Government Spend €580,000 on IT Consultants...Per Day!?!

DublinWriter

According to the Public Service Executive Union (PSEU), the Government spend €580,000 per day on IT consultants:

http://www.pseu.ie/xxxx/survey-of-it-resources-in-civil-service-departments.453.html

How is that even possible?

gandalf

It's quite easy if the people within those departments don't have the knowledge or experience required to run or contribute to IT projects. Looking at the staff breakdown if it is delimited as I think it is by seniority there is definitely imbalanced with too many officers of one level or another.

Bear in mind as well that consultants are being used to paper over the cracks of a lack of recruitment into the PS over the last few years.

Having sold consultancy in the past directly into Government Departments there is a severe lack of knowledge and of willingness to put the hours in to deliver a time limited project by a lot of the permanent staff in place in some departments. I also believe that management oversight on these projects is extremely lacking again because of lack of knowledge, lack of motivation or both.

antoobrien

DublinWriter wrote: »

According to the Public Service Executive Union (PSEU), the Government spend €580,000 per day on IT consultants:

http://www.pseu.ie/xxxx/survey-of-it-resources-in-civil-service-departments.453.html

How is that even possible?

From the responses to the parliamentary questions, we can infer that the average daily cost of a computer consultant is in the region of €1,000.

I wonder are they equating IT consultants with IT contractors (the first you hire to tell you how to do a job, the second you hire to DO the job)?

seamus

€1,000/day, 8 hours a day = €125/hour.

That's about the going rate for an ACA-qualified junior IT "consultant" from one of the big four firms.

Of course you'll get senior contractors for about half that rate who will actually do the work rather than just tell you what needs to be done. But that's too much hassle when you can just sign one contract with one firm and have them do the legwork.

micosoft

antoobrien wrote: »

I wonder are they equating IT consultants with IT contractors (the first you hire to tell you how to do a job, the second you hire to DO the job)?

That's exactly what they are doing much as they did for Irish Water.

Secondly most major IT projects are change projects - i.e. fundamentally changing the way people work in order to bring in efficiencies by changing the way people work through their processes supported by systems.

It does not make sense having this type of skillset permanently in any given dept. and makes much more sense to bring it in on demand.

TBH this figure looks quite low.

Phoebas

DublinWriter wrote: »

According to the Public Service Executive Union (PSEU), the Government spend €580,000 per day on IT consultants:

http://www.pseu.ie/xxxx/survey-of-it-resources-in-civil-service-departments.453.html

How is that even possible?

I spent a few years working in IT in the civil service and left because they couldn't compete with the market.
At that time, civil servants working in IT were leaving in their droves, many getting jobs with the big consulting firms and finding themselves placed back in the civil service departments that they had just left - only earning more and their new employers earning a lot more. This bred resentment from their colleagues and many quickly followed suit.

The solution is to clear the various barriers to entry to civil service jobs, to pay the going rate and to have the ability to get rid of IT staff that are surplus to requirements or who no longer have the skills in the required technologies.
As an IT professional with very many years of experience, if I wanted to work in IT as an employee of the civil service, I'd have to go in at an entry level rather than competing for a position at my actual level. I doubt that the PSEU will ever be looking for a change to the current arrangement which protects their own members who would suffer from the competition and holds back their members who would actually benefit.

Berserker

Phoebas wrote: »

At that time, civil servants working in IT were leaving in their droves, many getting jobs with the big consulting firms and finding themselves placed back in the civil service departments that they had just left - only earning more and their new employers earning a lot more. This bred resentment from their colleagues and many quickly followed suit.

I know of a few examples of this myself. Interestingly, if you work for one of the 'big four' you have a clause in your contract stating the you cannot work for another client of the consultancy firm or another consultancy firm for a year or so after leaving. Not sure how strictly this is implemented though as I know two people who have moved from one of the big four to another. It is important to note that the employees of the consultancy firm do not earn big money. Most earn the median salary for their role. All in all, they aren't great to work for (long hours, poor training etc) unless you fancy going out on your own as a consultant.

I was speaking to a high ranking manager about the reasons why companies bring in these consultancy firms for projects instead of using or hiring staff themselves. This person told me that such companies are used because "nobody has even been fired if/when the firm fails to deliver". If the project is done in-house the same is not the case.

The Corinthian

gandalf wrote: »

It's quite easy if the people within those departments don't have the knowledge or experience required to run or contribute to IT projects.

This is a large factor, but there are two others that I've observed over the years.

The first is budgets. Selling IT services in the last quarter of the year is traditionally like shooting fish in a barrel. A government department will have a budget, by Q4 it may realize that this is likely to end in surplus by year end. If so, they face the possibility that their budget will be cut for subsequent years because they've demonstrated they don't need it.

Solution? If your company specifically targets B2G business, existing clients start contacting you and so as to literally buy anything going as long as you send them a PO before year end - the importance of the PO by that date has actually been said to me more than once.

Second factor is that consultants are often necessary so that someone else makes the decisions. Anyone who's ever done any B2G work will know that getting sign-off on anything from a public servant can be like pulling teeth. So for this they will employ consultants to advise them and effectively sign-off on their behalf and avoid any responsibility should anything go wrong.

