Murdoch hacks grumble over outsourced IT failures To picturesque Wapping, where unrest among hacks and techies about recent IT cuts at News International is bubbling following a 24-hour email outage yesterday that crippled newsrooms and commercial operations alike. Cast in the role of villain is CIO Andrew Hickey, the man responsible for a broad IT outsourcing deal in …
That the reason he's not at Accenture anymore is because of stuff like this.
He's right, though, it is entirely possible to run a lot of these systems with off the shelf stuff and low skill staff.
As long as you don't mind the frequent outages and service problems created by using something that's not fit for purpose.
optimiZation instead of OptimiSation, StandardiZation not StandardiSation. HCL of Noid...a? Are we a letter missing here?
Clearly yer man Hickey has a problem with the spell checker as well.
Am I the only one thinking 'Couldn't happen to a more deserving news organisation'?
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Europe spells things differently you nerd.
As an Ancient Britain, I was taught "Oxford" spelling in the 1950s. My trusty Pocket Oxford Dictionary (1984) spells the words optimiZation and standardiZation. Both the Z and S spellings are acceptable - Z infers the writer is American or has a 'good' English education.
Perhaps he just went to a posh school? Or, possibly, his outsourced staff don't know how to change his default Windows installation to (British) English?
The problem with IT outsourceing is that may senior comany execs think that a server\service in India is going to be the same as the one you have here. You simply cannot transfer 10 years+ of customised IT experience via an SLA. Is it any wonder many are now reconsidering these decisions?
The collective hatred of offshoring is massively unjustified. They do the same job as onshore outsourcers but cheaper.
The collective dislike of onshore outsourcing is usually justified. The loss of productivity for a one-day outage is usually higher than the savings incurred in not having an internal IT department twiddling their thumbs most of the time.
But once we move the outsourcing offshore, the savings actually due make up for the loss of productivity.
Yes, workers, sometimes it genuinely is better for your bosses when you don't do any work.
Unless of course every single member of your staff has deadlines every single day of the week, every single week of the year, like, I don't know, newspapers?!?!?
I work for a notable outsourcer, and while I don't know if we bidded or not, I'm pretty confident our bid guys would have proposed an on-site solution as the only suitable answer....
I work with HCL, and in every case our inhouse team have had to do more work supporting the outsourced work, than we would have had to do to build the thing ourselves.
It's not about skills, as we've had to train the offshore teams. The only way it's cheaper, is on paper. in that you get a project manager, and offshore coordinator, and onshore coordinator and a developer, for the price of one developer. The actual productivity is less.
Somebody somewhere gets to say i have a team of 200 people offshore, for the same price as 20 inhouse developers, no-one ever ties back that you probably could do the same work, to a higher standard with the 20 inhouse developers.
I continue to maintain, that offshore outsourcing, just isn't cost effective. You have the language barrier - yes everyone speaks english, but not fluently. pidgin English code comments and design documents are a nightmare to unpick. Also, your carefully worded spec, may or may not be understood in the same way as you intended.
You have cultural differences, ties back to language, but this is a biggie, this is one we rub up against constantly, it manifests to us as no-one using any initiative whatsoever, you get exactly what you ask for without question or consideration that it will do what it's supposed to.
Things work differently within companies too, we never seem to work with the same group of peopel twice, so every project is a training excercise on our part. We train up a team of developers, just get the code up to a standard we can accept and the project ends, next project, rinse and repeat with a new team.
You have the simple timezone differences, which means a 5 min email back and forth can take a week due to people working at different times. Having no physical presence is also more problematic than you'd expect in IT, being able to get everyone sat around a table together, to go through designs is invaluable. Sharepoint isn't a substitute!
One of the problems we've had, is that we aren't allowed to tell the people higher up the problems we've had. It can be a train wreck from start to finish, we step in and pull a project out of the gutter at the last minute, as we'd take the fall if it failed, and that gets reported through as "<offshorer of choice> did a great job in getting that last project implemented, lets use them again for the next one"
I'll just highlight one of your statements:
"Also, your carefully worded spec, may or may not be understood in the same way as you intended."
A colleague of mine spent some time on the other side of the planet with the outsourcers and became quite pally with some of their grunts. They let slip a few things they probably shouldn't have.
Most interesting was the reason behind that little problem. Their primary driver from their management was not to fulfil the customer's requirements, but to look for ways of generating new revenue for the company. Thus, if your spec could *possibly* be read any way other than that which you intended it to be read you can bet that it bloody well would be (As per spec - Change Request - additional work on T&M - Ka-ching).
Now try writing a spec of which no part can, no matter how hard someone whose bonus depends on it may try, mean anything other than that intended. I, for one, can write the bloody thing in executable code faster than that!
I worked for News International for 10 years until Thickey made me surplus to requirements. (Thanks for the fat pay-off by the way Andy). During that time News never had an outage this serious, mainly due to the calibre of staff that were employed during that time.
Furthermore, they never lost an edition or came close to it.. Now as the Indomitable Gall alludes to, the true measure that outsourcing works for the Newspaper industry is whether the paper comes out during the 4 hour or so daily production window day in day out.
