Just the ruinous part. The Tory handling of outsourcing has been a disaster. Incredibly poor value, with very few (apart from greedy shareholders) benefitting.
Capita - We lead to her death but don't tarnish our reputation
- Thread starter SirGalahad
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Are you talking about privatisation @noseall ? Outsourcing has been rife in public sector for the last 25 years.
London congestion charge, Tube & train network, DWP, DVLA etc.. all had big outsource JVs under Labour with large SIs or BPO outfits, like Capita.
I know some on this site don't understand the difference between outsourcing - hiring an external company to run a part of your business (Business Process Outsourcing) and Privatisation - transferring ownership of state controlled assets to the private sector (e.g BT, BAA, BR, BG etc).
London congestion charge, Tube & train network, DWP, DVLA etc.. all had big outsource JVs under Labour with large SIs or BPO outfits, like Capita.
I know some on this site don't understand the difference between outsourcing - hiring an external company to run a part of your business (Business Process Outsourcing) and Privatisation - transferring ownership of state controlled assets to the private sector (e.g BT, BAA, BR, BG etc).
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I think if you look in to it, you'll realise it is inline with business trends. In the late 1990s, there was a bit of an IT boom as companies got rid of all their mainframe computer systems and tried to get internet ready. This was driven by 3 things: the internet, commodity server power and Y2K bug/shortage of bearded COBOL programmers to fix the mainframes. There weren't enough local experts to do the work and the doors were opened to large off-shore firms. Early 2000s this work dried up and the hungry off-shore firms moved in to off-shore and outsourcing. Hard for UK workers to compete with someone on £90 a day. You'll find these models were embraced by all government outfits as well private. i.e. BPO was big 2000-2010 everywhere. Fast forward to today and the trend is reversing. AI and ML is increasingly reducing the need for call centres (people prefer to click the chat button instead of phone up). Companies realised they lost agility and IP with these large contracts and wanted to bring the brains back in house. It takes time, but its got nothing to do with party politics. Privatisation is completely different.
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Carillion were doing great until a bunch of Tory supported "reckless" directors got their greedy hands on it.
So you keep saying.
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Ha ha, you will have to try better than that.
As you well know I did not acknowledge any such thing.
Ha ha ha, weak attempt
I never suggested outsourcing was purely the domain of the Tories.
I said the Tories have made outsourcing an utter failure.
Do try harder to catch me out Old Bean, your attempts so far havent been much of a challenge
Good post, sadly wasted on the 'four legs good, two legs bad' brigade.
Correct.
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These business trends were pushed by the business schools and their army of MBAs. The push to outsource was seen as a way to move away from non core competencies and to focus on where you had an advantage. It was the second wave of outsourcing the first being manufacturing - this was BPO and my word was it profitable with Six Sigma Blackbelts having no idea how a business was run but as long as they could measure something they could then use that as a metric to improve it.
The offshoring of IT work was mainly driven to cut costs. If you don't think IT was a core competency then you fell into that trap. The problem with these offshoring companies is that you can never distil into a service contract everything you need now or in the future. Anything off spec was charged at ridiculous rates. It should not cost £50k to change the background colour of a page. Or when the senior director negotiating the contract ends up being employed by the outsourcer.
It all depends on what is being outsourced - any company that outsources the development of core systems deserves everything they get from crap code to downtime. The problem with the outsourcing model is that the competent developers do not remain developers for long they either move into management or they leave - so the outsourcer is left with a pretty poor bunch of developers. A case in point was Boeing was using Indian developers on $9 an hour.
These companies now are struggling to bring the work inhouse because they have to build up the capacity themselves.
You really are clueless.
Whatever you say Napoleon, oink oink.
Ha ha
Fillyboy is a troll........just trying to get long responses by only making one line posts himself.
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I don't disagree, though I do remember the boom of the late 90s, when firms had to hire armies of self employed contractors to write code, at £1K+ per day, with these guys barely doing 6 hours a day and often poor quality work. You had no choice. Governments failure was to allow cheap off-shore skills to land in their 1000s. However, absolutely nothing to do with Privatisation or conservative vs. labour policy. Governments have a long history of failure to deliver IT projects. this has been true in the 90s, the 00s and 10s. You might well argue, this is because they have no in-house governance and end up hiring PWC, to watch KPMG, watching CapGemini overseeing Wipro on the delivery, while at the same time making redundant anyone who understands the business. I'd definitely agree with that.
For anyone who thinks the Tories are worse... remember Tubelines and Metronet, created under Public-Private Partnership (PPP) during the labour government both of which failed within 5 or 6 years having spent millions.
One of the major problems with IT systems is what was once known as Bloatware, Code was added to create patches that did not repair a fault in the system's core code but allowed the system to work even though the fault was still in the system. This was quicker than fault finding and correcting the core code.
My cousin set up a software company for the embrionic oil industry. It was a very sucessful company. He employed Polish coders working in Poland because they were experienced in writing very compact code. This was because for many years they had been developing software on Eastern Bloc machines in which memory was very expensive and so spending time and effort to save a few kilobytes of code was cost effective.
My cousin set up a software company for the embrionic oil industry. It was a very sucessful company. He employed Polish coders working in Poland because they were experienced in writing very compact code. This was because for many years they had been developing software on Eastern Bloc machines in which memory was very expensive and so spending time and effort to save a few kilobytes of code was cost effective.
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There is nothing conceptually wrong with privatisation or outsourcing. Where most times it falls down is in the practical application of such policies. Too many of the privatisations created a private monopoly from a public monopoly and the argument that the private sector uses assets more efficiently than the state were blown out of the water when so many of our utility providers are owned by foreign Governments.
When the policy is to privatise based on ideology and not trying to find the most efficient way to allocate resources then it's going to be another failure and gravy train for the army of consultants.
A well functioning market requires entry and exit and substitutes and compliments, as well as minimising externalities.
The only point of contention I have is that the Tories are worse than Labour when it comes to privatisation. Way worse. Both have been poor at outsourcing its just that the Tories have been in power for 28 yrs since Thatcher and still not learned.
B
Bodd
The sort people running Carillion are the likes who I'm talking about on another thread. You disagree with me there but we agree hear.
You don't know what you believe in do you.
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