Why? Well, public servant don't get rewarded for successes (there's even resentment to the idea of merit being recognized), but failure will end up staining your overall record. So with nothing to gain and only to lose from taking the responsibility for a decision, there is every incentive to employ someone to take that risk on your behalf.

So, other than lack of skills and knowledge (which existed long before any recruitment freezes, btw), these two structural factors contribute to a need to outsource excessive levels of IT and other services.

Berserker wrote: »

I was speaking to a high ranking manager about the reasons why companies bring in these consultancy firms for projects instead of using or hiring staff themselves. This person told me that such companies are used because "nobody has even been fired if/when the firm fails to deliver". If the project is done in-house the same is not the case.

Never forget the old axiom, "no one's ever been fired for hiring IBM".

Sleepy

I've spent most of my career doing Software Consultancy, about 50% of the time for government and tbh, it's quite obvious why they need so many contractors: they can't do the work themselves. Very few "IT" staff in the public sector have a degree in the area and even the most senior staff have typically been internally transferred from one admin function or another, in the words of one of my clients "because he had a Commodore 64 at the time and was 'into' computing".

A recent review of one of the IT departments I worked with showed that any of the senior staff were underqualified and underpaid for the roles they were performing whilst the majority of the lower level staff (desktop support etc.) were vastly overpaid compared to private industry. Just try arguing that the "low paid public servants" are, in matter of fact, overpaid in the public sphere, however, and you'll be torn limb from limb in the press.

endacl

Could they not just circulate an auld 'turn it off and on again' memo?

Berserker

Sleepy wrote: »

I've spent most of my career doing Software Consultancy, about 50% of the time for government and tbh, it's quite obvious why they need so many contractors: they can't do the work themselves. Very few "IT" staff in the public sector have a degree in the area and even the most senior staff have typically been internally transferred from one admin function or another, in the words of one of my clients "because he had a Commodore 64 at the time and was 'into' computing".

How did they end up in these positions if they do not have the knowledge or qualifications? I am not familiar with the recruitment process in the sector but I would imagine that they would need to do a tech interview etc?

Seth Brundle

Berserker wrote: »

How did they end up in these positions if they do not have the knowledge or qualifications? I am not familiar with the recruitment process in the sector but I would imagine that they would need to do a tech interview etc?

I'm aware of a public sector CIO very recently who had difficulty using windows explorer!!!

ObeyTheSuit

I'll be frank here, there are some reasons outlined in this thread that make sense and have been correctly brought up. Let me paint the picture:

I've worked in the Public Service for an Australian state government and I would gather it's similar to Ireland.

Public servants do not get celebrated for doing a good job. In fact you just get more work to do as a 'reward'. There are no bonuses or the paid for Christmas party as that would be using taxpayers money and people tend to make a frowny face about that. The standard wages paid out were mainly for support staff and came out of Opex (operational expenditure) not capex (captial expenditure) which is more commonly associated with money spent or invested to improve the business.

These days I am a middle manager in one of the big 4. Out of the 320k employees we have globally I have 10% of my workforce sitting on the bench. The bench is a place you sit around and do nothing while not assigned to a project. When it does I dip into my bench resource pool for the skills I need and put you to use. Our customers like that. Some of these people have highly sought after skill sets or certifications such as a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) for example. This basically means this individual can command up to AUD $200k per year or there about (not sure what Ireland is like these days). Your government needs this guy or gal to make x or y happen because simply put no one is going to stay in PS for the wages they are offered with a certification/skill set like that. So you come to me. I make it happen and I charge you market rates for my service and trust me his $200k is before we add our cut. We are a business after all.

Like Microsoft said:

Secondly most major IT projects are change projects - i.e. fundamentally changing the way people work in order to bring in efficiencies by changing the way people work through their processes supported by systems.

The purpose of a project is to provide a return on investment. You put in xxx Euros and if managed correctly you get your money back and then some. This report does not state where or how the money is being used or what saving are gained as a result in fact it's not even a report, just some table with staffing numbers in it. For all we know they are getting it pretty cheap.

edward2222

DublinWriter wrote: »

According to the Public Service Executive Union (PSEU), the Government spend €580,000 per day on IT consultants:

http://www.pseu.ie/xxxx/survey-of-it-resources-in-civil-service-departments.453.html

How is that even possible?

The government is also getting times ten of that amount from its citizens per day. Soooo, for them, its not a problem :cool:

hmmm

It's not unusual to find people in Government IT departments doing something technical/complex (e.g. firewall administrators, Unix sysadmins) who transferred into that job from something completely unrelated. It's the old 1800s civil service attitude of a level 1 minion being capable of doing any job at that grade, irrespective of the department.

Managers tear their hair out, and are forced to hire consultants because the staff they have been given are not capable of doing the job. I'm not surprised they spend so much on consultants, otherwise nothing would be done in some places.

Dr_Bill

Maybe it is over-simplistic but it would seem sensible to invest in training and development of the current staff within the PS to cover the majority of tasks needed, for sure specialists will be required occasionally and the expertise can be contracted in, but certainly for the bulk of day to day stuff the PS should be able to handle it on its own?