[Gllug] Government IT projects and wasted money

[Bruce Richardson]

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.

> 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.

> 
> Unfortunately, what sounds like a good idea in practise rarely is due
> to the ineptitude of Government procurement, contracts, etc. It's also
> far too easy for the private sector to rip off the government :(

Ah, yes.  Another problem (and this goes right back to the big
privatisations of the Thatcher era) is that politicians are very
reluctant to hold private contractors to account; they put the services
out to tender to increase efficiency (whether or not privatisation can
achieve that for the particular service) and don't their schemes to be
labelled failures, so the contractors can usually get away with gross
inefficiency and poor quality of service.

-- 
Bruce

I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I know is real)
proves that we are not living in Judea in AD 50. -- Philip K. Dick
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