Bank of England says it can run £431M settlement system without Accenture As the last Accenture employee clocked off from supporting the Bank of England's £431 million Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system, the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street was assured it would no longer depend on the global consultancy. Probed by MPs this week, deputy governor Dave Ramsden said he was confident the UK's …
>> Some government departments have become dependent on expertise from suppliers such that they have to extend contracts without competition, partly through a lack of internal knowledge.
This was the Tory mantra. Their hero was John Harvey-Jones. Become a buyer of services rather than have any real knowledge. It was state sponsored dumbing down of business intellect.
My ex-father-in-law was a life-long Morgan car owner, and happened to be in the Malvern workshop speccing up his next car when Sir John made his infamous visit. He was utterly appalled by how these hand built cars were pushed by hand between workshops, how the panels were beaten by hand to an ash chassis.
Craftsmanship was anathema to Sir John...
It's not clear from the article if the overall NAO position on this is positive or negative.
But, from my armchair POV, it looks like the BoE has done far better than just about any other government project. A modest cost overrun (not the usual orders of magnitude increases), and they aren't beholden to external rip-off merchants for ongoing maintenance and support.
I wonder how the ~£40m annual running cost compares against the previous incarnation of the project.
According to the BoE, it was £21M before and now it is £40M and that is because they brought it in house and added technical expertise. So it would appear that it is essentially double the cost of the previous iteration that was (implied by the language used in his answer) outsourced. Not exactly the incredible panacea that many Reggie's proclaim will happen if only the public sector ran everything.
Then again the cost overrun was minimal and it is amazing that we actually own anything, perhaps the BoE could set up the new clearing system for the UK and run that. Would rather them than a subsidiary owned by Mastercard, which seems to me to remove the point of setting up a new clearing system that is independent of Mastercard...
My first experience of the consultancy cash cow was at Barclays in Knutsford in 1991 when I worked for a well-known PC manufacturer. Arthur Andersen, who renamed themselves to Accenture after their involvement in the Enron scandal, were firmly embedded..
It was a large distributed software project, with a corresponding rollout of PCs to every branch.
The fax machines were running throughout the day with CVs from Andersen's Androids as they were known. These were almost all wet behind the ears graduates who'd had their 6 weeks of indoctrination at the Chicago HQ. Pretty much every project role at Barclays was up for grabs, with the going rate for a photocopying operative being £750/day. There were hundreds of them.
Why? Thanks to intransigent and difficult unions, together with an arrogant and belligerent CTO (Joseph de Feo), consultancies were routinely leveraged to get projects done.
There used to be an unofficial usefulness quotient placed on the Androids. I'd say only about 10% were adding real value to Barclays, with the remaining 90% essentially doing work experience, and 100% of them adding value to the Arthur Andersen partners' back pockets. Joseph de Feo probably enjoyed some great corporate hospitality out of it too.
Since that time, I've always been wary of consultancies, and have regularly seen the same old rinse and repeat in small, medium, and large projects, in both public and private sectors, although never quite as bad as the aforementioned Barclays experience.
I thought we were over greedy consultancy pillagers about ten or fifteen years ago. I guess I was wrong.
Thing is, as a dev, in-house work for govt dept or non-software company can be a little less exciting and formative than consultancy or working for a software company. Not to mention less lucrative.
And that not infrequently gets reflected in the caliber of in-house devs. It doesn’t have to, but it can.
I see no reason that phenomenon needs to happen with sysadmins, btw. Quite the contrary.
It’s a hard problem but BoE seems to at least want to deal with it.
On the flip side, the consultancies don’t all field geniuses. Far from.
The requirement for being a good consultant is the ability to be a good consultant (eg, milk as much money for as long as possible from the client while avoiding any responsability). That's what pays the bills and that's the focus. Giving good advice and helping the client is quite a long way down the list of priorities.
Quite different from being an in-house employee and needing to actually provide some productive output.
With regards to "...in the Accenture team real early on...", if a Bank of England employee really said that then they need to be hanged for crimes against the King's English.
If, on the other hand, El Reg have decided to revoice perfectly reasonable language into whatever that is, it's still a hanging offence. Only for undue impertinence instead.
Rosie
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