Waste not......?

[threaded]

voron: If what you describe ever had any realistic chance of happening you will find these consultancies will fight back, and fight back hard to damage contractors through lobbying for changes to various laws etc. etc..

Last time there looked like a possibility of such an occurance the consultancies lobbied for FTVs and IR35. Heck, IR35 is the baby of an EDS staffer on a sabatical playing at politics.

Try and convince me those machinations didn't harm a great many contractors...

[voron]

Threaded, I will have to bow to your superior experience, especially as IR35 was already a reality when I graduated.

However, are we, as contractors, really the main threat to the major consultancies? Surely we barely register on their radar. After all, we are but one man (or woman) operations and can hardly bid for major projects.

[The Lone Gunman]

Threaded, I will have to bow to your superior experience, especially as IR35 was already a reality when I graduated.

However, are we, as contractors, really the main threat to the major consultancies? Surely we barely register on their radar. After all, we are but one man (or woman) operations and can hardly bid for major projects.

May I join in?

We are not necessarily a threat to larger projects, but the big firms are greedy. They want every bum on every seat to be one of theirs. There are som 150,000 independant contraqctors in the UK (give or take a few) and at 1K per day that is a lot of money for EDS et al.
Not only that, but when local Govt. sees how good we can be then they WILL give bigger projects to smaller firms.
We are quite capable of bringing together lots of contractors to implement bigger and bigger schemes.
If the "claimed" expertise on this board alone were put into 1 Govt. project we could make the big firms look silly over night.

[voron]

LG, as usual, I agree with you. Unfortunately it's not about being competent. After all, if you want competence, you wouldn't hire EDS. It's all about politics, being seen to tick that box on the checklist which covers the senior civil servant's back.
I honestly don't see it being any better in local government. Atos are running some major projects and my current client has a huge contract with a certain French software company.

[threaded]

Voron: agree about the politics. My next point is that there is never any real desire on the part of the current UK gov to build working systems. It suits them best if there is never an end to these things, especially if it was initiated under the previous Conservative government. That way they can keep announcing initiatives and saying they are helping people whilst encouraging the opposite. The reason for this is so they can at a later date repeat the same rubbish, and if it all goes t1ts up in a deep and meanigful way beforehand , i.e. gets into the media, they then get to be on the tele blaming the problems on the tories who started it.

The Lone Gunman: I've built systems for the Danish e-gov stuff. It just works. I've had various people from the UK come and have a look at it, civil servants all the way up to ministers. So they've seen how well it can be done. They just do not want to do it for the reasons I've already outlined. Why do they bother coming to look? Junkets my friend, junkets and expense accounts.

[voron]

Threaded, does the Danish government hire contractors and/or consultancies to do the work?

[threaded]

voron: It is mainly small consultancies that do the bulk of the work. By small I mean with about 5 programmers.

There are larger firms in it but they are generally companies that were previously part of the civil service farmed out, such as CSC Health Care, and are customers of the systems, not actively involved in development. IBM run the machines at the bigger datacentres and as part of their contracts get their name on some of the websites, even though they had very little to do with anything, in one case that comes to mind only buying the hosting company after stuff was already set up. Interesting to note how Denmark shot up in the (IBM) e-gov readiness ranking after they bought in...

[voron]

Threaded, would you say that the Danish public sector is more efficient than its British counterpart?

[Chico]

As the article says there is no accountability in the public sector. In the private sector if you blew millions on a project that failed to deliver - you will be kickedout not given a promotion and a knighthood.

[OwlHoot]

They shift large amounts of public money because there is no contract management.

I just wonder if, for once, the Government isn't doing something right hiring all these consultants, if the motive is to stealthily "hollow out" the civil service and end up _reducing_ its headcount long term.

After all, if a large proportion of work comes to be done by consultants, no one can complain if the Government suddenly stops asking for the work to be done, by contrast to what would happen if they laid off civil servants explicitly.

Or rather no one can complain except the consultancies themselves, but then who'd worry about squeels from them as the trough was closed - quite the reverse, in fact, so for the Government it would be a win-win situation!