[sclug] Council to pay 17m for computer upgrade

[Jacqui Caren-home]

Tom Carbert-Allen wrote:
> I have personally
> worked on IT projects with a council where there were plenty of these 
> types who even admitted freely to not understanding even the basics of 
> the technology of the project but had very firm hand shakes and were 
> very happy with there salary thankyou very much.

This is completely different league to the high street .edu box shifters.

I used to work for Cray Research and the sales bods were a mixed bunch.
Some technical some pure sales sharks. The one thing they all relied upon
was commission. Salary was similar to junior IT (dev) staff but commission
was a percentage of sales. One big sale every few years kept a Cray salesman
happy :-)

When selling at this size contract, you end up negociating for at least a year
and it is a complete and expensive nightmare mainly due to the many commercial
and legal hurdles you have to overcome. Even Cray managed to fluff it sometimes
and they had some of the best sales and legal folks going.

FWICR on a contact that costs roughly 2 mill around over 100K will be in the
budget as the bid cost (without commission). Also public sector is always
more expensive to bid for as there are more hurdles to overcome.

I would have thought that councils would learn from each others experiences
- especially those who ran linux server pilots and remember that not all desktops
are equal. I would *hope* finance systems are completely seperate from the rest of
thier network and finance would have no direct internet access etc.

Finally they should remember that the big-bang approach never works as planned.
An incremental planned roll out allows for unforseen problems and gives you a chance
to fix department/system specific issues in a timely manner is also cost a hell of
a lot less!


Jacqui

p.s. I wonder if a network upgrade is included in the cost? networking can be
insanely expensive and cutting corners/costs is very very risky.