[dundee] HM Treasury Spending Challenge

[Arron M Finnon]

When i was at a talk recently one of the talks that i listened to was a third-party
security vendor that was in the process of delivering some solutions to the government
which required a number of government department's to work together.  I can't go into
many details, however needless to say they where departments that you would have presumed
worked closely together prior to that.

There where a number of government sub contractors and they all seemed to echo the 
same point.  That due to all the internal regulation it was hard for the customer (government),
to tell them what they wanted.  In many places it was actually the customer being told what they 
needed to stay internally compliant.  I would imagine for a number of reasons some of the following 
issues that arise;

Software is not on the departments OK list, so cannot be part of any solution until it is;
Companies looking at a more profitable solution with regards to reseller and licensing;
Technical expertise light on the ground due to previous vendor locking deals;

It seems strange to walk in to a garage forecourt, and tell the guy;
"hey look i don't like using my legs, could you supply me a solution"

My two pence worth, and as usual your being over charged


On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 11:10:03AM +0100, Kris Davidson wrote:
> The argument I hate is the training argument from both IT people and
> users. Presumably when a new version of Windows or Office comes out or
> they develop something in-house users just get on with it. Same with
> the IT Windows monkeys, they learned Sharepoint fast enough when it
> came along.
> 
> You can't expect your job not to require you to learn additional
> skills. Even when supporting Windows I routinely jump to the command
> line and some of the scripting engines available are pretty
> reasonably. It amazes how many Windows admins just use the GUI, some
> are even against editing config files.
> 
> Kris
> 
> On 16 July 2010 20:57, gordon dunlop <zubenel at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > The HM Treasury has put up a website for ideas on how to save money,
> > obviously there has been posts with stupid suggestions but I like suggestion
> > 8
> >
> > http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/spend_challenge_ideas_2.htm
> >
> > Whilst some people would be aghast at using IT products that they might not
> > be used to, but I think there would be less pain here in using open source
> > rather than losing policemen, nurses, services etc.
> >
> > Gordon
> >
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