Category Archives: managing outsourced services

Universal Credit – good for its IT suppliers?

Posted on 11/07/2013 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

The DWP is conceding in its own tangential way that the IT for Universal Credit is not up to scratch; and an article in the Daily Telegraph suggests that Universal Credit this year (and perhaps well beyond) will handle so few claimants that the calculations for the time being could be done by hand, or on a spreadsheet, and not automatically by IT systems. The Register, through anonymous sources, has confirmation of this.

The FT says there will be a progressive national rollout of the coalition’s welfare reform in just six additional jobcentres which it said was the “latest sign the project is falling behind schedule”. It added that a significant shake-up of the IT underpinning universal credit is under way. 

The DWP said David Pitchford, the Whitehall troubleshooter who took over the running of Universal Credit for three months, had been asked to “review” the IT and ministers had “accepted his recommendation that they should explore enhancing the IT for universal credit working with the government digital service”.

“Advancements in technology since the current system was developed have meant that a more responsive system that is more flexible and secure could potentially be built,” said the DWP.

The FT quoted Howard Shiplee, who has led the Universal Credit  project since May, as denying claims from MPs that the original IT had been dumped because it had not delivered. “The existing systems that we have are working, and working effectively,” he said.

He added that he had set aside 100 days not to stop the programme, but to reflect on where it has got to and start to look at the entire total plan.

Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, doesn’t concede that the  timetable for the implementation of Universal Credit has changed. He told the work and pensions committee on Wednesday that numbers of claimants would ramp up during 2014 and he insisted that all claimants would be on the system by 2017, as originally planned.

“We get fixated on things like IT; the reality is it’s about a cultural shift,” Duncan Smith told MPs.

Comment

Iain Duncan Smith makes it clear that his DWP staff and suppliers, with the help of HMRC, are implementing Universal Credit with extreme care. Labour’s  work and pensions spokesman Liam Byrne says the Universal Credit project is a shambles. The truth is hard to fathom.

For years the DWP has rejected press reports that the IT for Universal Credit was in trouble. It is able to do without fear of authoritative contradiction because it keeps secret all its consultancy reports on the state of the Universal Credit project, despite FOI requests.

The Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and his officials talk much about the need for openness and transparency. Isn’t it time they persuaded DWP officials to release their internal and external reports on the detailed challenges faced by suppliers and civil servants on Universal Credit and other major government IT projects?

All big government IT projects are characterised by secrecy and defensiveness, although a little information about them is in the vague and subjectively-worded Major Projects Authority annual report.

One by-product of departmental defensiveness and secrecy is that the IT suppliers – in Universal Credit’s case HP, IBM and Accenture – are likely to continue to be paid even if the project is halted and redesigned. It’s probable the suppliers would argue that they have successfully done what they were asked to do in the contract. Who knows what the truth is?

The DWP is in effect protecting its suppliers from public and parliamentary scrutiny. It has been this way for decades and nothing has changed.

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, Campaign4Change, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, Government IT, IBM, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, managing change, managing outsourced services, openness and transparency, operational issues, outsourcing, oversight, project management, public sector, public services, software quality, supplier relationships

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EC probes IBM CIO secondment at the Met Office

Posted on 08/07/2013 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

A part of the European Commission is investigating a decision by the Met Office to appoint an IBM executive as CIO while he worked at the same time for IBM, the organisation’s main IT supplier.

The investigation was prompted by concerns of campaigner Dave Orr who wrote to the EC about the Met Office’s appointment of an IBM secondee David Young as CIO for two years between 2010 and December 2012.

Now Michel Barnier, the EC Commissioner responsible for internal market and services, says in a letter to Orr’s MEP Sir Graham Watson that the EC’s Directorate-General for Internal Market and Financial Services has been carrying out “an in-depth analysis” of the facts presented by Orr.

As part of this, the EC has written to the UK government seeking clarification on a number of points.

Some of Orr’s concerns arise from the Met Office’s responses – and non-responses – to his freedom of information requests. One of his concerns is of a potentially cosy relationship between the Met Office as a publicly-funded organisation and its principal IT supplier IBM; and he has wanted to know why the job of Met Office CIO was not openly advertised in a competitive recruitment process and whether its appointment of an IBM secondee had the potential for a possible conflict of interest.

Orr said that the secondment had the potential to confer a unique and significant intelligence and relationship advantage for IBM that other supercomputer suppliers could not hope to match. “In my view, that is anti-competitive and may in spirit at least, fail the EU procurement rules,” said Orr.

Barnier said that the existence of a conflict of interest would “depend on a number of factors such as the precise role and responsibilities the position entails, in particular whether it includes formulating and preparing technical specifications or tender documents for future IT contracts that the Met Office may put out to tender”.

It is also relevant, said Barnier, whether the terms and conditions of the secondment “impose any obligations or restrictions on the head of the department to prevent conflicts of interest, both during the secondment and afterwards”. He also wanted to know if internal rules were in place to prevent conflicts of interest in the course of tendering procedures.

The Met Office and ministers said that Young was not involved in procurement decisions relating to existing supercomputer facilities. Norman Lamb, then minister at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, said last year:

“Any potential conflicts of interest regarding David Young’s appointment were fully considered prior to his appointment and his terms of engagement specifically cover these …

“David Young had no involvement in the procurement process for existing supercomputing facilities, either for IBM or the Met Office, and he will have completed his secondment and left the Met Office prior to the selection of replacement supercomputer facilities.”

A wise decision?

The decision to second an IBM employee to run the 300-strong IT department, which is based at the Met Office’s supercomputer site in Exeter, raises questions that may go beyond the potential for a conflict of interest.

As Young was unable to be involved in some buying decisions and was unable to attend the technology strategy board to avoid any potential for a conflict of interest, did the Met Office restrict itself unnecessarily in hiring a CIO who faced these constraints?

Did the Met Office waste money – and a precious two years – hiring a lifeguard whose terms of employment required him to wear handcuffs?

The secondment of Young came at a difficult time for the Met Office – and some of the main difficulties it faced in 2010 are largely the same today.

Responses to Orr’s FOI requests and a report by the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee highlight some of the Met Office’s challenges:

– A need for modernised software that will take advantage of next-generation supercomputers.

