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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."
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.
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.
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...
I doubt it. Apple is not on the list of approved suppliers for most UK government departments. In a lot Dell is the only option, and their government price list is insane: at least double their web price for exactly the same equipment. Even if this includes a support contract, it would still be cheaper to buy the cheap version and just throw it in the bin and buy a new one if there's a problem. Spending £3500 on an Apple desktop would mean a 12-core 2.66GHz Xeon - I'm pretty sure you can't get that for £200 elsewhere, since it has two CPUs that retail for over £500 each (although the rest of the specs on that machine are pretty anaemic for the price: only 6GB of RAM and a single 1TB disk? WTF Apple?)
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
However, as our report from the 13 May states: “The bottom line might make it look like Cabinet Office workers are all sitting in front of the most ridiculously expensive machines in Britain, but officials played down the figures, saying they covered more than just the hardware. According to a Cabinet Office spokesperson, the “costs cover the core infrastructure and applications – basically anything supplied by a third party’.”
(Read more: “Obscene” Whitehall IT spending or sloppy journalism? | PC Pro blog http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/07/28/obscene-whitehall-it-spending-or-sloppy-journalism/#ixzz1TUbtZD9C)
Sorry Sir, I'll get back to polishing the silver in a minute, but in case the references were missed...
Moats Ducks
Sounds like someone is buying too many 'shiny' Apple products.
Although I like a mac as a computer, they are ridiculously expensive...
...but £3,000 plus for a desktop is madness, even if it was apple!
500 UKP computer.
2450 UKP extra costs incurred by dealing with the UK government's self-serving bureaucracy.
50 UKP delivery.
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 am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
If it's really that much work to deal with the paperwork, then I can't even blame them for charging more. Makes sense to have the customer pay for his own silly paperwork, doesn't it? So the real news is that bureaucracy is raising IT costs to an unreasonable degree.
I work for an agency here in the states and we are a Dell shop. Dell likes to charge $700 for a system bragging they they gave us a $200 discount on a $900 machine that is actually worth $300. The biggest problem we have in our shop is that we don't have an IT budget. All It procurements are made from the general or individual funds and the IT director just rubber stamps many of them just to keep people happy. There is a bigger problem though with the industry in general in that IT people are often not in charge of IT departments, business people are and they don't know shit about computers or what a good deal is so they let companies like Dell give them a big pile of crap deal while getting their ego's massaged and pockets filled.
I got here through a series of tubes
Ha.. you are not just whistling Dixie there..
Imagine the horror I was in when I showed up for work to find 30 E-machines with windows Vista home premium on them and was told to connect them to the domain and start replacing the secretarial computers. I guess "a deal" is a deal regardless of how much of a downgrade something might be or extra costs might be associated with making it work.
Yes, I have ran into the same problems with the head of IT not being an IT person. the most painful part of that is that the volume licensing contract was purposely let to expire when windows XP was all the rage because "Every computer comes with it's own operating system, we don't need to pay for it again".
I guess that's what happens when the major qualification for a management position is being related to an owner and there is a family tree involved that doubles as a telephone pole.
Thanks for the link to the PC Pro article, it's very interesting and personally I felt you left out it's most interesting point:
Regretfully having read much of the report, the above is a good example of how worthless it is. PC Pro rubbishes poor media coverage of a government report, then another government report quotes PC Pro and uses the figure in exactly the wrong way that PC Pro was complaining about in the article the report is citing!
Admittedly the report does refer once to "median total cost of ownership", but either they failed to understand what that meant or failed to communicate the meaning in the report. Read para 16 & 17.
It's a very poorly written report, irritating to read and lacking in professional verse. While they appear to have sourced widely, assertions are made in the form of regurgitations of other's material, and throughout those sources are often very poor. There's no sense that they explored any of these sources in depth, let alone went into the field and investigated for themselves.
This is a pity partly as it attempts some very interesting topics and partly because a group of people running the country can't write a decent report.
As someone whose worked in UK public sector, I can tell you it's likely a bit of both.
I worked in IT for education, and it was not uncommon for £350 PCs to be bought at around £1500, and maybe £700 or so of software on top that would never be used.
I take issue with this:
"but itâ(TM)s ludicrous in the extreme to suggest â" as the Daily Mail does â" that the Cabinet Officeâ(TM)s IT department could pop down to its local branch of Dixons, buy a batch of £250 budget desktops and be none the worse for it."
I think it's unfair to write this point off- warranties will be included with such systems, as will the Windows license, sure they'll have to buy Office on top, and there are support costs too, but chances are you can still make it all come in at well under half the £3664 figure by buying, not necessarily from Dixons or anywhere, but directly from a supplier and bypassing the "approved government IT supplier" bullshit which was basically just code for "IT supplier someone in the government has a vested interest in".
Just to illustrate this point a little further, as part of a major programme to get laptops into schools, we had to evaluate a number of suppliers (this was some years back now) Dell was chosen in the end, for a contract of 3000+ laptops, with a combination of the bulk volume discount and an education discount they could be bought for £675 without VAT. Problem is, they could be bought by a home user directly from Dell's site for £500 with VAT, however this wasn't an option, because we had to buy through the approved agreement.
Fact is, public sector does grossly overpay for things, and a lot of the time it's because public officials are biased towards some company and so setup absurd agreements- whether it's that they directly have shares in the firm, or whether they just fancy the sales lady, I've seen it all.
Of course, even outside the per-system costs there are bigger savings to be had, my local council just went straight into a massive Microsoft contract without even investigating alternatives such as FOSS, and without trying to bargain Microsoft down by saying well look, we can do it cheaper with FOSS... nope, they just signed the contract and spent a few million tax payers money, all because the head of IT was a little too friendly with the Microsoft sales exec.