Capita goes to Jon Lewis for CEO Everyone's favourite outsourcer Capita has appointed Jonathan Lewis as its new CEO, after former grande fromage Andy Parker left last month, due to a series of profit warnings. Lewis will head up the company's turnaround efforts. He was previously chief exec of oil services company Amec Foster Wheeler, which he joined last …
Lewis will head up the company's turnaround efforts.
Right...
I have a feeling that the wider world is finally waking up to how truly awful Capita is. I've been unlucky enough to have worked with a few from Capita over the years, and they've all been somewhere between utterly incompetent and downright dangerous on the skills scale. It takes sheer dedication to be as clueless as Capita consultants are.
Still, as Jon appears to be a serial CEO - one year here, one year there - he'll no doubt pick up another mound of cash and swiftly depart to another 'challenge'. A good approach to getting rich if you've got the balls for it.
Capita holds a number of big public sector contracts, including collecting the telly tax collection, providing the London congestion charge, as well as numerous local government outsourcing deals. It also has a number of large private sector deals.
Might want to add that one of Capita's largest contracts is the billion pound Army recruitment contract, now looking to be in total disarray as they can not even recruit recruiters themselves.
On the recruitment front, I'm about to bring a claim for compensation against Capita (Section 13 DPA) for scraping my proile from LinkedIn, creating a likely e-mail address for me at work and targeting me with direct marketing. I'm arguing that they've unfairly processed my personal information - my work's e-mail address, because they failed to satisfy a condition for processing.
Financial Services sector is my thing, but have worked alongside Public Sector guys who told me all about the unholy trinity of Capita, EDS, and one who I've long since forgotten about.
In essence, big public sector is as much to blame for the parlous state of affairs - we all know what outsourcing does when it goes wrong - but for a long time central and large public sector were so incredibly painful to deal with, many simply didn't bother; leaving just the big uglies mentioned above
I recall seeing one tender which included a section on how much the responder could charge to actually put a bid in. Queried this with the fellow salesgit, and learned that in some cases the Govt dept was paying people to bid because a) the process took so long and consumed so much resource many firms didn't want to get involved, and b) this was such a problem that often the Govt dept couldn't get their required 3 comparative tenders.
Assuming you've soldiered on through the tender, the negotiation, and the contract/framework, then you've got to deliver the thing, and that's when the scope creep, political meddling, and budget restrictions really set.
But then, the upper echelons of the civil service have never shied away from utterly ruining things in the name of political gain (Chieftain multi-fuel engine anyone?)
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