– A need for a replacement supercomputer that has twice the power of the existing one which operates close to one petaflop (one thousand million million floating point operations per second).

– Funding a new supercomputer (with optimised software) at a time of cut-backs in government spending.

A Met Office Executive Board paper said that its executives have had “soft” negotiations with various suppliers about next generation supercomputer technology. They spoke to Bull, Cray, Microsoft, NEC and SGI.

“Vendor presentations indicate that performance increases will come from increasing the number of processors and/or adding co processors designed to process arrays of data efficiently, rather than increasing the speed of individual processors,” said the Met Office paper.

The Met Office says that “significant optimisation work will be needed [on the code] and, if this is not completed around 2014, a delay in the launch of the procurement may be unavoidable.” It has been seeking software engineers with experience of Fortran (which was originally developed by IBM) or C, Unix or Linux and Perl.

A House of Commons report in 2012 emphasised the need for new technology at the Met Office. The report of the Science and Technology Committee “Met Office Science” said in February 2012:

“It is of great concern to us that these scientific advances in weather forecasting and the associated public benefits (particularly in regard to severe weather warnings) are ready and waiting but are being held back by insufficient supercomputing capacity. We consider that a step-change in supercomputing capacity is required in the UK.”

MPs acknowledged that “affordability is an issue.”

The Met Office declined to answer Orr’s FOI requests about the cost to the taxpayer of employing Young.

Since Young’s  secondment ended in December 2012 the Met Office has hired one of its own employees as CIO. Charles Ewen has worked for the Met Office since 2008. He works with science teams to operate the Met Office’s high performance computing facilities. He is responsible for the development and implementation of the Met Office’s ICT Strategy and for the internal technical teams within the Technology Information Services Directorate.

Comment:

The Met Office hired Young for the best of reasons: after a succession of internal management changes it wanted a highly professional, stabilising CIO. But did it need a CIO from IBM, its principal IT supplier?

That the Met Office was sheepish about the appointment of an IBM secondee was, perhaps, revealed by its website which, in giving a profile of Young, did not mention – at first – that he was seconded from IBM. After Dave Orr’s FOI requests the Met Office corrected its website omission, making clear that Young was on secondment from IBM.

The Met Office has been in existence nearly 16o years. It was founded by Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy in 1854 as the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade. It is highly regarded internationally. A testament to the quality of its computer models  – which are used for daily forecasts – is that its “Unified Model” is licensed in Norway, Australia, South Korea, South Africa, India, New Zealand and the US Air Force.

Scientists say that a three-day forecast today is as accurate as a one-day forecast was 20 years ago. But in the UK the Met Office gets a bad press – not always unjustifiably.  There is a perception that the accuracy of forecasting is not improving. Sometimes it seems poor.

The algorithms that form the basis of weather and climate models place huge demands on supercomputing architectures. The models produce exceptionally large volumes of data. Although the Met Office had a new IBM supercomputer in 2008 it soon needed more powerful hardware and modernised software.

So was it a good idea, with all the challenges the Met Office faced in 2010 – including the need to persuade the government of the need to fund  new supercomputer facilities – to appoint a CIO for two years who, because he was an IBM secondee, had understandable restrictions on his freedom to do his job, restrictions the Met Office has been reluctant to reveal, despite Dave Orr’s FOI requests?

Hole in the head

The Met Office may regard an EC inquiry into its appointment of an IBM secondee as the last thing it needs now. But accountability should not be left to the occasional scrutiny by a Commons committee – or to Dave Orr’s FOI requests.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, capacity building, EU procurement, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, Government IT, IBM, innovation, managing outsourced services, Met Office, outsourcing, procurement, technology

How to cost-justify the NPfIT disaster – forecast benefits a decade away

Posted on 07/06/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

To Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, the NPfIT was a failure. In an interview with the FT, reported on 2 June 2013, Hunt said of the NPfIT

“It was a huge disaster . . . It was a project that was so huge in its conception but it got more and more specified and over-specified and in the end became impossible to deliver … But we musn’t let that blind us to the opportunities of technology and I think one of my jobs as health secretary is to say, look, we must learn from that and move on but we must not be scared of technology as a result.”

Now Hunt has a different approach.  “I’m not signing any big contracts from behind [my] desk; I am encouraging hospitals and clinical commissioning groups and GP practices to make their own investments in technology at the grassroots level.”

Hunt’s indictment of the NPfIT has never been accepted by some senior officials at the DH, particularly the outgoing chief executive of the NHS Sir David Nicholson. Indeed the DH is now making strenuous attempts to cost justify the NPfIT, in part by forecasting benefits for aspects of the programme to 2024.

The DH has not published its statement which attempts to cost justify the NPfIT. But the National Audit Office yesterday published its analysis of the unpublished DH statement. The NAO’s analysis “Review of the final benefits statement for programmes previously managed under the National Programme for IT in the NHS” is written for the Public Accounts Committee which meets next week to question officials on the NPfIT. 

A 22 year programme?

When Tony Blair gave the NPfIT a provisional go-ahead at a meeting in Downing Street in 2002, the programme was due to last less than three years. It was due to finish by the time of the general election of 2005. Now the NPfIT  turns out to be a programme lasting up to 22 years.

Yesterday’s NAO report says the end-of-life of the North, Midlands and East of England part of the NPfIT is 2024. Says the NAO

“There is, however, very considerable uncertainty around whether the forecast benefits will be realised, not least because the end-of-life dates for the various systems extend many years into the future, to 2024 in the case of the North, Midlands and East Programme for IT.”

The DH puts the benefits of the NPfIT at £3.7bn to March 2012 – against costs of £7.3bn to March 2012.

Never mind: the DH has estimated the forecast benefits to the end-of-life of the systems at £10.7bn. This is against forecast costs of £9.8bn to the end-of-life of the systems.

The forecast end-of-life dates are between 2016 and 2024. The estimated costs of the NPfIT do not include any settlement with Fujitsu over its £700m claim against NHS Connecting for Health. The forecast costs (and potential benefits) also exclude the patient administration system Lorenzo because of uncertainties over the CSC contract.

The NAO’s auditors raise their eyebrows at forecasting of benefits so far into the future. Says the NAO report

“It is clear there is very considerable uncertainty around the benefits figures reported in the benefits statement. This arises largely because most of the benefits relate to future periods and have not yet been realised. Overall £7bn (65 per cent) of the total estimated benefits are forecast to arise after March 2012, and the proportion varies considerably across the individual programmes depending on their maturity.

