UK Home Office tenders £5m for a supplier to help it greenlight IT projects. Yes, you read that correctly The UK's Home Office is tendering to recruit a supplier to help manage the selection of its IT projects, leading to concerns over conflict of interest. The notice published in the public sector Digital Marketplace is seeking a company to help deliver and operate the "discovery-as-a-service" capability for the "Innovation - Law …
"The UK's Home Office is tendering to recruit a supplier to help manage the selection of its IT projects,"
What's really needed is a non-supplier - an adviser that can be completely objective about the pros and cons of what they're advising on. However the Home Office approach is common. It prevails within government and quango advisory panels on technologies, security, risk and many other critical areas. The general rule is that vendor representatives dominate the composition of said panels. Consequently, the status quo usually gets maintained at the expense of necessary change.
Reading this weekend about all the oinking currently going on at the financial trough in government and elsewhere, one could start to believe that the safeguards have been deliberately omitted in order to make lucrative conflicts of interest easier to waft through, as long as the right people's interest is ensured.
The World is rapidly going down the plughole of corporate governance, it seems to be approaching the point where the vortex will be so strong nothing will escape it.
Politicians of all colours appear to be aiding and abetting the process with the view of securing their post political futures.
National Security now in the eyes of many leaders is not about the preservation of national identity or culture, it's about securing assets.
I suspect the 'Save the NHS' slogan is in alignment with that mentality.
Quite possibly a belated admission of incompetence. "If you can't do it, outsource".
Unfortunately, if you can't do it and outsources, you have no means of validating the quality of the outsource service's performance. The only safe way to outsource is to outsource something you're thoroughly competent at and keep checking the results. That means the only valid reason for outsourcing is resource saving - certainly not handing over "responsibility", as you can't. The responsibility remains yours (unless of course you're a government, when you have no responsibility at all for anything).
The whole point is to "Cover their arse!" When the projects go tits up those in charge i.e. government can stand back and say "We just followed the consultant recommendations regarding hiring the consultant for the project!" "Not our fault!"
I've seen the same thing in IT for years! Even though the IT group has all the knowledge and talent to perform the project without issue IT management insist on bringing in a consultant so they have someone to blame (and sue!) when the project goes badly. In my experience 9 out of 10 consultancy project do end badly!
"The Demand Management process will ensure that all work meets the needs and priorities of the Home Office in the most appropriate and efficient way to deliver value for money "
Yes, because UK Government IT projects have a stellar record for meeting needs and priorities.
Well, the needs and priorities of the snouts that have access to the trough, that is.
Assessing a prospective contractor is difficult.
You need to determine how close a friend they are to the PM, individual Cabinet Members, and individuals in the Commons and Lords.
Then you need to assess how supportive each one of these is of the PM and, for those on the edge, whether the PM wants to reward them with more money or punish them by shutting down the tap.
Once you've done those assessments, you need to factor in previous contractor awards to make sure that no pig is hogging the money trough.
Given the hoops we have to go through for the simplest or procurements I can see exactly how this has come about.
From my experience we appear to spend more time worrying about what the unsuccessful tender responses might do than whether the successful response is fit for purpose. This results in enormous amounts of wasted time, effort and crippling inefficiency. Very simply purchases get turned into a circus that takes 3 months instead of a week or two.
Has anyone any experience of a company who submitted an unsuccessful tender challenging or taking people to court?
This is just the procurement gravy-train on steriods.
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