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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."
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.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
(I, like any true /.er haven't read it)
Read what?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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?
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.
Question Reality, Find Your Own Truth...
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.
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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.
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.
The title says absolutely nothing about WHY it costs 6000 pounds/year/desktop.
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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
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.
They pay 2 dingos and a bushman a month.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.