“For three programmes, nearly all (98 per cent) of the total estimated benefits were still to be realised at March 2012, and for a fourth programme 86 per cent of benefits remained to be realised.

There are considerable potential risks to the realisation of future benefits, for example systems may not be deployed as planned, meaning that benefits may be realised later than expected or may not be realised at all…”

NPfIT is not dead

The report also reveals that the DH considers the NPfIT to be far from dead. Says the NAO

“From April 2013, the Department [of Health] appointed a full-time senior responsible owner accountable for the delivery of the [the NPfIT] local service provider contracts for care records systems in London, the South and the North, Midlands and East, and for planning and managing the major change programme that will result from these contracts ending.

“The senior responsible owner is supported by a local service provider programme director in the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

“In addition, from April 2013, chief executives of NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts became responsible for the realisation and reporting of benefits on the ground. They will also be responsible for developing local business cases for the procurement of replacement systems ready for when the local service provider contracts end.”

The NAO has allowed the DH to include as a benefit of the NPfIT parts of the programme that were not included in the original programme such as PACS x-ray systems.

Officials have also assumed as a benefit quicker diagnosis from the Summary Care Record and text reminders using NHSmail which the DH says reduces the number of people who did not attend their appointment by between 30 and 50 per cent.

Comment

One of the most remarkable things about the NPfIT is the way benefits have always been – and still are – referred to in the future tense. Since the NPfIT was announced in 2002, numerous ministerial statements, DH press releases and conference announcements have all referred to what will happen with the NPfIT.

Back in June 2002, the document that launched the NPfIT, Delivering 21st Century IT for the NHS, said:

“We will quickly develop the infrastructure …”

“In 2002/03 we will seek to accelerate the pace of development …

“Phase 1 – April 2003 to December 2005 …Full National Health Record Service implemented, and accessible nationally for out of hours reference.”

In terms of the language used little has changed. Yesterday’s NAO report is evidence that the DH is still saying that the bulk of the benefits will come in future.

Next week (12 June) NHS chief Sir David Nicholson is due to appear before the Public Accounts Committee to answer questions on the NPfIT. One thing is not in doubt: he will not concede that the programme has been a failure.

Neither will he concede that a fraction of the £7.3bn spent on the programme up to March 2012 would have been needed to join up existing health records for the untold benefit of patients, especially those with complex and long-term conditions.

Isn’t it time MPs called the DH to account for living in cloud cuckoo land? Perhaps those at the DH who are still predicting the benefits of the NPfIT into the distant future should be named.

They might just as well have predicted, with no less credibility, that in 2022 the bulk of the NPfIT’s benefits would be delivered by the Flower Fairies.

It is a nonsense that the DH is permitted to waste time on this latest cost justification of the NPfIT. Indeed it is a continued waste of money for chief executives of NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts to have been made responsible, as of April 2013, for reporting the benefits of the NPfIT.

Jeremy Hunt sums up the NPfIT when he says it has been a huge disaster. It is the UK’s biggest-ever IT disaster. Why does officialdom not accept this?

Instead of wasting more money on delving into the haystack for benefits of the NPfIT, it would be more sensible to allocate money and people to spreading the word within Whitehall and to the wider public sector on the losses of the NPfIT and the lessons that must be learnt to discourage any future administrations from embarking on a multi-billion pound folly.

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Posted in Atos, BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, change, change management, CSC, e-health, excessive secrecy, Fujitsu, health records, IT projects, IT-related failures, legal disputes, Major Projects Authority, managing change, managing outsourced services, NHS, npfit, public sector, public services, Summary Care Record

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Somerset County Council settles IBM dispute – who wins?

Posted on 28/03/2013 | 10 comments

By Tony Collins

Somerset County Council has settled a High Court legal dispute with IBM-led Southwest One. It will bring some services back in-house.

The Conservative leader of Somerset council John Osman said, “This agreement will save Somerset residents millions of pounds and will make the contract fit for the future.”

Osman added that the agreement involves settlement of Southwest One fees, which the council had been withholding, for a mutually- agreed sum.

“Most importantly the cancelling of the gainshare agreement will save Somerset County Council residents millions of pounds in the future as those sums can now be kept by the Council,” said Osman.

But as the deal includes payment of an undisclosed sum by the council to Southwest One it is unclear which side is the beneficiary in the dispute. [See Dave Orr comment on this post.]

The council says the settlement will bring benefits for the council including securing “greater strategic control and capacity back with SCC  in terms of Procurement, Property and ICT”.

The agreement also “removes some barriers to ensure successful delivery of our Change Programme – with greater alignment to the operating model, commissioning capacity, service reviews, and technology enablers.”

And the settlement allows officers to focus on improving services rather than on a series of disputes.

Southwest One had issued a writ against the council – what the authority calls a “substantial claim” – and a date for a High Court hearing was set provisionally for November 2013.  Yesterday [March 27 2013] the council agreed to settle the High Court claim, and an unspecified number of other disputes.   

IBM, Somerset County Council, Taunton Deane Borough Council, and Avon and Somerset Police set up Southwest One as a joint venture company in 2007.  IBM  owns 75% of the company.

Somerset’s officers said in a report yesterday:

“Following a series of discussions between the Council and Southwest One we are now in a position to settle the disputes and the Procurement legal proceedings against SCC will cease.

“The agreement includes a settlement payment to SWO which is substantially lower than the claim against SCC and releases payments to SWO that were held by SCC as part of the dispute.”

Somerset County Council will take back several services and about 100 people who had been seconded to Southwest One. The council says that taking back staff and services will “reduce the potential for further disputes and align those services much closer to the operating model the Council has adopted”.

Services returning to SCC include:

• Strategic and Operational Procurement
• Property Services
• Estates Management
• ICT Strategic Management including some web management posts
• Some business support posts for the above functions

The council says there will be little change in day to day activities and no changes to locations of staff. Somerset’s staff will have their secondments terminated and revert to the council’s terms and conditions.

The High Court action was because of a disagreement  about the quality of Southwest One’s procurement service and what payments Southwest One was entitled to as a result of savings made through the joint venture.