General opinion of the remaining IT staff is incredulity that they have managed this long without losing an edition, given the incompetence of HCL (or to be fairer, their ignorance of Newspaper production) It's fair to say it's not if this will happen but when. Then will the shit truly hit the fan.
They have even managed to lose the source code to their in-house written Editorial Production system for God's sake. Bet the auditors would love to hear about that...
A not too disgruntled ex-employee
Every time I've been through the IT Outsourcing loop it's always ended in failure. To keep costs down the Outsourcing companies pay badly, and as they say, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. But the cost to the business from lost productivity when the systems are down is massive. SLA's aren't worth the paper their printed on when the chips are down.
They should sack their CIO, recruit someone with a small amount of clue and get back skilled staff to run the operation properly, rather than cutting the corners to outsourcing. It may look cheaper, but I bet they lost more yesterday in revenue and productivity than they have made in outsourcing savings over a 12 month period!
That's a bit like the bank who scrimped on the SAN software and ended up screwing their SAN when someone extended the LUN and nearly devauling the Euro. A £500 licence cost ended up with a 7 figure fine on their bottom line.
You can see this happening anywhere.
It's the same old cycle.
Innovators create the software.
Completer finishers finalise it.
Architects (now the product's making money to afford them,) come in, and talk about models all day, introducing a few third party products of their own, "because the existing solution doesn't scale" despite it running on sub 1% resources, and outselling all the company's best other assets.
Architects having caused a few problems, "software engineering" consultants now come in, usually sandlewearing beared types who talk with a nasal tone, know the W3C standards by heart, and who've read software engineering from a book, and never delivered anything, and say, "You need some design patterns, N-tier, messaging and outsourced search." to gullible management who pay them a grand a day.
This fails, because it's one size fits all bollocks and the consultants have never delivered anything. The scope is changed from faster, and more scalable, to "fast enough" and "it handles all the customers it needs." by middle management to avoid having to say "We just spent hundreds of thousands to get to a worse place."
The management of the day, hire in more children, plus one guy in a £2000 suit, in the form of the bane of techie's lives - management consultants.
The children go around with clip boards interviewing the staff, and the man with a £2000 suit makes a report saying the problems are what they've just been told and he "recommends an off the shelf" product because there's no work for him to do in this case.
All the techies that can leave, being disgusted, leave, usually including the Architect, who moves onto another architect role, and all the steady talent that hung over from the original setup.
The company is now at the mercy of management consultants who bleed the place dry, because the upper management value the statements from a man in a suit, over the statements from the Autistic IT guy in stained polo shirt and paint spattered (at least it looks like paint) track suit bottoms.
Tzimples.
I was one of the 39 individuals that was TUPE'd across to HCL last June as part of the outsourcing
initiative. To say this has put a smile on my face is an understatement.
When HCL initially attached their network to NI's, it brought down the NI mail servers for
three days. Yes we were running exchange servers, but up to that point there was need to run
any anti-virus software other than End Point Protection. This was a perfectly stable solution - until
the virus ridden network of HCL joined ours and all hell broke loose. At the time James Murdoch
told 'Tricky Hickey' that he did not want this to happen again - I'd love to have been a fly on the
wall when the chinless wonder tried to justify the recent events ( From the side, Mr Hickey looks
like a Turkey so calling him chinless is not too unkind)
Anyway, an unfortunate colleague of mine felt the brunt of HCL's incompetence when they
took over the support infrastructure at vodaphone a number of years back and guess what?
HCL took there network down as well!! They have a problem with repeating the same mistakes
and never learning from them. Please, if anyone reading this has had exposure to HCL and
feels this statement is unfair then please say so. I won't go into the problem last September when
the HCL knowledge transfer team managed to forcibly mount a 3Tb filesystem on
one node in a cluster whilst still mounted on the other node - our saving grace was VxFS.......
Last but not least, when it came to signing our 'compromise agreements' which were
essentially pieces of paper promising that we would not bad mouth HCL,
the rather astute Solicitor that we hired pointed out that it only applied to HCL Great Britian
and not India.
Therefore, HCL Great Britain; Mustard, true as the day is long, trust 'em with me Grannies'
life. HCL India; Now fit to work down the docks w*nking for coins.....
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Your well out of it mate, for mugs like me still waiting for redundo we have to sit & watch the car wreck happening. No-one wants to change anything now: even unix passwords, for fear of being blamed, so we have the endless ITIL drivel, waiting for CAB approvals and constantly hearing "I'm not technical" from the managers who are more interested in getting the latest apps for their blackberries.
To be honest, the Indians are just doing what they're told, can't blame them for that, it's just a shame that those higher up the food chain don't seem to have a clue what a mess it all is.
I really don't understand the philosophy behind this practice. If you aren't willing to pay the engineers that keep the company running a reasonable wage, where does the money that your productive company earns go? I mean we can be certain that outsourcing to the lowest overseas bidder will certainly not improve service, so why do it?
Cutting corners on the most essential parts of your business just doesn't make sense to me.
I'm not trying to push a "lazy manager are taking all our cash" agenda here, I just really don't see how anyone in charge could view this as a good idea.
