Public service spending cuts.

[Hatterlovesbrighton]

My civil service pay is performance related!

And my department is just about to embark on yet another round of "efficiency savings" looking to 'save' around £39 millions in the next three years.

How does your system work? Our's has been slowly eroded so that the PRP bit is a nonconsolidated bonus that 6 in 10 get.

 

[Publius Ovidius]

I worked for the supplier rather than the NHS. We only spec'ed HP to start with and everyone was happy until this NHS IT Programme Manager stuck his nose in. As a business we actually made more margin from the Cisco kit and more in professional services. As a tax payer it stank as we were able to prove that the HP solution easily performed just as well but for a much lower level of investment.

ah but the trick is to convince people that the "cloud" is where it is at and is cutting edge technology using virtualisation ( this fantastic new thing) - which IBM used on Mainframes 30 + years ago.

If virtualisation takes off again, there will be no need for 60% of IT staff as you only need datacentres full of kit and people who can run Hypervisor software. The tape monkeys of this world will be no longer required

 

[bhaexpress]

the bureaucracy is the problem though, with everything having to be tracked and measured in order to provide for perfomance related metrics to prove x or y. im sure this could all be done simply, but no one has found a way yet, and i fear that largly because too many vested interests.

In IT this comes though as lots of project managers, account managers and service delivery managers at different points when one of each and decent people doing the work would work better.

IT budgets could be slashed if organisations asked the troops what they needed to do the job rather than listen to consultants tell them what what the business needed (wtf do they know?).

as above, too many chiefs not enough indians sums it up pretty well.

Agree with your first two points but with many organisations, not just the NHS, many users don't know what is and isn't possible and the NHS has a whole lot of staff at all levels with little or no IT knowledge. I have spoken to quite a few who will not use email including a couple of senior consultants. Given the fact that you have to deal with this sort of mentality in an organisation that does just about every thing by computer you wonder how these people still have employment.

 

[bhaexpress]

ah but the trick is to convince people that the "cloud" is where it is at and is cutting edge technology using virtualisation ( this fantastic new thing) - which IBM used on Mainframes 30 + years ago.

If virtualisation takes off again, there will be no need for 60% of IT staff as you only need datacentres full of kit and people who can run Hypervisor software. The tape monkeys of this world will be no longer required

Yep, 'dark' computer rooms. Thesse days they have machines that load tapes. Where I am now they are scrapping Citrix which is effectively a mainframe solution but not as reliable. It was a good idea ten years ago but isn't anymore with the changes of the industry. As for Virtualisation, as a former VM sys prog this makes me smile. I have VM on one of my PCs at home, big deal !However, you do need some staff as a lot of users barely know how to turn a computer on.

Whilst there are plenty of people who can do lots of clever things on a computer there are plenty more who would be much happier if all they had to use was a good old fashioned dumb terminal.

 

[clapham_gull]

ah but the trick is to convince people that the "cloud" is where it is at and is cutting edge technology using virtualisation ( this fantastic new thing) - which IBM used on Mainframes 30 + years ago.

If virtualisation takes off again, there will be no need for 60% of IT staff as you only need datacentres full of kit and people who can run Hypervisor software. The tape monkeys of this world will be no longer required

I sort of get your point, but the cost of hardware 30 years ago forced computer companies to think like that.

The major difference now is that the software can produced by any company (not just IBM) and the web/internet allows it to be run across different systems developed by many different manufacturers.

One interesting thing is the charging which is similiar to buying time on the mainframe. I'm seeing more and more applications where you charged for the amount of time you use them.

Room design software seems to be going this way for instance.

The benefit being that you never have to buy or upgrade to the latest version.

The cloud is a bit of a catch all term, it doesn't just include virtualisation.

 

[pork pie]

Stop having elections and let Labour rule forever.

Don't even joke about it!

Their changes to wards, and the little areas of control they have tried to built up by creating "The Welsh Assembly", "The Scottish Parliament" (oh sorry they f***ed that one up! ) and "The Mayor of London" (oh sorry they f***ed that one up! ) will mean that it will take years to completely eradicate their control over some areas of our society.

 

[bhaexpress]

My civil service pay is performance related!

And my department is just about to embark on yet another round of "efficiency savings" looking to 'save' around £39 millions in the next three years.

