Has the DT got it right?

The DT ran a piece the other day about the chap parachuted in from the private sector to a fancy salary in the civil service to sort all those hopeless civil servants out. It seems that he has been claiming rather a lot of expenses and there are questions about his relationship with someone from his outer office. Along the way there is also talk of a computer system which has gone wrong and which will cost £20m to put right.

This computer system is said to be intended to help manage the MoD's 4,000 sites. Let us suppose that the cost to repair the computer system amounts to half the now projected total spend, so that the taxpayer is stumping up £40m to build a computer system which supports the management of 4,000 sites, which I make £10,000 a site, perhaps the equivalent of a quarter of an administrative officer year, and up to as much as a third if female, including here the cost of a networked PC with MS Office on it. At which point one starts to wonder what this marvellous new computer system can do in support of administration that a properly equipped administrative officer can't do over several weeks, the transition from months to weeks being intended to allow for such a system's expected working life of four or five years.

How much administration can some bit of barren marsh land on Sheppey with a few derelict buildings on it take? I do allow that an ammunition dump might be a bit more tricky - but is some general purpose computer support system going to be much help in such a place?

A cynic would say that it is the same gang which prepares the justification for such systems which stands to profit from their construction. Not necessarily the exactly same bunch of people, but these private sector contractors are all in it together. It is in their collective interest to push for as many fancy computer systems as possible: payday when pushing and paydays to follow when the push has been successful. One thing the private sector is really good at is extracting money for old rope from the public sector. No holds barred on that one.

This is not to say that civil servants are immune from the lust to build. Engineers the world over like to build things and IT flavoured civil servants are no exception. So they will push to get their latest project, system, wheeze or whatever approved so that they can get on and build it. But at the end of the day they are on salary, they have tenure (to borrow a word from academe) and their livelihoods do not depend on it in the same way, there is more room to stand back and think that this project is not going to fly, that it should not be approved. Maybe one should go off and do something else. Whereas a contractor without approval does not get paid.