Crapita, government money...
This can only end well, right?
Capita and Updata Infrastructure UK pipped BT and a joint bidding team from Vodafone and Virgin Media to scoop up the mega Scottish Wide Area Networking (SWAN) framework gig. The nine-year contract, valued at £325m, involves building and running a public sector network to be accessed by up to 4,600 sites in the country, …
Well named.
Recently had the "pleasure" of dealing with one of their contracts. Nice guys, but I don't think they understand just what they are supposed to be doing, who the customer is or what they need.
Working primarily with technology that is 10 years old or more; and with processes that were considered a bit archaic at the turn of the century. At the initial meeting, they told me that security was their number one priority, but then I was allowed to walk around the site, unescorted for over 30 minutes and not challenged once. I entered several offices, saw workstations unlocked and with passwords written down on post-it notes, stuck to the screen.
More money down the drain.
Well I'd sure as hell instruct my finest legal people to find a way to ensure that BT are excluded from bidding processes ever again! If you're that litigious that you delay the process then fire off a damages claim for a tender that you don't win, I don't want to be doing business with you ever!!
Also: Capita and Updata (Crapita and more-down-than-updata)? From admittedly limited experience of both this will be an utter failure, or at best hugely missing it's promises. Just a question of how much of a cover up/brave face is put on it and at which levels in the chain of politics.
Depressing because in my little part of the world I know for fact the local councils and NHS could link and abstract their networks with very little pain and money, remove redundancy, sell it as a service and STILL run it a sight better and cheaper than a company that's got a highly leveraged deal* they now need to make dollar out of. It just needs some strong willed and driven people at the top.
*guessing from BT's whinging.
Why dont government put some serious investment into building their own IT capabilities - that way they would avoid wasting vast anounts of cash purely for the purposes of lining the pockets of incompetent organisations like Capita who couldnt deliver a paper let alone a major IT infrastructure programme like this?
Outsourcing just does not work on this scale - and for one simple reason - the objectives of the 'client' doing the outsource are usually to save cost (but internally this gets marketed as 'leveraging the expertise' of the supplier, getting access to best of breed tech & process from a proven supplier, improve quality of service, shorten time to market blah blah blah), but the commercial objectives of the supplier are simply this:
To meet their contractual obligations at minimum cost.
Quite how any IT director in their right mind can equate the two and seriously believe that signing an outsource deal with one of the numerous IT services companies - pretty much all of who share an abysmal record of success - will lead to anything other than them getting their bonus cheque is beyond me....oh wait - i think ive just answered my own question....