British Govt Debates Swapping Printers For iPads

An anonymous reader writes "The British government is examining whether it could save money by getting rid of its printers and giving civil servants free iPads instead. The head of the UK government skunkworks told silicon.com that if he got rid of all of a major government department's printers and gave staff iPads, the savings on printing costs would pay for the tablets in less than 18 months. The UK parliament has already let tablets into the debating chamber, with politicians already starting to choose to use tablets rather than bundles of papers in debates."

Comments

eBay ahoy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome :-) I look forward to a steady stream of cheap iPads appearing on eBay, ideally loaded with sensitive documents ...

Re:another try at the paperless office

[chrb]

Exactly - they have ignored the TCO of iPads and compared only the initial purchase cost with the assumption that every civil servant with an iPad will never use a printer again! What about support, administration, setup of wifi networks or 3g costs, software and security updates, replacement of broken hardware etc.? That will be outsourced to some big corporation like Accenture, which will easily triple the initial purchase cost; the civil service apparently pays upto 10 times the commercial rate for IT systems.

This is the same civil service that has consistently refused to upgrade from IE6, and which their own MPs report said "The lack of IT skills in government and over-reliance on contracting out is a fundamental problem which has been described as a 'recipe for rip-offs'". Maybe they should fix the existing problems before they embark on a whole new IT rollout? And why iPads or Android tablets? What can a civil servant do with an tablet that they can't do with a cheaper laptop or netbook? And why dismiss the obvious solution to expensive printing costs - buy cheaper paper and ink? Or charge the users for each page printed? I have seen a per-page charge for printer use instigated at an institution and the change in user behaviour was fast and cut costs more than any large IT project every would. When printing is free it will get abused - people were printing out non-work-related manuals, books, home photos, stuff for their friends etc. Charging for printing stopped that overnight.

Re:Justifying shinies

[b0bby]

Despite the summary being ipad only, the actual IT guy looking into this in the article is very clear that it's tablets in general.

Re:Then

[Overzeetop]

Have you ever tried getting files onto the iPad in a useful, orderly way. I have thousands of documents which are synced with a land and cloud server. Often, it's faster to walk to my desk, navigate to the file, and print it out than it is to find it on the iPad.

Also, until they get a real stylus interface (and not the ones with the 5mm tip; 0.5mm would be more appropriate) you will never be able to make decent notes in the margins.