UK Government Spending £6,000 Per Computer Every Year To Maintain Desktops

girlmad writes "The UK government's chief operating officer Stephen Kelly offered a frightening insight into the world of government IT spending this week. According to Kelly, the government spends £6,000 per year per PC just to maintain the devices, and wastes 3 days per year per person due to slow boot-up times."

Comments

How is this even possible?

[TaoPhoenix]

What exactly is "maintaining"? I've spent nothing on "Maintaining" my PC for some six years. And you can buy four PC's for that fee. And you can get a techie at $20 an hour for five hours a month every other month, so call it $500 per year. (Skipping currency games.)

So can we all have a piece of that slush fund?

Re:How is this even possible?

[Maxo-Texas]

In a business,

You need to test the patch before you allow it to propogate everywhere.

At a minimum, for every tuesday patch, you have 1 person patching a representative sample of your computers and then after seeing the computers still work postpatch, setting up the patch to propagate.

Assuming a 40,000 pound salary for one expert employee... and then another 50,000 pound salary for a back up... costs add up quickly.

Re:How is this even possible?

[mjwx]

What exactly is "maintaining"? I've spent nothing on "Maintaining" my PC for some six years. And you can buy four PC's for that fee. And you can get a techie at $20 an hour for five hours a month every other month, so call it $500 per year. (Skipping currency games.)

Their considering boot times to be costs. That should tell you how much bollocks is in the article (I, like any true /.er haven't read it).

Actual overheads are probably much lower.

Also which government department, the amount of security around any MOD installation would easily reach or exceed 6000 GBP in overheads, but very few departments would have this onerous requirement.

Re:How is this even possible?

[Black Parrot]

(I, like any true /.er haven't read it)

Read what?

Re:How is this even possible?

[mwvdlee]

Those particular costs are shared among a relatively large number of PC's however.
Even if you have a thousands of PC's, you wouldn't need more than that handful of experts to test patches and maintain the backups.
If their setup is even remotely sane, all labor-intensive work on location would be low-skilled.

Re:How is this even possible?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the UK government doesn't pay for support by the hour, they have established support contracts in place with several large UK companies.

The "hack job" of an article "forgets" that desktop prices include all the network infrastructure and the standard software packs. Switch ports, uplinks etc and the aforementioned support in place

The hack job article only touches lightly on the software costs of major application providers but fails to mention the amount of support required to maintain the crap that a lot of Government writes for itself... which is a lot of the most god awful crap.

The hack job of an article also fails to mention the rules and conditions that they, themselves, impose of desktop requirements. A vast amount of UK Government is required to operate at IL2 and IL3 security impact levels. Everything that touches said network, must be accredited to that security level. All software, all network, everything... EAL4/EAL4+ infrastructure is not cheap because of what the worlds Governments demand the manufacturers.

So, this article is complete crap, written by someone with no obvious understanding of the technical and security requirements and by stating "just buy iPads" she has told the world that she really does know nothing about large infrastructure design, planning and implementation.

Re:How is this even possible?

[Apothem]

This is the government we're talking about here. There isn't much that they build that can be considered sane.

Re:How is this even possible?

[Xest]

I guess it does depend on what is classed as maintaining as you say and I'm not sure what sections of government they're referring too.

I can however speak for local government, specifically my local council and whilst it differs council by council I can quite imagine it for mine.

At my local council around 2009 they were paying £28k for bottom of the rung helpdesk/front line support monkeys, and they upped their wages to £32k around 2009 - 2010 right at the height of the recession when they were axing outright other departments and services. For reference the equivalent member of staff in private sector with an equivalent degree of competence and responsibilities would be paid around the £18k - £20k mark in this region so they were paying £12k - £14k a year premium for each member of support staff alone and there was a decent number of them. If support costs are factored into this figure then I can full well imagine grossly over-inflated wages in at least some IT departments across the spectrum of government departments across the UK is a big factor.

Further to this, in 2011 the council decided, again, whilst making cuts to real actual useful services to blow a few million on upgrading everyone from Office 2007 to Office 2010, because of course that was totally worth it, I mean Office 2010 was so fundamentally different that despite being at the height of an austerity drive and despite having to cut useful services and despite cutting funding for real actual problems like 1 foot deep potholes and so forth it was essential that all staff got bumped from 2007 to 2010. Oh, and of course they hired a bunch of people on £32k a year to install it, because of course you need people paid a 23% premium over the national average wage in a relatively cheap part of the country to stick a CD in and click next next next a few times rather than just get your existing well paid support team to just install it remotely using the city-wide fibre network you'd built to every single satellite office a few years beforehand. It's all this sort of wastage that causes that figure.

