Slashdot Mirror
UK Taxpayers' Money Getting Wasted On IT Spending
hypnosec writes "A report combined by MPs has claimed the UK government is spending 'obscene' amounts of taxpayers' money on IT. The Public Administration Select Committee revealed in its report that some government departments have spent £3,500 on a single desktop PC, which can be purchased for as little as £200. Some other examples of the government pouring public money down the drain include buying copier paper for £73 when it can be purchased for £8."
Sounds like someone is buying too many 'shiny' Apple products.
It probably was only 8 pounds for the paper - the other 65 pounds was re-directed to the MP's pocket (either directly or indirectly.)
About that £3500 PC...
The media reporting this story appear to be doing a good job of ignoring what that £3500 PC actually is: three years of PC, with software licensing, hardware replacement, upgrades, maintenance and support. It's not just the bare metal put on someone's desk but the full service behind it.
If you take the IT budget for a large healthcare public sector organisation and divide it by the number of desktop PCs they support, it'll probably come out at around £1000/year.
My father works for a logistics company who handle a lot of government computer stuff: everything from moving an entire data centre to a single printer. I've seen the stuff that they dispose of: desktops that are less than a year old, entire racks of hardware that has never been used, and even printers and monitors that are brand new, still in the box. This is stuff that has been bought with tax money and then is being chucked out without ever being used.
That's just the stuff I've seen moving through one small company. The scale of waste UK-wide must be massive.
I'm not denying that some money is being wasted, but nowhere near as much as this report implies. See this article for more detail.
the summary mentions the £3.5k, but with a slightly different context than TFS.
Given the cuts that they are having to make in response to the fiscal deficit it is ridiculous that some departments spend an average of £3,500 on a desktop PC.
is this with or without software? add a Citrix licence, SAP access, some security token with a user licence, MS Office, AD user access licence, ... and it is at least thinkable that one workstation is expensive as hell.
While I have no doubt that some departments are letting themselves get raked over the coals(or taking kickbacks, better check on that), and that someonebody has been seriously drinking the kool-aid when it comes to the 'efficiency' of contracting everything, I am annoyed by the example being cherry picked:
A £200 computer is, what, the low-end consumer model on the shelf at limey-Best-Buy? Oh, that'll make perfect sense as part of an enterprise IT system, once we've quadrupled the RAM, upgraded the OS to something that will bind to AD, factored in the cost of Office and whatever horrid application specific cruftware holds the department together, and doubled up on screwdriver monkeys because the hardware that gets thrown into that model changes only slightly less often than the serial number does...
It's just the hidden extra terrestrial tax
You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?
It is "stolen". Usual scheme, where cronies get to charge insane amounts of money for something, then split the cash with person who set the deal up.
Is http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/07/28/obscene-whitehall-it-spending-or-sloppy-journalism/
Basically, they took something out of context and sensationalised it.
isnt this money just going around the system anyway? so yes, it maybe seen that the government spend OUR tax money on things they could get cheaper.. but at the end of the day, public sector is encouraged to puchase from local suppliers. arent we then talking about local suppliers receiving tax payers money for goods and services, which in turn creates jobs and wealth? if they cut back and spend less, doesnt this create new problems?
You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?
Ten years ago I was being taught about the attempt to upgrade the London Ambulance Service's systems, as a notorious failure and how it could be avoided. The government has not learned: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/01/auditor_says_firecontrol_a_disaster/
shocked, I tell you, that people would spend money that's not their own so freely.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Let me break it down , there's two possible reasons.
One , as other readers have suggested , the article might be purposely omitting various facts or mixing up total cost of ownership with purchase value.
Two , it's not that the buyers were stupid , they might be to some extent (not knowing the market well enough to shop around for the best deal) but that doesn't cover such a deep discrepancy.
Most often than not , at least in the ex soviet block , these things are done to take money away from the institution. The buyers just agree with the sellers to up the cost dramatically and get a part of that money back as incentive to do it. And these things happen ALL THE TIME , in all corners of all public institutions. That's why these states are doing so poorly , budget wise. It's called corruption.
This may come as a shocker to you if you were brought up in some place where these are not common day activities. Criminal penalties should be enforced against such wrongdoers.
I can not emphasise enough , this is the kind of stuff that brings a nation down , one expensive toilet seat at a time.
some government departments have spent £3,500 on a single desktop PC, which can be purchased for as little as £200.
So they're using iMacs ?
Open source. Or is the solution far more complex?
In spite of the Whitewash, it IS/WAS huge incompetence/negligence and I do not doubt that it is all true if not understated.
If you providevide ways to game the system, either through one of the standard mechanisms [hideously complicated process, unrelated mandates, vapid technical or financial rules eg "lowest bidder wins"] you open two doors to corruption for each you purport to close. Lack if internal un-corruptible strategic vision and management and failure to take account of previous history has made UK IT procurement a joke since the days of the Computer Board and HMSO' procurement unit of the 1970s.
IT and Defence procurement has been against the public interest and the uniformed military interest for decades, eg sthe SA80 rifle (joak).
Until Tyburn is reopened this will go on, gaming and bribes are too easy, corruption too easy to pass off as bad luck or incompetance and the risk/penalty FAR too low.
In fact, the worst cost offenders in both areas are not the IT/facilities providers and the supply companies; they are the end users who buy inkjets and run them on petty cash.
