do with Linux, Windows, Large organisations or anything else, it's called a MISTAKE, an ACCIDENT! - yeah careless, yeah dumb, imagine how the poor guy feels who pressed the submit button, get off your soapboxes for goodness sake - geez you guys obviously all collectively had never had a car wreck, never tripped over a paving stone, done something you werent supposed to....how lovely to be so angelic
I think youll find, Mr Liberal Democrat MP, that its very likely the people involved with this upgrade previously worked for the DWP, having worked with EDS I know that they dont magcially parachute hundreds of staff in, most EDS people either used to work for a client of EDS (of which there are thousands btw) or still work on there original site doing a similair job.
Yeah, blame this account and its weak change control ,but dont Tar the whole of EDS as incompetent, I have a lot of friends who work for EDS and they are very smart, very dedicated people.
The technologies are available to secure and instantly recover computers with absolute certainty. By using products such as the Valt.X Computer Security subsystem all 80,000 systems could have been recovered instantly by simply restarting the computers.
See www.valtx.com .