Marks & Spencer swaps out TCS for fresh helpdesk deal

UK retailer Marks & Spencer has replaced Tata Consultancy Services as its IT service desk provider following a procurement process that began in January. The contract ended this summer, though TCS continues supporting other IT services for M&S, a spokesperson at the food, clothes and household good supplier told The Register …

[Like a badger]

What's the saying, "penny wise and pound foolish"?

"estimating it would save £150 million over five years. TCS became M&S's "principal technology supplier," .....The outsourcing deal was designed to identify areas of inefficiency at M&S."

So, after the £300m hit from the cyber attack, how's that maths looking now, Marks bean counters? Hahahahhahahaa! Which wanky management consultancy "helped" you to make that sagacious choice to outsource in the first place, and then to bundle it all up with Total Cockup Services? Was IT security one of those lovely, lovely "efficiencies"?

I'd like to think there have been some bitter recriminations behind the scenes (and likewise at JLR), but decades of business experience tell me that there won't be. Perhaps a few juniors will be thrown under the bus, but the chances of the board having any insight, nope.

[munnoch]

Re: What's the saying, "penny wise and pound foolish"?

Well, they did identify one big inefficiency...

[DrXym]

Re: What's the saying, "penny wise and pound foolish"?

I'm convinced companies outsource because they are shown a spreedsheet with 2 columns - the cost for an in-house team vs the cost outsourced to India. The difference is probably 3x difference. What it doesn't account for, is the reputational harm from the shitty service, or the added security risk. Or of using an outsourcer that will never learn the company / country culture, or develop deep knowledge, or improve customer relations, and who hires apathetic staff who don't give a damn and will be gone somewhere else in 6 months.

[MyffyW]

Re: What's the saying, "penny wise and pound foolish"?

Add to that the fact companies often outsource a right mess of an estate and the supplier charges extra for all the deviations and you've pretty much described my career experience with outsourcing. Interestingly my current employer, keen to cut costs during COVID, chose to insource key services.

[BJC]

Re: What's the saying, "penny wise and pound foolish"?

Completely agree that there is more to consider than the quotation costs. However, a bad in-house team doesn't work either. A team with poor management might not even realise that they're not up to the job.

That said, it should be easier to ensure that an in-house team is - and remains - better aligned with the needs of the business.

[DrXym]

Re: What's the saying, "penny wise and pound foolish"?

I can only speak of when it happened in a US financial services company I worked at and it boiled down to this logic - Americans cost $120 per hour, Europeans cost $90 per hour and Indians cost $40 per hour. Ergo you got 3x the value from outsourcing to India. Except it worked terribly - stuff took 3x as long to happen, required constant handholding from US / Europe, and the work was still shoddy and broken.

They first kicked it off an Indian operation as a subsidiary but when the figures didn't stack up they sold it to an outsourcing operation.

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: What's the saying, "penny wise and pound foolish"?

And indeed if your IT is staffed by locals then you’ll get better service with some give and take on hours for out of hours work. Most forget their business runs on IT, literally. IT down, business wastes hourly rate x number of employees until it’s working again. Plus invested staff are more likely to understand and care about some of the weirdness in the IT systems so can help to fix. Outsourced staff will just fix it over and over and never bother to suggest improvements because it’s not in their SLA.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What's the saying, "penny wise and pound foolish"?

>Outsourced staff will just fix it over and over and never bother to suggest improvements because it’s not in their SLA.

Outsourcers absolutely love making "improvements" - they can charge top whack for project managers, architects, and techies to do that work. On many contracts, its where the profit is.

[CRConrad]

Re: Outsourced staff will just fix it over and over

Of course they will. That's how they make money. If they actually fixed it once and for all, then they cut off that cash flow. Of course they won't do that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What's the saying, "penny wise and pound foolish"?

I wonder how many of the 250 staff transferred to TCS as part of the original support TUPE are still left to TUPE on to the mysterious new supplier who isn’t being named.

[David Hicklin]

Re: What's the saying, "penny wise and pound foolish"?

> TCS as part of the original support TUPE are still left to TUPE on to the mysterious

But is that a thing? The original TUPE was is 2018 so will have long expired leaving just as TCS employees, and the only way they will be working for the new supplier is by applying for a job with them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What's the saying, "penny wise and pound foolish"?

Let's just say that in at least two cases I've been involved in the sharp-end of this sort of thing, it's actual 100% truth. "Hey it costs us £x to run all this stuff right? So let's get rid of the kit and the people that run it! Instant brownie points with upper-management!". Fast forward 6 months and it's hell on earth 'cos while the official docs showed that those staff looked after ABC, they also too care of 57 other things as well that weren't on the sheet and now after looking at the sheets, the company's IT is well and truly right in the "sheet"!

My advice is when you see outsroucing coming on the horizon, instantly put your name down for voluntary and get the hell out 'cos if you delay then your career is getting flushed along with the rest of the "sheet"!

[Pascal Monett]

A cyber incident

Why does this sound like a gold-plated excuse to do away with something that worked acceptably until now, but that some upper-level board member suddenly decided that he would would prefer changing his AMS Mercedes for a new model ?

