So...
...massive acquisition plan, followed by an "Errr...oops, we spent too much, in a down market"
..any of managers who oversaw this massive cock up in that line for P45's...? Oh look, there's a surprise...
Capita IT Services (CITS) boss Mark Quartermaine told staff the rapid expansion of the group through acquisition and more recently a slow down in sales led to the redundancy programme. As exclusively revealed by The Register, the public sector IT supplier informed 1,000 staff - more than 26 per cent of its total workforce - …
If you want to get paranoid...
We 'accidently' grew too quickly and rather than scale back across the board, we're scaling back in the UK while maintaining staff and possibly growing staff in India.
Like i said, this is taking a paranoid approach and unfortunately, its somewhat justified. Many companies used the excuse of a slow down in work and poor planning to cover the shift in work force.
Those who are agile enough in the IT job market will recognise that this outsourcing of UK jobs was always bound to happen. And those with more than half a brain would realise that starting up a new business teaching people how to read and write in languages used commonly in India is the way to go.
However that rules out most UK workers who expect to have work handed to them on a plate.
"CITS kicked off a voluntary redundancy programme in November but only found 60 candidates willing to jump rather than be pushed."
Not quite - the VR programme was massively over-subscribed, but by people who the company didn't want to get rid of. Most of the people who they did want to get rid of didn't apply.
The problem is one of management - essentially, CITS existed until recently as the IT supplier for the rest of the Capita Group... and the Group mandate is that you have to keep money within the Group by getting your IT from them. Therefore, absolutely no need to be competitive or worry about developing a product catalogue which stood any chance of succeeding in the open market. Now, they want to grow and win external business in their own right, but what they are finding is that they don't have the products to offer, and they're just far too fat (too many managers) and un-competitive. And the contracts that are being won are because they're bidding at a stupidly low cost (as usual for Capita), then in order to meet that cost they have to get rid of a load of staff - the problem is, they're going to end up getting rid of the staff that actually have skills and do real work, instead of getting rid of the excess number of mangers who don't really add anything to the business.
"Not quite - the VR programme was massively over-subscribed, but by people who the company didn't want to get rid of. Most of the people who they did want to get rid of didn't apply."
Par for the course for VR. Good staff know they can get a job elsewhere with relative ease, so want free money from a redundancy cheque and to escape to somewhere with prospects. Crap staff know they can't get another job so easily.
Rummaging around on Quartermaine I found this about his appointment to Crapita:-
"Quartermaine has over 25 years of experience in ICT sector and he previously worked for IBM, Cable and Wireless, BT Global Services and, most recently, for Azzurri Communications where he held the CEO position." ...and now Capita.
It's like a blinding streak of achievement then....
We're crap. We tried to hide the crapness by buying other companies. It didn't work. We are still crap. So we are sacking our expensive UK based staff and keeping our crap slave labour in India. That way we will still be crap but we maximize our potential profit and keep the shareholders happy. Possibly.
Someone commented on the previous story and made the excellent point that outsourcing to India is the easiest path to take when the other options are actually improving the way you do stuff. It would indicate the senior management (and presumably board) have no idea how to run things, so they take the path of least resistance which looks like they might be taking action.
If they had any relevant experience they would realise outsourcing doesn't save money and leads to poor quality products - everyone else seems to. So no experience means they've been won over by an outsourcing organisation's sales team bullshit. Or to put it another way: gullible, greedy, and totally under qualified.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/wtf_32.png He only joined in February FFS! The bloke can't have a clue how CITS works, he'd need to spend a lot more than a month or two to form any sort of working idea of the structure and composition of the group and form a proper understanding of the areas and roles contained in it, and certainly couldn't have commissioned, received, read and comprehended the reports he'd need so as to decide where cuts could be made intelligently. To call for up to 1,000 heads this quickly smacks of desperation. It's so obviously a blatant case of calling in a hatchet man to do a dirty job quickly.
Sad, but if he only joined in February then he is there to be the 'hatchet' man. This is, as many have said, a common ploy within organisations that acquire too many too quickly (frequently unwisely) and find the easiest route out is to cut direct cost out of the business. Issue is often that management has not kept its eye on the ball, has lost business and credibility and stands to lose much more.
I very recently went for a job interview at a company that have previously outsourced their IT to this SoS; and it's proven to be such a PITA that they are trying to bring it all back in house again.
Some of their key issues; PCs supposed to be replaced on a set cycle, but they still have a couple of dozen machines running Win98! They have 0 PCs on Win7 although I'm told that there were plans to start migrating "towards the end of Q3" on about 10% of their estate.
They also have a major problem with network infrastructure; internal cable work is shoddy at best, most switches look to be 10/100 models rather than 10/100/1000. As for their WAN link; I've seen worse, but not by much. The available bandwidth appears to be around 200 kbps (yes really!) - the guy I was talking to did not know how much they pay for this crap.
One of their senior managers had obviously been taken out to lunch by one of the senior managers of CITS....
Just another in a long line of IT companies that believe their own marketing bullshit, racing towards the lowest possible labor costs so that in the end the outsourced IT specialists, outsource themselves and their company right out of business.
Somewhere along the line, governments need to establish laws and regulations that protect their own citizens against outsourcing, if only they could learn to take their craniums out of their rectums.
The short term capital expenditure that is saved by outsourcing is immediately overcome by the loss of tax revenue, cost of unemployement insurance and other "benefits" that are paid to the victims of outsourcing.
Any company that can only get out of their financial hole by outsourcing is already insolvent.
These are very simple facts and can no longer be allowed to be ignored by government.