Put simply, if my local council is representative of government in general then I'd say the £6k is probably about right because for some reason they have a hard-on for IT and all common sense and fiscal responsibility just goes right out the window. Government has enforced public sector pay rise increase limitations of 0% for a few years and 1% some years after so the wages issue at least will begin to be dealt with via inflation if they keep that up, though the problem is it's a blanket thing so unfairly harms government roles that were underpaid but this is typical of our current government's cuts - rather than grappling the fundamental issues of wastage and overpayment in some areas they just demand blanket cuts and let local councils get on with it even though many are way too lacking in competence to do it sensibly. The net result is reports like this - highlighting the disturbing levels of wastage in some areas.

I'm just glad I'm not paying council tax to that particular council any more at least though I've no idea what expenditure on this sort of thing is like at my current council as I don't know anyone that works there.

Re:How is this even possible?

[dbIII]

... and people wonder why we pile shit on MS Windows. Booting is one thing, but if a login takes longer than a user's attention span then the system is broken. Roaming profiles may be a good idea, but when some flaw turns them into crawling profiles then either the bottlenecks need to be found or the idea needs to be given up on in favour of something local enough to work before the user gets bored and wanders off.

Re:How is this even possible?

[SuricouRaven]

"Assuming a 40,000 pound salary for one expert employee"

Hah.

Re:How is this even possible?

[Lumpy]

They pay 2 dingos and a bushman a month.

Re:How is this even possible?

[war4peace]

Bullshit. That isn't the cost of using anything, it's one (or more) of the following:

- Made up numbers
- Wrongly calculated costs
- Huge useless management overhead
- General spending incompetence
- Overpriced licenses (e.g. "must have full Adobe Creative Suite on all PCs and upgrade it yearly")
- Users being dumb shits who break their computers on a weekly basis

All the above has little to nothing to do with which OS is being used.

Re:How is this even possible?

[onyxruby]

I've been an infrastructure architect for environments that include heavy government regulation at multiple large enterprises. I've dealt with everything from HIPAA, DOD, SOX, PCI, FERPA, FDA and so on. I've also worked a fair bit Euro and Asian regulatory environments at multinationals. I've done these things at environments from large health insurance companies to financial companies at stock exchanges to working with DOD contractors to large multinational pharmaceuticals.

There is no reason for their support costs to be anywhere this high, even when you include everything you mention. This is why you utilize enterprise management tools to manage your computers. This is why you pay for a professional lab, use change management, standardize the desktop, use HII, use packages, and have strong policies. Even with the costs to professionally manage everything you should be at well less than a fourth of the support costs that they mention.

IL certification costs money, but there is no reason for it to cost anywhere that much money. All that being said the "just buy iPads" bit is enough for me to consider her incompetent and whole heartedly agree with your statement "she really does know nothing about large infrastructure design, planning and implementation"

Re:How is this even possible?

[onyxruby]

Patch Tuesday? Patch Management is an issue that affects all platforms and requires professional support regardless of your operating system. It also involves all of your applications and that easily requires as much work as the OS itself. There is nothing special about Microsoft in this regard. Half my fleet is OS X and I've implemented Patch Management to support Unix and Linux over the years.

Your either talking out of your ass or simply incompetent by thinking you don't need to patch your environment.

Re:How is this even possible?

[Phoghat]

In other news, the contract to maintain the UK Govdernment's computers was won by the ne'r do well brother in law of a PM

Kelly could be quite right

[Craefter]

I believe the writer of the article does not consider enterprise items like geo-redundant infrastructure, storage, backup, auditing compliance and enterprise level servers. The majority of the cost is probably generated by slow IT processes to change, acquire and deploy software or features. A lot of meetings and paperwork is often needed and those people need to be paid also. A lot of large organizations do not know the meaning of the word "agile".

Number I pulled out of my ass way too high!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa, so I like talked to this guy and he was all like "Dude, I bet the UK spends like 6k pounds per desktop." And I was all like "Whoa, that number is so fucking high, man. How did you figure that out?" And he was all like "Dude, you just had to be there." And then I was like "Whoa, you could buy like so many fucking iPads with that money." And he was all like "Dude, sooo fucking many." And then I wrote this article about it.

Some perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to comment to say that I work in the UK public sector and this is so far from the truth it's amazing. It's complete crap. I'm sure someone wanting to make a point about waste could find a department somewhere in the country which made some bad decisions and got locked into an expensive contract but the general picture is that public service IT teams are under huge pressure to reduce costs. I suspect this £6000 figure is about ten times what we spend over the thousand-odd desktops in our offices.

But let's not forget that in the UK at the moment, we have both a government with an interest in painting public sector organisations as slow, lazy and wasteful in order to lay the foundations of their plans to privatise it (i.e. sell it to their old etonian school chums). We also have a press which is more than happy to press home the same idea. Why let actual facts get in the way of that?

Not quite.. but I've been there..