[Catch-the-Pigeon]

Re: A cyber incident

exactly , the socially engineering attack could happen with any third party, changing it doesn't achieve much but maybe it's easier to tell the shareholders we can blame someone else for the lack of judgement with these types of attacks. There's no mention of blame but I guess the change almost covers it

[Like a badger]

Re: A cyber incident

The cyber attack might have had some minor impact on the choice, but the fact they'd gone from letting TCS manage the help desk as part of the principal supplier framework, to re-sourcing it suggests to me that (1) the statement they started the process in January is true - it takes a long time to re-source any major services contract, and (2) there were undoubtedly reasons for help desk being selected for a re-source.

I'd guess two reasons, and speculate that first and possibly 2nd, 3rd line are all offshore and poor quality, with all the reputational and performance baggage that goes with cheap offshoring, so there's a performance rationale in how staff IT support operates. I'd also reckon that re-sourcing help desk will be seen as a good way of signalling to TCS that Marks may not be entirely happy with the wider performance.

Obviously Marks won't have reflected and learned Lesson 1 of IT outsourcing, that technology services vendors always over promise, under-deliver, and back load their margin across the contract period. Which means that re-sourcing the help desk might initially seem to provide better service, but ultimately performance and value to Marks will decline as the new supplier cuts their own costs and looks to ream out Marks with all the variations and non-standard service requests.

[David Hicklin]

Re: A cyber incident

> always over promise, under-deliver, and back load their margin across the contract period

Plus they will have under-cut TCS as they always look for an outsource that saves money over the last one

[DrXym]

You get what you pay for

Outsourcing sounds financially attractive but if it ends up being provided by a revolving door of culturally clueless staff from another country who bodge fixes and don't give a damn about the service they provide then you got what you deserved.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: You get what you pay for

Yes copying config files from a register/server in another store i never a great strategy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: You get what you pay for

Of course they don't care 'cos they're getting typical local wage rates for being "trained monkeys", they're often in it just to get experience so they know how systems work in several industries. Then they leave those shitty entry-level outsource roles, go get proper jobs in the industries they worked with, either moving to that country to get better pay and benefits OR they start their own services companies and contract their skills remotely.

[werdsmith]

It appears that there is one particular 3rd party that is a common denominator with M&S, Co-op and JLR.

[Fara82Light]

Helpdesks

The big trend now is to adopt AI into Service Desk operations, and I am guessing this may have been a factor in the final decision in this instance as well.

[Fara82Light]

Outsourcing

Apart from the usual comments around outsourcing, such as the quality of service, there is also the topic of the business security implications, which, as far as I am aware, do not receive any attention at all.

The fact that a business exposes its very heart to third-parties and their service providers in turn should be raising alarm bells. As well as the usual problems of not knowing who ultimately has access to your business intelligence and the risks of criminal activity in other jurisdictions, there are the growing problems of geopolitical divides that could lead to potential expolit in the event ofinternationalconflicts developing

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Outsourcing

Yup the ‘TCS does not provide cyber security services to M&S. This is a service that is provided by another partner” was a load of slopey-shouldered bollocks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Outsourcing

PHB: "Yes, yes, I get all that, but I saved the company millions and got a big fat bonus last year!"

[Diogenes8080]

Slipped schedule

This still begs a few questions.

So M&S move to TCS in 2018, evidently on the basis of a 5-year plan giving savings yada.

But in January 2025 at least a year after that plan completed, they started re-tendering for reasons not mentioned? If this was part of the normal procurement process, should it not have started at some time in 2023? During the first few days of the disastrous April 2025 incident, it seems that no-one could be reached. Was someone's back-to-the-office plan underdelivering? Had it fallen on the same altar as measuring remote productivity?

Of course, the really interesting question from this latest story is whether the decision to leave TCS was taken before or after Easter 2025. It would not have helped morale at TCS if they knew they were on the way out. Perhaps all of the first rate staff were transferred to the JLR account?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Slipped schedule

COVID Could have played a part in the delay. Where I worked at that time, every contract of this sort, was put on hold until the pandemic subsided.

Operations carried on but end dates were flexible.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Slipped schedule

Contracts weren’t put on hold … they still expected suppliers to do work. Most of the retailers just stopped paying.

[af109]

Interview process

M&S: "What do you know about cyber security?"

Contractor: "Less than you".

M&S: "Sounds incredibly good value. When can you start?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm

JLR, M&S, massive cyber attack, TCS

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hmm

You forgot Co-op.

[Fred Dibnah]

”UK retailer Marks & Spencer has replaced Tata Consultancy Services as its IT service desk provider following a procurement process that began in January”

When I parse that sentence, it says to me that M&S are now M&S’s IT services provider.

I also chuckled at the photo used on the article - it’s M&S’s Oxford Street store, the listed building they want to demolish and replace with a new one. There’s an ironic parallel with IT in there somewhere.

[Anonymous Coward]

After 41 years I'm just glad that 4 months ago I resigned and I'm heading to retirement soon. The IT game is just a complete minefield these days and I don't have the nerve to play the game any more, they can only up your blood pressure medicine so many times!

[nonpc]

Similar for me but I got out pre-Covid. Mine was IT for a small company that I kept in house on premises before going cloud based and outsourcing IT support (within UK provider) just before I left. Shortly after I left they lost their Cyber Essentials accreditation that I had achieved for them for their government contract.

[Screwed]

Yet again...???

Five minutes ago:

M&S

Thanks for visiting!

We are currently experiencing some technical difficulties.

I knew they had been too reliable for the last week or two.