HMRC dangles £10bn in outsourcing meat before hungry SME hounds

The dangers of SME in Government work

I worked on this contract for about a year and the IT approach this government has adopted is not sustainable.

They believe single/limited supplier contracts are poor value because the big companies have been ripping them off. The introduction of SME's is a treasury campaign to diversify contract holders not to improve service but to save money.

However many small SMEs are not geared up to work in a tightly controlled production environment.

They tried this on the DVLA (another Fujitsu contract) and had to call in Fujitsu to cover it when the SME's failed to deliver. In one instance the SME wanted to amend code on the Production server with out testing or staging.

The anti-Big company swing will continue until SMEs start failing, at which point the fat cats will return at hugely inflated costs to clean up the mess.

Nothing changes.

What goes around, comes around

With both the original outsourcing to EDS and then the setting up of Aspire for the next contract, the contract terms were set by the Inland Revenue, then HMRC. In each case it was the government department that agreed to the service levels and the charges. As both companies met the agreed service levels* and charged the agreed fees it's a bit disingenuous for them to start bleating about the cost now. They got what they wanted for the price they specified. In the meantime, there has been a lot of tax collected reliably and on time.

There has been a move to using smaller suppliers of late, which in many cases has led to announcements of the bold and thrusting innovation taking place as HMRC employs two people from over a chip shop to do what the vast corporation wasn't sufficiently agile to do. This works well for a month or two, then something has to be deployed in a controlled and reliable manner across a wide, secure and mature network and ChipShopSoft discover that you can't just send someone round the country with a USB stick in their pocket and things hit a roadblock. That's when the Aspire behemoths step in and offer to fix things for large amounts of cash. This bit gets hushed up, the job gets done and Fujitsu and CG collude with the powers that be as it's good business. Every time they lose a small piece of business they just wait. They know it's coming back to them with extra fees attached because now it's both broken AND urgent.

I'm quite glad that I'm out of that environment now. It was an interesting ride, but exhausting at times. I have a lot of sympathy for my former colleagues and wish them well in the GovCos and SMEs post TUPE.

* There were monumental screw ups under EDS, but in each in case EDS said, "Do you really want us to do this? This is A REALLY BAD IDEA", then the Inland Revenue came back with, "We pay, you do" and EDS shrugged it's shoulders and said, "Chump don't want no help, chump don't get dick help" and helped them to make the mistake that they were paying for. I know, I was that soldier.

I'd like to say that the while many SMEs may not be "geared up to work in a tightly controlled production environment", I've found that the vast majority of non-behemoth, small contracting and consulting firms I've worked with have been very capable of working in this sort of environment.

Its my experience that when people want to avoid testing and staging changes before deploying to production, it is because the wrong people are being asked to deploy their changes to a production environment - this is where, traditionally, System Administration teams spend their efforts, and they generally excel at keeping things stable and not cutting corners. Software Development teams (and small development companies) are often understandably light in this regard, and it seems reasonable to expect HMRC to be taking ownership and sourcing the resources to perform this role.

From the outside, it seems as though perhaps the problem does not lie with the SMEs being brought in to work on developing these systems, but a gap in the planning that means there has been insufficient provision made for the deployment to and ongoing maintenance and management of these production environments.

What SMEs aren't geared up for is spending millions of pounds over many months or even years, bidding for the work.