Posts by Stoned Hippy

LibDems call for gov 'IT skills' office

In-house

When I was a Civil Servant, many many moons ago, all IT was in-house and IT projects were robustly planned and delivered.....and then some bright spark thought it would be a good idea to outsource vast swathes of core IT Services to the likes of EDS, Fujitsu and, these days, CSC.

Governmental IT has been nothing but a disaster since, as all of the staff who knew what they were doing no longer reported to their bosses in the civil service, where their pay rise depended on annual reporting and performance, but were now external consultants reporting to a new set of commercial bosses who had determined that their job description, irrespective of what they were actually doing, was now "How Much Money can you make our company today".

Until this changes, Governmental IT will either not deliver or will deliver at such an inflated cost that there was no point in conducting the project in the first place.....and if you don't believe me...just ask a CSC bod about the WAF process....if it wasn't taxpayers money being spunked away I'd laugh.

Paris. Coz even she could have seen the problem

UK.gov doesn't know its IT spend – but insists it will spend less

Outsourcers

Why not also request a list of how much money was paid to the Commercial IT Outsourcers who have done so much to rob HMG blind....mainly due to the fact that HMG ditched or TUPE'd any in-house experience that could have told them what was happening in the process

But I'm not bitter....

Penguin....coz no outsourcer would recommend such a cheap solution as it requires people who know what they're doing to support it

CSC cost-cutting spreads to Europe

Sounds like typical CSC to me...

Move money here, shave a service there, pad out some accounting shenanagans on Executive Beancounters spreadsheets and voila..... we've made some profit.... you haven't really, and staff are still unhappy, most of them are lacklustre at best (think Customer Service Support Staff rather than IT Engineer) and the service provided for costs charged are astronomical .....

BTW, in the UK CSC provide Desktop, Gateway, Infrastructure support and extortionately priced Project Management to:

Department of Health

Care Quality Commission

Railtrack

Transport for London

Hmmmm, this list is by no way definitive (they are all over the place) and might go some way to explaining why services in these organisations are p*ss poor and why they never have any money anymore.

I was fortunate...just missed out on a 'glorious' opprtunity to be TUPE'd over to these muppets

Skull and crossbones coz that's what the CSC corporate logo should really be...

Lenovo ThinkPad X300 sub-notebook

Conned the workplace into buying me one.....

Purely for testing purposes of course....

Mwahahahahah!!! Don't think it made it into the asset register...

Anyways, this review is pretty much on the ball, the X300 laptop is far superior to the Air (the choice of my missus) and surprisingly better than the X61 and T61 (My Orgs standard laptops). This is also the first IBM/Lenovo to have speakers in the correct location i.e. on top in front of the keyboard and not squirreled away on the bottom

Only complaint is, in divergence from the report above, the NOISE!!! While running standard windows and other installed applications, this unit is quieter than a mouse in a Church, but as soon as you are running a program that requires an inserted CD/DVD you are hit with one of the noisiest DVD Drives I have ever encountered... it even drowned out the music on Need for Speed for Underground..er... I meant the sound of me typing in my analysis report of this spiffing new bit of hardware.