Secrecy

Whereas a High Court hearing would have been open to the public, the sum paid by Somerset to IBM as part of the settlement,  and the risks of bringing staff and services back in-house, are being kept confidential because of what the council calls “commercial sensitivity”.

Risks

Some of the settlement’s main risks for the council are listed in yesterday’s report:

• The confidential nature of the discussions held to secure an agreement has
meant that full consultation with a wide range of officers and partners has not
been possible.
• The transfers of staff and functions will take place during the new financial
year. The proposed transfers create some risk due to SAP changes required.
• There will be some risks in the hand-over of programmes of work.
• Despite all efforts to mitigate risks to services, it is possible that some
disruption may occur. Transition workshops are planned to identify and preempt such instances, which significantly reduces the risk.
• Implications for partners have also been estimated. It is possible that partners
may take a different view of the implications for them.

Blame

Osman blamed the previous Liberal Democrat administration for the problems which he said were owing to the way the contract was worded, the actions of the previous Lib Dem administration transferring services to Southwest One that should never have transferred and the failure to clarify the savings sharing element of the agreement. Osman said this was the “equivalent of the Lib Dems writing a blank cheque”.

The 10-year joint venture, which started in 2007, will continue. 

Comment:

As the terms of the settlement and the risks associated with transferring staff and services back in-house are being kept secret nobody outside an inner circle of the council can know how bad the joint venture and the dispute have been for Somerset council’s taxpayers.

If anything is clear it is that IBM held the dominant legal hand all along. It issued a High Court claim, and now it has received a payment from the council.

It seems to be a feature of big council outsourcing deals and joint ventures that councillors are easily swayed by promises of enormous savings, often upfront savings, and are not too concerned about the risk of things going wrong because they won’t be in office when or if any mud hits the fan.

Yesterday Cornwall Council’s Interim CEO, along with the Chairman of Cornwall Partnership Foundation Trust and the Director of Finance at Peninsula Community Health signed a contract for a joint venture with BT.

As Andrew Wallis, an independent councillor in Cornwall, says

“Lets hope the Council does not regret this day.”

The Southwest One joint venture was flawed joint venture from the time a rushed contract riddled with literals was signed in the early hours of a Saturday morning in 2007.  For years afterwards, Somerset Council has been trying to dig itself out of a hole. It is now near the surface – except that yesterday’s council report says there is a potential for further disputes. 

Will other councils learn from Somerset’s experiences? Cornwall’s deal shows that any learning will be very limited.

And the secrecy that tends to go with big outsourcing deals and joint ventures means that a small group of councillors can sign joint ventures and outsourcing contracts without proper accountability  – and can settle any legal disputes later without accountability, and indeed with impunity.

Whenever a  major supplier offers a council large upfront savings from an outsourcing deal or a joint venture why would the authority’s inner circle of councillors say no?

Thank you to campaigning Somerset resident and former county council employee Dave Orr who provided the links and information that made this post possible.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, IBM, IT projects, IT-related failures, law, legal disputes, local government, managing change, managing outsourced services, outsourcing, public-private partnerships, SAP, supplier relationships

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Cornwall Council’s cabinet approves BT deal after hurried talks

Posted on 13/03/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Independent Cornwall councillor Andrew Wallis has revealed on his blog that the councils’s cabinet has approved a tender from BT which involves the transfer of 132 staff in information services, 76 in shared services, 46 in document management and 28 in telecare.

Cornwall Council has rushed through agreement of a deal with BT – whether deliberate or not – ahead of the voting in of a new council in May. A formal consultation with the staff affected will begin next month.

All cabinet members apart from one, independent Bert Biscoe, approved the tender. Wallis says that a meeting today has brought to an end a “long, emotive, and fraught process”.

He adds: “I am pleased the Cabinet meeting today, and the information surrounding the bid, was all done in open session. It might bring some confidence back in to the process of partnership working.”

Cornwall’s cabinet ratified the recommendation that

“…  award of the contract to BT plc for the Strategic Partnership for Support Services, as set out in the Invitation to Submit Final Tender issued by the Council on 4 March 2013, be approved.”

The cabinet also gave authority for the signing of the contract to the Interim Chief Executive in consultation with the Leader, the Corporate Director of Resources, the Head of Legal, Democratic and Procurement Services and the Head of Finance.

Wallis says the deal guarantees the creation of 197 new jobs by end of year 4 and 313 new jobs to be delivered through reasonable endeavours by end of year 5.

“I am told the term reasonable endeavours has legal meeting, but for me, it still sounds wishy-washy,” says Wallis. “I am there will be some nervous staff wanting to know how they will fit into this new utopia.

Fifty two jobs have been identified to go by the end of year 4. There is a contractual commitment for most of the affected staff to be re-deployed.

Says Wallis: “The deed is done, and I just hope it will not turn into the disaster like so many other councils’ joint ventures up and down the land.”

There is a warning in a report to the cabinet about the risks of not signing a deal with BT. The report implies that BT would have to receive compensation for its bidding costs.

“If Cabinet chooses not to award a contract the Council will face a different set of risks (when compared to the risks of signing a contract).

“These risks would be higher in relation to finance and similar in relation to legal and delivery. As the bid meets the requirements as set out in the Evaluation Guidance … there are financial and legal risks in deciding not to award a contract.

“The ‘in-scope’ services have developed proposals with bidders over the past 12 months and if a contract is not awarded, work will need to be undertaken to ensure a level of continued service delivery in these areas in light of recent budget decisions.”

The report to the cabinet gives no projected cost of the deal. Officers are expected to sign a contract anytime after 24 March 2013.

Comment

BT’s promises, contractual commitments and guarantees are built into a concrete frame. Except that the frame can be broken apart by any legal dispute that throws clauses in the contract into doubt.

Let us hope Cornwall Council understands that its failure to keep its contractual commitments may bring BT’s litigation lawyers into play – and BT has more experience in outsourcing legal disputes than Cornwall Council.

Councillors will assume that Cornwall’s officers will be monitoring BT’s performance from day one of the contract. They may not realise that, perhaps with impressive diligence,  BT will be monitoring Cornwall Council’s performance from day one.

But not all councillors will need care how the contract progresses – for there will be a new council in May and some councillors may not stand or be re-elected.

