Lloyds finally inks mega 10-year cloudy outsourcing deal with IBM Lloyds Bank has today inked a mega 10-year cloudy outsourcing deal with IBM, with 1,500 staff and contractors to be shipped over to Big Blue - according to internal memo seen by The Register. The bank has been negotiating with IBM to outsource the management of its bit barns to IBM for many months, as we exclusively revealed …
That sort of client travel is permitted and isn't normally an expense.
That's where the work is being performed. Its the non-billable expense that has been hit.
The issue though is that these guys and gals will do the heavy lifting and train their replacements where they will then fade away to find a new job.
Lloyds just made their systems worse and they don't even care because the bean counters can show the savings to the bottom line as long as things go smoothly.
In preparation for your first IBM meeting once you've officially transitioned:
"90% of your roles will be off-shored in the first two years - we want you to help moves these roles off-shore via knowledge transfer and we will help you to move to another exciting part of our business. The regular resource actions you hear about are just because we are a large company, and won't affect you."
If you are a permanent staff member, get out while you only hate Lloyds and IBM and can move to another role before IBM sucks out your will to live. Take redundancy if it is offered but expect to get the statutory minimum once you're on IBM's payroll. Ignore any promises they make about protecting T&C's unless there are enough of you to fight a proper employment case against them..
Contractors - take the risk of staying, but when they discover they don't need you, your contract will be rolled over in the last week before it finishes until you are arbitrarily terminated. Christmas is always a good time to make sure IBM's quarterly numbers stack up...
The rest of Lloyds? Hopefully accountants will deliver any necessary innovation in your company, because your new IT out-sourcer doesn't have any IT staff that can actually help your business.
The good news is that you if you don't sign the TUPE agreement, you can walk out without a statutory notice period and the gut wrenching realisation of what working for IBM GTS is actually like....
4 years of bringing back in house
Sadly, if they're stupid enough to believe the promises of an outsource salesman, then when they find they're getting rubbish service from IBM, they'll believe the siren voices of other outsourcers, and they won't bring it back in house, they'll move to Wipro. TCS, HPE or similar, and wonder why the same thing happens.
When the service goes TITSUP (Reg definition) we can look forward to the CIO of the day stating that it has nothing to do with outsourced services and they are looking at how to mitigate the fact that they have just wiped out ten squillion current and savings accounts in a botched disk replacement operation.
Beer because lots of it will be needed when the time comes.
Having worked there for 8 years as a contractor I was surprised at how many contractors are there, of the 1500 staff being moved across 2/3rds are contractors, that was never a good model, that said there are some really good people there and it's a shame that some friends are going to have to move away from the bank after many years of service
"It said controls and mitigation plans have been established to offset the risks of outsourcing everything to IBM's private cloud."
Translation:
We have a few easy wins that will guarantee that we get our year 1/2 bonuses and that IBM can show there cloud business is growing. Everyone wins! After 2 years, we're off to outsource another company and leave the actual work to someone brave or stupid enough to continue.
As for the IBM private cloud, Lloyds will be pleased to get rid of their expensive legacy DC's and instead use IBM's expensive legacy DC's, only without the ability to control costs or their direction. IBM have ensured that the contract adequately protects them against customer outages.
Yup. 'Private Cloud' being 'Z Cloud' - being the 1960s Bureau Computing model. All owned, run, and operated by Big Blue, but this time around deploying the cheapest available global labour as their service minions.
What could possibly go wrong?
Ahh, the journey to the cloud. They'll be talking about virtualistaion, software defined, SAN etc on the mainframe next.....ohhh, wait a minute.
This is progress? ;-)
"Upto date technology on Demand" .... and they went to IBM
I know one large UK retailer who went to IBM for their web presence and were stuck with WebSphere as IBM would not entertain any thing else. All the web bods hated it, some left and it promptly failed for 2 x black friday's.
as the outsourcing wont take 4 years to move to India - give it a less than a year (unless it is written into their contracts) and they will have their jobs moved.
contractors - doubt they will be there in 6 months
GruntyMcPugh - yes. HBOS outsourced to IBM many years ago (about 15 I think) and the staff were brought back in-house again (possibly after it became LTSB). Some of those staff are still there, so they'll have been employed by a few different companies (BOS, HBOS, IBM, LTSB, Lloyds) while still doing the same job.