There's one very simple point to this.
As an employee, which even Hickey is, you get performance objectives. At that level, they are tied in with some pretty serious bonus money.
Now suppose your objectives are... "cut IT costs by 10% per year for the next 5 years" (and not "cut IT costs by 10% per year for the next 5 years without degrading service levels").
What's the best way to do this? Get rid of all your expensive resources (typically the ones you had been wanting to hold on to) and replace them with cheaper ones. Sure, there may be some redundancy costs, but that's going to come out of the corporate bucket and not the IT one, so your bonus is not affected.
Sure, the company is going to go down the toilet (as we're seeing), but so what? You're meeting your objectives and getting a big fat bonus. With any luck, the real problems won't happen until after you've left anyway...
i cant get a job either....
since leaving Voda' just before they started the uncle Saruns jobs for lads at home Project.
looks like my only option is to relocate to a country with a very pro-active anti-immigrant stance that has gangs of vigilantes handing out punishment beatings(or worse) to anyone who isnt slavic or western european looking.
Aa now where's my bolshoi book of Crylic words....
the copter? Aa its a MIL :)
As the CTO of this prestigous organization, I can flatly deny that I had anything to do with this incident.
I'm right behind Andy: the comments these wicked people are making are based on jealousy and the fact that we pushed them out and replaced them with HCL contractors on dubious visas.
I have extensive knowledge of publishing software, having edited this picture in Photoshop and I know what pdf stands for (print the damn file). Mr Thickey is a nice man who's kind to children (especially those employed by HCL).
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/108332016492197748919/Johnny#5458167037869447810
JK Rowlings
Comments here mirror my experience of offshoring. A three month development project that was eventually canceled after fifteenth months, during which time the Indian developers could not deliver code that compiled, let alone worked. I actually got so pissed off with it that I did the project myself, pulling all nighters so my other projects didn't slip off schedule. Took me two weeks - and this was for a system that interfaced with one the offshore firm "maintained" for another company, which is the only reason I reluctantly agreed for management to use the f*ckers in the first place.
It's not the language barrier, it's cultural. The offshore development firms I've worked with will promise anything to get the contract. In the case described above, they agreed to develop in Java, claiming it was an environment their developers knew. Turns out their developers were actually Visual Basic programmers, which we found out when we queried why the code was full of bizarre idioms and beginner style mistakes.
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I am one of the victims of outsourcing to HCL. The multinational I work for has just lost an entire day of productivity because the cretins overseas thought that sending a command that shut down every server might be a good idea. With time differences this took extra time to resolve and the figure being bandied around is a loss of six million quid (3% of annual revenue). But hey, at least the outsourcing is saving them money!
"He believes all IT departments from banks to supermarkets to newspapers can be run in the same way: ie just using off-the-shelf software administered by low-skill employees"
...and this is probably true just as long as everything is ticking along and all they have to do is drink coffee and browse the Internet. It is a different story when things start to go wrong and everyone starts to realise that the people who actually understood how all their systems were integrated are long gone.
I have been contracting for over 20 years now and have worked on both sides of the outsourcing fence. It seems that companies take about ten years to forget the lessons of the past and repeat the same mistakes.
I've been on the 'net for 35 years, have spent more than half my life in "Cyberia",
and have worked with numerous multi-national, physically dispersed teams.
It is possible to establish the same kinds of working relationships on the 'net as
one does in person, but it takes 10 times as long and takes 3 times the effort.
Hope that @$$#0!3 Merduck enjoys his Spam raw.
~D
Oh, I forgot. He hates them.
But that hasn't stop him deploying Google Apps for sky.com and the Sky Broadband/Sky Broadcasting part of his company, has it?
If The Sun and The Times went Google, that wouldn't on, would it, especially since the competition (The Grauniad and the Telegraph) have already done so successfully.
<strokes chin>
OK, so the newspaper's systems failed for a day or so, and some salacious shite about Z-list celebrities wasn't published.
What you should be afraid of is our Government owned Banks and Building Societies outsourcing their critical systems and services. Might have slightly larger repercussions if payment services go down on payday.
From the film Armageddon - "You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it? "
Outsourcing is a "political" move made by accountants to make to books look better. It removes head count and costs from one column to another. It is NOT cheaper. It does NOT save money. It's simply cooking the books.
(AC - These comments are personal, created from my personal computer, and in no way reflect the opinions of anyone else, especially not of my employer.)
Don't know whether to laugh or cry:
"We will leverage our experience in transforming the IT operations landscape of hundreds of global enterprise and our globally benchmarked best practices in Infrastructure Management to add exponential value to News International," said Pradeep Bindal, Senior Vice President and Worldwide Head of Sales for Infrastructure Management and Transformation Services, HCL Technologies Infrastructure Services Division.
http://tinyurl.com/yaysz9k
.... the honeymoon is over, but the suit doesn't realize it yet?
Oh if only Hickey had an army of marketroids to deploy, to us, so in order to decypher for us, every detail of his cryptic business-looking nonsense speak. Thanks for the attempt though, Reg, I guess that's what one could imagine he meant.
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