If things go sour the new council could claim it wasn’t in any way responsible for the BT contract. All of this is within the context of rushed talks and a rushed agreement to sign the contract.

As Churchill said in the House of Commons in 1947:

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Things run well and efficiently now at Cornwall Council. How can BT guarantee  197 jobs, invest more (Trading investment in bidding for new work – £1.9m plus £7.8m investment in transformation), make savings (£17.4m over 10 years) and run services more efficiently – and make a profit?

The Council says that BT will invest £157.5m in the partnership over 10 years, excluding an additional £16m spent outside Cornwall trying to win bids. The cabinet was told in a report that BT has made an “excellent offer”. But is it too good to be true? Indeed the one figure the report to the cabinet doesn’t give is the projected cost to Cornwall’s council taxpayers.

With the prices charged by BT for inevitable and as yet unforeseen changes, could the costs to the council more than wipe out savings?

It may be that all but one of Cornwall’s cabinet councillors, perhaps encouraged by council officers, have been naive. I hope I am proved wrong.

Andrew Wallis’s blog

Cornwall Council rushes to sign BT deal ahead of elections

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Posted in BT, Campaign4Change, local democracy, local government, managing outsourced services, outsourcing, public services, public-private partnerships

Cornwall Council rushes to sign BT outsourcing deal before elections

Posted on 08/03/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Cornwall council logoCornwall Council was a model of local democracy in the way it challenged and then rejected a large-scale outsourcing plan. Now it has gone to the other extreme.

Amid extraordinary secrecy the Council’s cabinet is rushing through plans to sign a smaller outsourcing contract with BT – a deal that will include IT – before the May council elections.

Councillors who have been given details are not allowed to discuss them. No figures are being given on the costs to the council, or the possible savings. The Council’s cabinet is not releasing information on the risks.

Councillors are being treated like children, says ThisisCornwall. Documents with details of the BT outsourcing plans have to be handed back by councillors, and cabinet papers are being printed individually with members’ names as a watermark, on every page, to guard against copying and to help identify any whistleblowers.

The council’s Single Issue Panel has a timetable for the IT outsourcing plan.

– Recommendation to Cabinet to approve release of ITT – 27 February 2013

– Evaluation of bid – March 2013

– If contract awarded, commencement of implementation work – April 2013

– Staff transfer date – July 2013

The SIP report emphasises that the timetable for signing a deal is tight. “Evidence received is that there is little room for slippage in the timetable, but that potential award of contract is achievable by the end of March 2013… It is expected that a contract could be ready to be issued as part of the ITT [invitation to tender] pack by early in the week commencing 4 March 2013.”

The SIP report concedes that the plan is “fast moving”.

In the past, the SIP group of councillors has been open and challenging in its reports on the council’s plans with BT (and CSC before the company withdrew from negotiations). Now the SIP’s latest report is vague and unchallenging. The risks are referred to in the report as a tick-box exercise. Entire paragraphs in the SIP report appear to have little meaning.

“Risk log and programme timelines are reviewed and updated on a regular basis… 

“The Council and health partners have been working on and have reached agreement on their positions in relation to commercial aspects in the contract and their expectations have been part of the dialogue with BT.”

“Previous concerns of the Panel relating to the area of new jobs have been addressed with BT in contract discussions and contract clauses have been revised to reflect this…”

It is also unclear from the SIP report why the council is outsourcing at all, only perhaps a hint that the deal will be value for money.

“The contract will be fully evaluated by the Head of Finance and her team to ensure value for money once the final bid is received. No savings have been assumed for 2013/14 budgetary purposes, although there are assumptions of savings for the indicative figures for future years,” says the SIP report.

Comment

It is a pity that Cornwall Council’s cabinet is rushing to sign a deal for which it won’t be accountable if things go wrong. In a few weeks a new council will be voted in and, if the outsourcing deal with BT ends up in a dispute or litigation, the new council will simply blame the old, as happened when Somerset County Council’s joint venture deal with IBM, Southwest One, went into dispute.

In essence, with the local elections only two months away, Cornwall Council’s cabinet has a freedom to make whatever decision it likes with impunity; and it appears to be taking that freedom to an extreme, almost to the point of sounding, in the latest SIP report, as if the council is an arms-length marketing agent of BT.

Cornwall Council’s cabinet has a mandate from the full council to move to a contract with BT. The full council has voted to “support” a deal. But that vote was a mandate to negotiate, not to sign anything BT wants to sign.

Openness has gone out of the window and BT, it seems, is no longer being rigorously  challenged – by Cornwall’s cabinet, the full council, the public or the media.

How exactly can BT guarantee jobs and make savings? We don’t know. The Cabinet isn’t saying, and its members are doing all they can to stop councillors saying.

Are BT’s promises reliant on the fact that IT is subject to constant and sometimes costly change – often unforeseen change – and that is bound to continue, at least in the form of supporting changing legislation and reorganisations?

Unforeseen changes could add unforeseen costs which the council may have to pay because IT is at the heart of business continuity.  In any dispute with the council  – and BT knows its way around the world of contested contracts – the company would have the upper hand because of its experience with litigation and the fact that the council would need undisrupted IT at a time of change and could not afford, without risk, to take the service back in-house.

We have seen how normality broke down at Mid Staffs NHS Foundation Trust amid a lack of openness and excessive defensiveness;  and we have seen, in Somerset County Council’s joint venture with IBM, Southwest One, what can happen when a contract signing is rushed.

Cornwall Council’s cabinet is doing both. It is rushing to sign a contract; and it is rushing to sign it amid excessive secrecy.

Surely Cornwall Council can do better than slip into the shadows to sign a deal with BT before the council elections in May?  If it is such a good deal, the new council will want to sign it. A new council should have the chance to do so.

For Cornwall Council to outsource now what is arguably its single most important internal resource – IT – is bad for local democracy: it is snub to anyone who holds true the idea that local councillors are accountable to local people.

Thank you to campaigner Dave Orr who drew my attention to information that made this post possible.

* Cornwall Council, by the way, has one of the best local authority websites I have seen.  If the website is a reflection of the imagination and efficiency of its IT department, Cornwall Council should be selling its IT skills to BT for a small fortune – not giving staff away.

