Re: [Fsfe-uk] govt standards development contracted out

[Simon Waters]

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Robin Green wrote:
|
| in general the principle of outsourcing technical work to the private
| sector makes some kind of sense, because public sector employers can have
| difficulty attracting employees with the range of experience that you
might find
| at a good private sector IT provider.

Pay a third party X + Profit + N, so they can pay their staff more (X+N)
than you pay yours (X), and outsource the interesting new stuff, and
wonder why your inhouse IT staff are demoralised and leaving in droves.

Hey I was the consultant at one point, so I've seen this a lot of times,
indeed quite a lot of staff discreetly made clear they were definitely
poachable, or asked other obvious questions (like "how much are you
earning", which probably wasn't as much as they thought).

In my case I did what many people do, 5 years as a civil servant getting
very good training from HP, and folks, then 6 or so years in the private
sector making more money but barely seeing a training provider (I think
two courses in 6 years).

It makes sense to outsource if you are small enough that you can't get
expertise inhouse, the government don't have that excuse. Well actually
they have outsourced so much I suspect a lot of the governments good IT
staff have long left to work for EDS, or got forcibly moved to EDS.

A similar comparison might be the NHS recruiting group, where they
created their own job agency, after realising how much cash they were
handing over to nursing agency, to send the same people to work for them
week after week after week.

The government is big, they just need to organise better.

In Logica there were scrolling lists of IT project vacancies on monitors
staff by the main exit, so staff saw them on the way out.

In the Government there was a monthly published list in small print of
all jobs you might like to transfer to elsewhere, not even specifically
IT just everything, and you had to go look for it usually.

In reality you usually need skilled IT inhouse after the projects are
finished, my Aunt worked at a hopsital where the inhouse IT staff had no
idea how the main admin system worked, so every little fault had to
accumulate till they could justify a 1000GBP for a day of "fixes" from
the consultancy (Cap Gemini I believe), and these weren't rocket science
type fixes.


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