[wbane]

When I worked as a SysAdmin (on to an IT Manager) at a Healthcare system, I inherited a PC system spanning 16 counties, 300 machines all running various iterations of Windows on a mixture of new and incredibly aging machines. We spent so much time and wasted so much money on supporting some of these machines in the remote sites that I eventually got fed up and made a PXE booted custom mini-Linux distro (I dubbed it Spork Linux because it was so damned handy) that included basic web browsing, rdesktop (rdp client), citrix client, helpdesk access and a few misc tools and just setup a central Windows terminal server. This gave us better control over what people were accessing and where, removed licenses for apps that some people really didn't need.. (c'mon.. how many people really needed Microsoft Office suite? So.. we set OpenOffice and made them think some of them had MS Office.. LOL) and helped us "recycle/reuse" some old machines that now acted simply as dumb terminals but booted up in about 5-20 seconds since all that extra bloat wasn't there anymore. After all that license reclaiming and monitoring how much we spent on travel, repairs, etc.. we saved over 75,000$/year easily. It's definitely not that impressive but when you considering that's for a small org covering the geographic distance of a US state.. that's decent enough.. those numbers from the UK government don't surprise me all that much in comparison considering how many machines/people/locations they'd have to support. It's wasteful and awful, but unless someone changes it.. and for the better, they are going to hemorrhage money.

Re:Guess you didn't read the artice

[mwvdlee]

The title says absolutely nothing about WHY it costs 6000 pounds/year/desktop.

TFA seems rather confused...

[Bearhouse]

A few gems:

“I came into the office and I pressed my PC and it took me seven minutes to boot up,” he told attendees. “That’s government in the old world, that’s three days of the year I waste of my time booting up."

Urm, just gonna sit there and watch it boot, eh Steve? Go grab a coffee, make some calls...whatever.

"You wouldn't believe how much (it costs), I think the average cost of a desktop a year is about £6,000"
So he "thinks" a "desktop" costs that....I wonder what the definition of "desktop" is? The PC, the PC & support? The PC, support & s/w? etc...

The Fine Jounalist challenges the £6K figure.
"According to my estimations – verified by a CIO – this figure should be less than £1,000 per year taking into account the cost of the hardware, office suite, and support and server costs over a three-year period"

Seems more reasonable, but does not say it's a like-for-like comparison. Support costs for Govt. PC may include additional security, network and application maintenance, which for Govt crapware can be insanely costly.

Could only find one other article here, but really just the same information...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10097514/State-workers-spend-three-days-a-year-waiting-for-PCs-to-start.html

Re:Guess you didn't read the artice

[jythie]

For that matter, it does not even really say if it _means_ desktops. My guess is that the person just took the IT budgets of all the offices and divided it by the number of computers they had and came up with the number, skipping over things like server costs. The number is so silly-high that I am skeptical that it represents what they say it does.

I've worked for several London councils....

[Tomsk70]

...and I can tell you, this is not surprising at all.

All the desktops are the lowest CPU version possible - usually with not enough memory either. Because you can't put a value on waiting for bootup/ apps/ etc., but you can show how much money you've saved by going for a Celeron instead of an i3/ i5, you can guess which one happens.

Then there's citrix, and other money-saving wheezes that ultimately do nothing to lower the TCO, rather just shift the expense to the server-end instead of the desktop. And that's before we get to staff (or rather, senior managers etc.) that then demand a PC anyway.

And let's not forget the stupidly low money that gov. techs get paid - see peanuts/ monkeys, because anyone that has a real aptitude for the job will be gone within a year because this. As a result, contractors do very nicely out of it but the value-for-money aspect goes out of the window.

And remember, the decision to save-money-now-even-if-it-costs-more-tomorrow are legion - I just finshed a domain refresh, where I had to replace all the DC's across a London borough with brand-new HP boxes...loaded with Win2003 because the client 'didn't want to change anything'.

What's annoying is when politicians start complaining about the system they preside over and are ultimately responsible for - I suggest we remove them and replace them all with contractors :-)

IT Crowd

[Webcommando]

Their considering boot times to be costs.

When I read this in a story about UK, reminded me of the simple question. Have you tried turning it off and on?

Re:These are windows boxes, remember.

[trum4n]

12 people at my old company managed 12,000 windows computers in 2300 companies as off site tech support. Auto updates were enabled. We pretty much only visit when needed. They seem to still be going strong.

Extraordinary claims and all that...

[TapeCutter]

12X the industry standard is an extraordinary claim but as usual there's absolutely zero detail of how the "maintenance" figure was calculated, eg: did they just divide the entire IT budget by the number of desktops?

It seems to me that the point of the article is to convince people that, and I quote, "it looks like the government is getting completely swindled by their PC supplier". The whole story smells of "negotiation by press release" to me, are the big IT contracts coming up for renewal by any chance?