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Posted in BT, Campaign4Change, change management, excessive secrecy, IBM, IT-related failures, legal disputes, local democracy, local government, managing outsourced services, openness and transparency, operational issues, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, project management, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships

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Big IT suppliers and their Whitehall “hostages”

Posted on 30/01/2013 | 6 comments

By Tony Collins

Mark Thompson is a senior lecturer in information systems at Cambridge Judge Business School, ICT futures advisor to the Cabinet Office and strategy director at consultancy Methods.

Last month he said in a Guardian comment that central government departments are “increasingly being held hostage by a handful of huge, often overseas, suppliers of customised all-or-nothing IT systems”.

Some senior officials are happy to be held captive.

“Unfortunately, hostage and hostage taker have become closely aligned in Stockholm-syndrome fashion.

“Many people in the public sector now design, procure, manage and evaluate these IT systems and ignore the exploitative nature of the relationship,” said Thompson.

The Stockholm syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages bond with their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them.

This month the Foreign and Commonwealth Office issued  a pre-tender notice for Oracle ERP systems. Worth between £250m and £750m, the framework will be open to all central government departments, arms length bodies and agencies and will replace the current “Prism” contract with Capgemini.  

It’s an old-style centralised framework that, says Chris Chant, former Executive Director at the Cabinet Office who was its head of G-Cloud, will have Oracle popping champagne corks. 

“This is a 1993 answer to a 2013 problem,” he told Computer Weekly.

In the same vein, Georgina O’Toole at Techmarketview says that central departments are staying with big Oracle ERP systems.   

She said the framework “appears to support departments continuing to run Oracle or, indeed, choosing to move to Oracle”. This is “surprising as when the Shared Services strategy was published in December, the Cabinet Office continued to highlight the cost of running Oracle ERP…”

She said the framework sends a  message that the Cabinet Office has had to accept that some departments and agencies are not going to move away from Oracle or SAP.

“The best the Cabinet Office can do is ensure they are getting the best deal. There’s no doubt there will be plenty of SIs looking to protect their existing relationships by getting a place on the FCO framework.”

G-Cloud and open standards?

Is the FCO framework another sign that the Cabinet Office, in trying to cut the high costs of central government IT, cannot break the bond – the willing hostage-captive relationship –  between big suppliers and central departments?

The framework appears to bypass G-Cloud in which departments are not tied to a particular company. It also appears to cock a snook at the idea of replacing  proprietary with open systems.

Mark Thompson said in his Guardian comment: 

– Administrative IT systems, which cost 1% of GDP, have become a byword for complexity, opacity, expense and poor delivery.

– Departments can break free from the straitjackets of their existing systems and begin to procure technology in smaller, standardised building blocks, creating demand for standard components across government. This will provide opportunities for less expensive SMEs and stimulate the local economy.

– Open, interoperable platforms for government IT will help avoid the mass duplication of proprietary processes and systems across departments that currently waste billions.

–  A negative reaction to the government’s open standards policy from some monopolistic suppliers is not surprising.

Comment

It seems that Oracle and the FCO have convinced each other that the new framework represents change.  But, as Chris Chant says, it is more of the same.

If there is an exit door from captivity the big suppliers are ushering senior officials in departments towards it saying politely “you first” and the officials are equally deferential saying “no – you first”. In the end they agree to stay where they are.

Will Thompson’s comments make any difference?

Some top officials in central departments – highly respected individuals – will dismiss Thompson’s criticisms of government IT because they believe the civil service and its experienced suppliers are doing a good job: they are keeping systems of labyrinthine complexity running unnoticeably smoothly for the millions of people who rely on government IT.

Those officials don’t want to mess too much with existing systems and big IT contracts in case government systems start to become unreliable which, they argue, could badly affect millions of people.

These same officials will advocate reform of systems of lesser importance such as those involving government websites; and they will champion agile and IT-related reforms that don’t affect them or their big IT contracts.

In a sense they are right. But they ignore the fact that government IT costs much too much. They may also exaggerate the extent to which government IT works well. Indeed they are too quick to dismiss criticisms of government IT including those made by the National Audit Office.

In numerous reports the NAO has drawn attention to weaknesses such as the lack of reliable management information and unacceptable levels of fraud and internal error in the big departments. The NAO has qualified the accounts of the two biggest non-military IT spending departments, the DWP and HMRC.

Ostensible reformers are barriers to genuine change.  They need to be replaced with fresh-thinking civil servants who recognise the impossibility of living with mega IT contracts.

Mark Thompson’s Guardian article.

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, Capgemini, change management, Cloud, Cloud Computing, cost avoidance, cost reduction, culture, DWP, G-Cloud, Government IT, HMRC, innovation, managing change, managing outsourced services, open source, open standards, operational issues, Oracle ERP, Politics, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, project management, reducing cost strategically, supplier relationships

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Is BT having trouble meeting some of its promises?

Posted on 10/12/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Six weeks ago BBC’s Watchdog broadcast an advert for BT Vision, which offers broadband-based pay-TV packages.  “With BT Vision you won’t miss a thing,” says the advert.

Chris Hollins, a presenter of Watchdog, then tells millions of viewers:

“Big promises. Tempting promises. But according to customers who contacted Watchdog they are empty promises.”

Can BT always be trusted to deliver on its promises? BT Vision is a completely different part of the company that bids for joint venture and outsourcing contracts with local authorities. At the same time BT is marketing its services to Cornwall Council and other local authorities partly on the basis of its unified corporate strength, as a FTSE 100 company.

Can BT’s culture and practice be separated from one division to the next?

Maragret Outschoorn told Watchdog of how she had been five months without a proper service. Sue Bennett, another BT Vision customer, had had problems for two and a half years, since 2010. She told the programme she had been on the phone to BT Vision nearly every week, sometimes for two or three hours.

“Like others who contacted us Sue fell foul of BT Vision’s habit of passing customers from one person to another for weeks on end without sorting out their problem,” said Hollins.

Joe McCaffrey said he spent about 13 hours on the phone over a period of 18 days and each time he had to re-trace the history of his problems.

Breaking up can be hard to do

“So what if a customer decides there are just too many problems to navigate through and they just want to leave BT Vision?” asked Hollins. “Can they achieve their goal? Kieran Potter couldn’t. He was told he’d have to pay a £200 cancellation fee first.

