[Gllug] Government IT projects and wasted money

[Jon Fautley]

On 17 Jun 2011, at 09:49, Bruce Richardson wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 08:46:46AM +0100, Jon Fautley wrote:
>> 
>> That's one of the big arguments for the Government outsourcing as much
>> as possible to the private sector.
>> 
>> The grand idea is that by passing the work to the private sector,
>> existing work can be reused
> 
> Read Alistair's reply to find out why that will not happen, whether or
> not the work is done in house.

Agreed - I wasn't suggesting the system works ;)

>> and the government can leverage the
>> skills and resources not typically available to them for the reasons
>> you listed above.
> 
> But look how much government work is already put out to tender, and how
> much of the old civil service was privatised in the last 30 years (e.g.
> Qinetic).  Ask yourself why private contractors should want to make the
> process more efficient.  Duplication of work = duplication of fees.

Again, correct. It ties in with the fact that as you've mentioned, the government won't hold private contractors to account. 

For clarification, I wasn't suggesting that outsourcing was a fix for the problem, or even a particularly good idea for a lot of government projects - just that the issues raised in the OPs mail aren't really perceived as a problem because "the government is already doing all it can by outsourcing". Fixing the problem for good would require a major culture shift in government IT, and that simply isn't likely to happen :(

Cheers,

/j
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