Carry on going right to India because that's where 90% of the Lloyds jobs will be this time next year.
I would not advise any young person to go into IT these days. There is no future unless you can speak Hindi and your family comes from S. Asia. Then you would fit right in and become a manager in no time at all.
So basically, nearly everyone who is caught up in this outsourcing and is not an RBS employee should be looking for new work.
Plus the current RBS employees should probably also be looking for new work because once they are moved over to IBM they will find your average developed-world IBM employee has the career prospects of a mayfly.
My experience from last year. The bank board (PHBs?) had signed the contract without asking IT if everything they needed was in there. Looked like a good deal :-)
Then they told IT and said get on with it. And IT said, well who is supporting the other apps? Who is doing the batch operations? Who is doing monitoring and alerting? Who is doing 24x7 DC ops? There were a few more.
By the time all the CCNs had been raised for the stuff that should have been in the contract in the first place it was no longer such a great deal. Sigh! :-(
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I can tell you that no-one is doing the monitoring
My old job was moved to IBM and shifted to India
During the summer last year a DC was having issue - A local IT manager went into the DC and it was hot, he reported that and the "unhelpful desk" wanted to raise it as a P5 !
At this time the 3PAR SAN started to fail (yes, IBM had stopped the maintenance contract) and it basically cooked its own disks and failed and so all the VM's were going down - fast
Part of the investigation found that the netbots were indeed reporting the issue to the relevant mail account, but that was no longer being monitored by the IBM staff (these were not from those tuped over as we had all left bar a few managers) The netbot had reported temperatures of over 100c - and that is their limit.
They lost a lot of VM's as they then found out that the backups had not worked since the December ! when the contractor doing the job left - he had handed over, but no-one in IBM knew CommVault.
While at IBM I was drafted to an account in trouble because the client was going to sue and terminate the contract. I found there were no backups available because they had been sent offshore. It was a known issue that had been outstanding for 18 months. After escalation failed and as I was in the process of consciously uncoupling from IBM I threatened to tell the customer if it wasn't fixed.
IBM seems to think the only time to fix a problem is when shouted at or facing legal action which I saw on several accounts. it all makes for a very tense organisation where people don't even trust each other internally. How can a customer trust them?
My advice is don't leave more than the FSCS limit (£85000) in Lloyds and keep your own paper records. If you really object tell Lloyds why you are moving your account to a competitor.
No. You are offered the current IBM pension scheme. Your Lloyds scheme is frozen. You lose the other benefits your Lloyds pension provides too. It's the most expensive part of this deal for the full time staff.
Read TUPE rules here.
https://www.gov.uk/transfers-takeovers/overview
Pensions are specifically excluded from TUPE.
All the IT staff resign now, it's the best way to stop this nonsense. Lloyds will have to raise your pay rate and pay you a large retention bonus and IBM will have to do the same. Make sure you have a written guarantee that all your Ts and Cs are transferred too. It's the only language IBM understand.
maybe it's OT .... maybe not
Three Mobile is touted as a UK company - anybody trying to deal with them beyond the retail stores finds out quite quickly that it is essentially an Indian operation these days
Lloyds had some Indian outsourcing that ended badly some years back... now they seem to have had a bout of corporate amnesia (Alzheimers?)
Right. Sure. Until they outsource the lot to IBM India. Then, the real fun begins. Try to understand their weak English and don't be too cross about their lack of skills, rude demeanor, and inability to get the job done. And don't freak out when the whole lot goes down, due to one of the genius's pulling the power plug, like one of them did at British Airways... >:-)
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In my time working for a big payment technology company I've never had the displeasure of meeting a more ruder, more miserable bunch of people than LBG's IT staff. Regardless of whether they were phoning you to inform you of maintenance or if you were phoning them to enquire if there was a problem with their systems or if we had a problem and we were dealing with the response was *always* incredibly surly, sarcastic and depressingly rude.
So forgive me if I don't shed a tear or two for those whose jobs are about to be off-shored abroad...
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