“I ended up having an argument with them for the best part of 13 months saying I want to cancel; I want to leave,” said Potter. “By the time I did get them to cancel me they still wanted me to pay £70 which was in July this year, which I refused. The only reason they did cancel was because I threatened to get in touch with Watchdog.”

Earlier this  year Ofcom revealed that for every 1,000 customers BT Vision received four times as many complaints as its nearest rivals. “We continue to hear from customers who are told they will be charged to leave even though their service is plagued with problems,” said Hollins.

Cornwall Council will decide tomorrow whether to go ahead with a mega-deal in which IT and other services are outsourced to BT. Some council officers and BT favour the services being delivered by a joint venture company that is owned completely by BT. Underlying the assumptions being made by the council is that BT would fulfil its promises and, if not, could be found in breach of contract. Remedies in the contract would give the council the ability to obtain compensation or terminate and bring services back in-house. A 134-page report to Cornwall’s councillors is underpinned by a catalogue of BT promises and guarantees.

But how easy would it be in reality to ensure that BT meets its promises? And how easy would it be in practice for the council to leave BT if termination became necessary?

BT’s response to Watchdog

“BT would like to apologise to the customers featured in the report. Where issues have occurred with BT Vision, we have made efforts to help customers to enjoy the service at its best.”

“However, it is clear that in these particular cases, we have failed to deliver the excellent and timely customer service customers would expect from BT. Where these customers have asked to leave, we have waived charges for leaving contracts early. We are also in the process of agreeing compensation, where appropriate, for some of these customers…”

BT’s full response to BBC Watchdog broadcast.

Comment:

A deal with BT may be good for Cornwall Council and its taxpayers. The evidence we have seen so far looks one-sided though.

The council’s presentations to councillors appear to make the assumption that BT’s promises and guarantees are inviolable, that contractual remedies for any breaches would be easy to enforce, and termination would be straightforward. Could this be because of what TS Eliot called the inability of humankind to bear very much reality?

BT Vision – Watchdog 31 October 2012

BT Vision tops Ofcom pay TV customer complaints

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Posted in BT, Campaign4Change, local government, managing outsourced services, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships

Barnet’s inner circle ratifies Capita deal – now the challenge begins

Posted on 07/12/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Conservative-led Barnet Borough Council’s inner circle of “cabinet” members  agreed  unanimously last night to confirm Capita as the supplier for a 10-year £320m back-office services contract, subject to financial reports.

The deal was agreed despite widespread opposition, without a vote of the full council, and without a political consensus.  A report published by Cornwall Council’s Support Services Single Issue Panel has said that a political consensus is critical to the success of partnership deals.

Capita promises to save £120m over the 10 years, and make an £8m investment in new technology. Up to 200 jobs could go. Capita will run:

  • Estates
  • Finance and Payroll
  • Human Resources
  • IT Infrastructure and Support
  • Corporate Procurement
  • Revenues and Benefits
  • Commercial Services.

About 100 people gathered outside the Town Hall in The Burroughs, Hendon, to voice their opposition to the contract.

Standing on chairs and holding banners, members of Barnet Alliance for Public Services called on the cabinet members to listen to residents’ concerns.

Councillors vacated the room and continued their meeting next door. Speaking at the meeting, Labour councillor Alison Moore said: “This is an end to democracy as we know it… There is no such thing as guaranteed savings.”

Council leader Richard Cornelius said:

“I look forward to getting the savings we desperately need. This is not a gamble. This is not a quick fix – we have been talking about this for a long time. If we were to reject these proposals we would have to find savings elsewhere, which would be very unpleasant.”

Cornelius said the combination of a saving to the taxpayer of a million pounds a month and an £8m investment in technology by Capita made it a “very, very good deal for the Barnet taxpayer”.

The council will set up a monitoring committee in the next couple of months to scrutinise the contract.

Capita’s New Support and Customer Services Organisation deal will be the first of two major contracts awarded under the Barnet council’s One Barnet outsourcing programme. Capita’s contract is due to start in April 2013.

Comment:

Barnet’s cabinet has made an important and controversial decision about the council’s future without a vote of the full council, which is a snub to local democracy.

Somerset County Council’s joint venture with IBM has failed in part because the staff were opposed to it,  the promises were over-optimistic, the finances were on fragile foundations, and the political leadership changed.

In Barnet the opposition to the deal with Capita is more pronounced than at Somerset, particularly among staff. Can the contract survive so much animus, and will opposition to Barnet’s cabinet grow now that local democracy has been flouted in such a macho way?

Cornwall is putting its joint venture decision to a vote of the full council, on 11 December. Whatever the outcome one thing is clear. Cornwall Council’s approach to local democracy puts Barnet to shame.

Barnet approves outsourcing plan

Political consensus key to success in outsourcing

Capita contract approved despite protests

Resident seeks judicial review 

Barnet’s fire-sale

A day Capita will rue?

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Capita, change management, cost reduction, IBM, local democracy, local government, managing outsourced services, outsourcing, public-private partnerships

Parts of report on Cornwall’s planned BT joint venture are missing

Posted on 06/12/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Cornwall Council’s officers have written a 134-page report on the options available to councillors for confronting budget cuts.

It will help councillors  decide at a full council meeting on 11 December whether to ask officers to conclude a joint venture with BT.

The report “Partnership for Support Services – Options Appraisal” is clearly a well-meant attempt to convince councillors that the best option is a deal with BT. The current plan is for BT to set up a subsidiary it would own completely, that would deliver ICT and other services back to the council and parts of the local NHS. BT has no plans for the council to be represented on the subsidiary’s board.

The new report is strong on the benefits of a joint venture with BT, such as guaranteed jobs and savings. Absent, though, are  important parts on costs, risks and local authority experiences on joint ventures and private sector partnerships. 

Secret risks

The report says that the “risks inherent in SP 1 [the joint venture with BT] has been submitted to the Council” by legal firm Eversheds.  A final version of the Eversheds report will be signed off by council officers before any invitation to tender is issued to BT. But there’s no indication that this report on risks will be shown to all councillors.

Secret appendix 

The council’s own procurement costs relating to the proposed joint venture, and further projected costs, are escalating.

In July 2011 the costs to Cornwall’s taxpayers of planning the joint venture  were estimated at £375,000. That figure rose to £650,000, then to £800,000, then £1.8m and now stands at  £2.1m.

