New HMRC IT boss to 'recuse' herself over Microsoft decisions The UK's incoming Chief Digital Information Officer of HMRC is to recuse herself from making any decisions regarding Microsoft, as she is on sabbatical from the company under a two-year placement with the taxman. Jacky Wright was named as CDIO last week, and will take up the £180,000 per annum role in October 2017. She is …
Jacky Wright certainly likes her Buzzwords, that's for sure (watching clips of her on youtube).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf1lCarFotk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQBtSKUDj3k
Boy, the bullshit meter is in overdrive here.
Pink Cloud? (Female's implementing cloud infrastructure) - FFS, it reads like a script of an episode of W1A.
Jacky certainly knows her Onions about Virtual Communication.
Perhaps she could entertain Alien SeeScapes. Introduce and Provide Info to the Masses on that which is Now and for Quality Quantum Systems, Available.
Is AI Script Needed and Readily Available to Control Commandeering Commanders/NEUKlearer Kids in the Hood?
"Shirley running all of or much of the UK's tax system on a foreign OS that is known to phone home a great deal"
That's only in the consumer Windows versions, not the enterprise and server versions. (Those can send error reports if desired to Microsoft but it's centrally controllable.)
>> That's only in the consumer Windows versions
Son, I have this wonderful "London Bridge" to sell you here, look, cheap, cheap, nice and shiny, have I mentioned it is cheap?.
I'm absolutely sure anyone in the USA's state department can order these "enterprise editions" have "accidentally" activated the siphon if the need arises.
Windows has always been as transparent as a muddy swamp.
The incoming Chief Digital Information Officer of HMRC is to recuse herself from making any decisions regarding Microsoft, as she is on sabbatical from the company under a two-year placement with the taxman.
How is this even possible, how can somebody be hired as a civil servant while still being on the books of a large foreign corporation ? How is this even possible ?
Now, consider for one second, the person in question is a corporate vice president of said foreign corporation ...
...they aren't looking at Google Apps for Work. Microsoft licencing will be cheaper for them as they are local government and Microsoft tend to drop the cost of migration to Office 365 as part of their deal.
Anyway. Whats to say (and I'm not saying she will, this is hypothetical) she doesn't "invite" "mates" (directors in charge of getting the contracts) around for "dinner" and they then discuss the "Book Club" they are going to start up (the possible Microsoft procurements on going at work) and then she "suggests what books they read that week" (what Microsoft contracts to pick). They'll be no record of said talks at the "Book Club" and no one would be able to prove otherwise.
So they've employed someone in a well paid, top dog IT management position with a 2 year contract who now can't make decisions that relate to client devices (Desktop, Laptop, Mobile), software (Office, IaaS, PaaS etc) and the majority of servers and storage (Windows Server, Cloud).
I mean, there is actually a lot left for an organisation of that size, but methinks perhaps not £180k worth when I'm sure anyone without the MS link would have to deal with it all for the same package?
Frankly the only meaty decisions involving MS that would be made at the CDIO level are whether or not to use Azure (i.e. vs AWS vs UKCloud). Everything else is either handled through a framework agreement, delegated to CabO or such a non-decision that it wouldn't hit her desk.
MS are in no way, shape or form the "majority of servers and storage". Client devices, certainly, but that's the same as every organisation the planet. Everything on the back end is run on Linux or some form of Unix.
Now if this were an Oracle or SAS or SAP exec they'd recruited you'd have a point.
MS are in no way, shape or form the "majority of servers and storage".
So Aspire has finally(?) migrated the thousands of NT/W2K/W2k3 servers (both physical and virtual)...
Another story that would be of interest here, but not the mainstream media.
Also are you suggesting HMC aren't using G-Cloud (aka Azure for government) users...
Those thousands of windows servers (mostly hosting CAFs and other similar nonsense) are outnumbered 5 to 1 by non-windows boxen. 100:1 or more if you go by business value or capacity or criticality etc. etc. They're commodity background stuff that every business has, not mission-critical strategic delivery pieces, which is what CDIO (the person) looks after.
And yes, HMRC's use of Azure is not substantial, as it is only rated to OFFICIAL so can't do much.
Azure should not be confused with G-cloud, which is a purchasing framework run by CabO and avoided by most of the rest of central government.
I had the great misfortune to need to use the HMRC site last week. I've never seen such an absolute train-crash of a website. The form I wanted required login... to get to a public *form*, not any data. The login page forwarded not to the form that the link had promised but to a 403 Access error... for a form!
The complaints form was public but you had to already have a valid complaint reference before you could register a complaint... no, I kid you not!
The online support chat service was staffed by someone who could not (or would not) use any capital letters or punctuation and knew less about their own job than they did about English.
Just incredible. I'm no fan of M$ but if they were allowed to sneak their grubby paws into the till at least we might get a working system out of it...
She seems to talk about herself in the third person.
e.g. from an Interview with CIO "Her answer is disarmingly simple. "That's who Jacky is.""
So has yet to fully grasp the use of "I" and "me" or perhaps is projecting a fake persona.
Her previous role seemed to be guiding Teams on what they already know about Enterprise Software features.
She will be lucky to move the needle on any projects in 24 months.
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"In totally unrelated matters, Microsoft avoided £100m in tax payments on UK revenue of £8bn by using a confidential deal to book sales in Ireland, The Sunday Times reported in summer 2016."
If I did something like that, would they give me a job for 180,000 per year?
Or would they just throw me in jail?
They should have offered the job to the Prime Minister - most probably Mrs May would jump at the opportunity to take a 2 year sabbatical right now and have an increase in pay at the same time. As for being a suitable candidate for the job, I am sure she'll be more effective as she wouldn't have to recuse herself every time Microsoft is mentioned
A sabbatical which Microsoft reluctantly agreed to out of the charitable goodness of its warm heart ...
... Not because it's looking for ways to infect more and more clueless organisations with its bloatware.
Redmond must be awash with tears of laughter at the pathetic naivete of HMRC.
Trouble is, there are a lot of greay areas where the damage could already have been done. Hypothetically - I have no evidence either way. What if for example Google came in offering a truly fantasitc G-drive price offering a year ago but it got pushed back 24 months till after the MS negotiations. Where OneDrive type stuff will probably become part of the bundle on the table.
Government departments seem expert at hiring IT leaders who are either:
- Academically overqualified -> no real use when s**t happens
- Great corporate project managers -> no accountability, ever
- Candidates with glaring conflicts of interest -> no impartiality and planning their exit
If in doubt, pick a department and check the IT leaders background and what job they picked up after they completed their 2-3 year posting.
Five or ten years ago, here in Canada, some Microsoft exec., took a key role at Canada Revenue Agency, I think it was, for several years. It appears that person was in the position long enough to ensure the MS was the key provider for a lot of software that many thought could have been done for less and more reliably without them.
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