Outsourcing has been kind to people like me. Too bad for everyone else.
I remember back when I worked with a colleague from the Government IT office during the stirrings of outsourcing. He was directed to put together a report on outsourcing and make it good. He handed in his first draft and subsequently had his eyes opened. Don’t make the report good, make outsourcing good. The envelope was pushed back along the desk and he started again from scratch.
Thus here we are several years down the track with most of these outsourcing contracts coming to an end. A track littered with the corpses of false hopes, discarded cash funnels from a million superfluous salesmen and whitened soggy cost reports showing the ever escalating price of management overhead. But look on the bright side, we have quality control now, right?
Have a F*CK!
Government offices all over Canberra have an ever increasing heap of checks and balances thrust upon them by their contract savvy IT providers. These things are designed to ensure the quality of, not product, but bureaucracy. Check and Balances on checks ands balances. It’s amazing the prole worker scum get a chance to put finger to code and actually produce a piece of software to do a job unrelated to project status tracking and reporting.
I don’t even want to touch on the soul sucking corporate culture we happy go lucky Aussies have had to endure. These places leak personnel like a sieve, I blame them for the recent explosion and subsequent implosion of LAN café’s across the territory.
So why should a lazy ass public servant put up with it? Here’s how it works. You make your proposal. All the client is thinking about right now is what they want to build to show off to the minister. So you tell them how good you are at building software, you throw some key terms at them like SDLC, OO, .NET and international talent. You get a nibble, then you give the ‘good’ news. You can make it in no time at all for bugger all price. You get a hit and reel them in.
And you make that software. You hire the very best……… graduates with zero experience and low initial wages that you can and churn out the most poorly conceived abomination spawning from a five year old sixteen bit application used already in the third world. Just give it a fresh virgin face and wala, product.
Then the customer is hooked on your new system and you rape their wallet through a never ending maintenance cycle, constantly fixing your own bugs and charging more for it all the time. Ensure you introduce new functions to an already flawed design to keep that bug tally up. The client will be so desperate to make it succeed so they don’t look a fool to the minister that they will invest all their emotional and financial resources into you so that you can easily feed tonnes of cash back to the USA.
Now the contacts are coming up for renewal and minds in government offices are waking up to this. Some are taking back what’s theirs. Public money going back into public pockets with the ruthless certainty of a government organization hounded by one of the most powerful unions in the country.
This is but a hint of the privatisation scam we are currently getting foisted upon us at all levels. But will we allow it in turn to become a smoking gun?
I’m told the public service in England recovered after Marge and her thrilling sequel within three years, so I’m not too fussed anymore. I took the mercenary way out myself and have decided to jump ship before it wrecks come contract end.
From Davey and me, the freshest public servant in the country, to you, the stinkiest old USAnian IT despoiler………..
Blow Me In Perpetuity!
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