“The current forecast estimate of the costs of the procurement process now stands at £2.1m. This is funded from the corporate improvement budget,” says the new report.

There are further costs arising from the partnership, says the report. One example is the pension fund for the transfer of staff which will cost about £10m over 10 years.  “There will also need to be additional budget to create a robust client team [to manage the BT contract],” says the report. This would cost between £400,000 and £700,000 a year.

“Both of these additional costs have been taken into account in the option analysis contained in appendix 2.”

But appendix 2 is missing in the public version of the report.

Also missing  

The report suggests that strategic partnerships are “nothing new”. It adds:

“BT – and other councils (sic) – have been involved in them for more than 10 years. Similarly the outsourcing market is mature and well understood. The UK local government IT and Business Process Outsourcing market is the biggest outsourcing market in the world and there are over 100 deals in operation. Risks are sometimes managed well and sometimes managed badly. The risks have been mitigated by using expert advisors and the Council has senior officers who understand this territory well.”

But the report does not mention that some councils in the mature local authority market have, after poor experiences, outcast joint ventures and one-size-fits-all outsourcing deals. Neither does it mention that the Cabinet Office disapproves of partnerships that lock public sector organisations into one major supplier.

These are some of the partnerships not mentioned in Cornwall’s report:

– Suffolk County Council signed a £330m joint venture deal with BT in 2004. By late 2010 the cost had risen 26% to £417m.  A BT spokesman told  the Guardian that the additional costs were due to “…additional services contracted by the council”.  Suffolk has decided not to renew the BT contract. It will instead outsource to separate specialist firms. Assistant director director strategic finance Aidan Dunn said in a council report that “efficiencies can be achieved by dealing with individual suppliers who are experts in specific areas of back office service provision, rather than contracting with back office generalists”.

He added: “Our analysis suggests that it is not necessary to have one large contract, but that our requirements would best be serviced via three separate contracts: finance and HR, ICT and services to schools.”

– Somerset County Council’s loss-making joint venture is in dispute with its main supplier IBM. Council leader Ken Maddock said the joint venture was “failing to be flexible enough in the changing financial landscape”.  He did not blame the workforce but the “contract, the complications, the failed technology, the missed opportunities, the lack of promised savings”.

– Birmingham City Council is, in effect, locked into a “Services Birmingham” contract with Capita that began in 2006 and lasts for another nine years. The contract has been largely successful but the relationship is deteriorating in some areas, according to a report which was published this week.  The two sides have many problems to overcome.

– Essex County Council has taken civil legal dispute advice over its deal with BT. The European Services Strategy Unit quotes the Financial Times as saying that a 10-year contract began 2002 but in January 2009 Essex Council served BT with a notice of material breach of contract. A spokeswoman for the council said: “We decided it wasn’t value for money and we weren’t getting the level of service we required, so we decided to terminate the contract.”

Analysis of other parts of latest Cornwall report

The options appraisal report says it was produced in a tight timeframe which has limited its usefulness to councillors. But who has imposed a tight timeframe? Councillors have not imposed any specific time limit. It could be that some council officers have. But aren’t artificial time limits usually the prerogative of double-glazing salesmen who offer 60% off if you sign straight away? Cornwall’s report says:

“… it is recognised that the necessity for the Chief Executive to fulfil the mandate of Council in such a tight timeframe means that it has been difficult in terms of ensuring full Member engagement…

” … As stated, the timeframe has been particularly challenging and the report would have benefited from more discussions with and input from Members but it is hoped that the Council has sufficient analysis and background information to make a decision on the best way forward.”

Health partners

The report says of the council’s three proposed health partners that “all are keen to promote closer integration, improve services and deliver savings through the SP 1 [BT joint venture] proposal”.

This isn’t quite what “all” the health partners said.

Kevin Baber, chief executive of Peninsula Community Health in St Austell said the only realistic option was a BT joint venture (though the authority has begun telehealth talks outside the partnership). The other two health authorities were not so definite in their support for a BT joint venture – and one of them  wished expressly not to influence Cornwall Council’s debate.

Lezli Boswell, Chief Executive of Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, said:

“It would not be appropriate for me to comment on the Options Appraisal as [the trust] has not been involved in the preparations process and also would not want to appear to be influencing the Council’s debate…”

Phil Confue, chief executive of Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, said that the option for a BT joint venture appeared to offer to a real opportunity  to deliver value for money. But he made no commitment to the partnership even if Cornwall votes in favour of a deal with BT.  He said the trust did not want, as an NHS body, to lobby the council over its decision.

“The decision whether to pursue the Strategic Partnership will be made by
our Trust Board of Directors, once the Council has made its decision on the 11 December 2012.”

As the Cornwall options appraisal report concedes, health trusts have the option of outsourcing services to Shared Business Services, a successful shared services organisation run by Steria.

Comment:

Most of the councils that went into joint ventures with high hopes amid promises of large savings have become disillusioned. Such deals are characterised by an anxiety for a deal to be signed as soon as possible, followed by rising costs, lack of flexibility, high prices when there is a need for major legislative and organisational change, and the discovery that ending a contract early carries risks of disruption to services, high re-transitional expenses, legal action and sunk costs.

Some may wonder if the unforeseen rising costs of procurement – they have increased five-fold – may be a sign of what could happen with costs after a contract is in place.

Given the lessons from the growing number of joint venture failures, one would have thought that council officers would be suspicious of supplier promises.  Not at Cornwall. The officer-enthusiasts for the BT deal don’t mention any of the joint venture contracts that have failed. Indeed those officers prefer the claims of suppliers that failures are in the eyes of trouble-makers, media scaremongers and union activists.

Why does so much enthusiasm at the start of contracts dissipate once realities set in? Could it be that the best marketing people are the easiest to sell to? Do the officials that want success so much overlook or minimise the risks and past poor experiences of others?

Links to Cornwall Council’s options appraisal and agenda for 11 December council meeting on the blog of campaigner Cornwall councillor Andrew Wallis.

Cornwall’s joint venture procurement costs escalate

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Posted in BT, Campaign4Change, IT-related failures, local democracy, local government, managing outsourced services, outsourcing, Politics, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships, shared services, supplier relationships

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