My own GP is very clued up in this area and keeps a close watch on the local trust to see if they are getting good value for money. Generally speaking, they do. In fact, compared to privatised healthcare in the US, the NHS is amazingly efficient and low cost - which is why we have very similar life expectancy adjusted for social class, but we only spend half as much of our GDP as does the US - and our GDP per head is lower to begin with.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I keep hearing reference to MPs but I have no idea what that means. Can somebody enlighten me?
Better for tax money to go to frivolous IT spending than have it wasted on senseless wars.
The main areas of waste are simply large infrastructure projects that are badly designed by unqualified Civil Servants with unrealistic and underspecified objectives, which are then divided up among too many contractors with too many legal interfaces between them, and then have to be repeatedly redesigned and reimplemented as the scope changes. It is like our national habit of building motorways that are too small, and then having to pay more to widen them than the original building cost.
The cost of PCs and support is utterly irrelevant in this. It is the way in which, say, it can cost nearly £30000 in legal fees just to have one contractor run a wire between two boxes operated by different contractors, because the scope of contracts has to be changed.
The answer is a radical reform of the Civil Service to ensure that anybody involved in an infrastructure project is actually qualified in the right areas, rather than having graduated from Oxford with a classics degree thirty years ago. But every attempt to reform the Civil Service is handled internally - good luck with that.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Well its not like the money not spent on IT all goes to good use.
This has nothing to do with LASCAD. The failure there was that public services were required to award the contract to the lowest bidder, meaning when an inexperienced software house offered a more comprehensive system for several million less than the nearest competitor they weren't allowed to ask questions. Fourteen people needed to die before they changed that policy.
The accused failure here is unnecessary over spending, though it appears on even a surface glance to actually be merely poor journalism (see every other comment anyone has posted on this story).
If you're going to troll, at least put a little effort into it. That didn't even raise an eyebrow.
At least we don't elect retarded cowboys as the supreme head of our executive branch of government.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
President Thomas Whitmore: I don't understand, where does all this come from? How do you get funding for something like this?
Julius Levinson: You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?
~Syberz
Meh, it's similar in the US gov't & defense contracting sector, mostly for tax reasons.
For a largish contractor, if a PC is purchased for under $3000-$5000, it comes out of the expense budget, which tends to be relatively low year to year. If it's over that amount, it can come out of the much larger capital budget, which tends to be much bigger, and the company can take tax breaks for depreciation of that equipment over 3-5 years. So to the bean counters, it's much more desirable to have stuff come out of the capital budget, even if they are 3-10x overpriced. It also goes on the books as something that makes the company look like it has "capital resources", instead of sinking money into "expenses".
It's been funny to see computers overspec'd to cost $3k-$5k... usually through some combination of overpriced nVidia Quadro GPU (which can get up into the $1000s, but at least you can still buy the same outdated model number for a couple of years), 12-32GB+ RAM in 32-bit systems, RAID adapters that are never configured or used, loaded up with extra disks that might get pulled and stored in a pile elsewhere so they don't have to be bought individually separately (and often for cheaper when not bundled with an OEM's equipment build).
The other magic number is something like $200,000 for a single purchase or system of computers, so you'll see lots of the big iron companies dish out a rackfull of product for about that amount, like EMC storage etc. when there's stuff like NetApp that does the same thing for maybe 10% of the cost. So if the IT department can plan ahead enough, they can make a large purchase of cheap PCs for over $200k and still depreciate them, which is why the desktop/laptop you actually get to use is still a piece of crap. But the computers that can't be planned and spec'd a year in advance get to cost way more.
Although the money doesn't go directly to the politicians, some of it often ends up indirectly benefiting them or their relatives.
I am not excusing what British MPs were up to - but by world standards, and US standards, they weren't even trying.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I have seen with my own eyes, a government department that uses a company for all their IT needs, and that company needs to fill out a form every time you need to purchase a mouse, those forms and paper trail end up costing about 100$, for an 8$ mouse.....seriously, when no one is watching how you spend the money, anything goes, but tell these same people to pay 100$ for a mouse at home , they would freak!!!
The inevitable review and response to this scare story will produce a series of reforms which will increase these costs by introducing more "accountability" steps that increase the admin overhead. One of the main justifications for these single-supplier procurement deals is that they are necessary to comply with regulations on competitive tendering and other "lets fix everything" laws.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Some plonker comes along and demands to know why IT resources cost so much more than the crap he can buy at Best Buy. If said plonker has any pull at all, everyone gets all worked up for a while and plans are made to pilot a program to just buy all our shit at Best Buy and avoid the costs. Then people start looking at bringing hardware reliability up to corporate standards, retaining extra employees to do away with "expensive" support contracts and licensing software. Then, for some bizarre reason, the project quickly and quietly dies, is buried and no one ever hears about it again. This usually wastes more money than is actually being "wasted" with the "expensive" desktop machines we're using.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It seems wasteful to be spending taxpayers money on proprietary operating systems and expensive word processing applications when there are perfectly good free equivalents.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
500 UKP computer.
2450 UKP extra costs incurred by dealing with the UK government's self-serving bureaucracy.
50 UKP delivery.
It's GBP - for Pound Sterling. Admittedly not as intuitive as one would first think (Great Britain Pounds? No).
Tory MPs, cherry-picking edge cases. When -will- the press and public finally get a grip on this tired old tactic??
That's something new!
The horror stories don't actually apply to most of the UK. They tend to apply to areas which are overpopulated with excessive house prices, i.e. London.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Leaving sad and unimpressed.
I had a sig, but