Really ? Then some of your colleagues should be paying us ! Having worked in more than a few civil service departments I can tell you that quite a few would never survive in commerce. Committing murder is about the only way to get sacked as a Civil Servant.

 

[wellquickwoody]

Whilst reading all this talk if 'virtualisation, VM, Citrix and so forth' I came to the conclusion that this 'geek speak' is most of the problem in relation to IT. The project managers/buyers in the public sector are bombarded with technical specifications which most of them either do not fully understand or do not realise that these levels of specification are not neccessary for the normal staff within their organisations. They are bamboozled by the sales talk.

On another topic now,here's one real example of left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing in local gevernment.

Local Authority A and Local Authority B have formed a partnership to provide local services to their residents. These include waste management, lighting, library services, housing etc etc. Whilst this partnership is operational on the delivery end of services it is entirely fragmented on the funding of these services.

Local Authority A independantly collects council and business taxes and provides housing benefits etc to its population. Local Authority B does not work independantly in these roles. Local Authority B works with Local Authority C and with Local Authority D to collect both its revenues and to run it's benefits operation. Local Authority B has also transferrred its revenues and benefits staff from their employment to Local Authority C's employment, although the staff continue towork from Local Authority B's premises. Local Authorities B, C and D are now in discussion to also work with Local Authority E on revenues and benefits. All this whilst Local Authorities A and B continue to provide frontline services whilst having totally seperate financial arrangements.

Doh!

 

[beorhthelm]

If virtualisation takes off again, there will be no need for 60% of IT staff as you only need datacentres full of kit and people who can run Hypervisor software. The tape monkeys of this world will be no longer required

yeah thats the sales pitch. in reality you end up with expensive consultants to admin the virtual infrastructure, outsourced admins who dont know what anything is, a layer of project managers and services delivery managers to email everything between the above groups and pissed off users who cant understand why it takes 3 months to commision a new server when last time it was done in a couple of weeks including delivery of the hardware. AND, you still need the tape monkeys and network guys on the ground to do physical stuff, only they are shit and dont care because there is no job prospects.

i love virtualisation, its bloody brilliant tech, but it needs to be used to improve existing services, not abused to try and cut head counts. I wouldnt trust my data to the cloud and anyone whos ever had an outage with a 99.99999 uptime hosting provider (ie near anyone in the business) will know what im talking about. only last week a flood at one BT exchange knocked out internet for large numbers of west london and also the south east (eastbourne was affected that i know of). all your accounts on the cloud? need to file a return? pay a supplier? tough.

 

[bhaexpress]

I sort of get your point, but the cost of hardware 30 years ago forced computer companies to think like that.

The major difference now is that the software can produced by any company (not just IBM) and the web/internet allows it to be run across different systems developed by many different manufacturers.

One interesting thing is the charging which is similiar to buying time on the mainframe. I'm seeing more and more applications where you charged for the amount of time you use them.

Room design software seems to be going this way for instance.

The benefit being that you never have to buy or upgrade to the latest version.

The cloud is a bit of a catch all term, it doesn't just include virtualisation.

Hate to tell you but 30 years ago IBM were by no means the only players. As far as manufactures there was of own (and frankly crap) ICL, most governement departments HAD to buy ICL because they were British a policy inflicted by a labour government. Any body who can remember the debacle at the old DVLC in Swansea should be aware that they only started to get sorted once they had slkung out ICL for IBM mainframs. ICL are now part of Fujitsu, they still manage to lose business ask the NHS.

There were other manufactures too, DEC (taken over by Compaq who lost so much money on the deal they in turn were bought by HP). There was Borroughs and Sperry Univac, they joined forces and are now Unisys although their kit is now rare as rocking horse crap. There were others too, Hitachi and Amdahl made kit to run IBM software. There was people like Harris (who ended up making vdus for IBM kit). Prime was another although not very common. There was also Honeywell, a quite big player in the US although now they do fancy electrical swutches and the like. And of course there was, and still is Cray, the super computer manufacturer.

Whilst the hardware was very expensive the personnel costs were far lower. There were no desktop or user support staff as there was no need for them, it was quite simeple, your VDU either worked or it didn't. The real problem was that all these manufacturers (other than the IBM clones of Hitachi and Amdhal) were totally incompatable, both soft and hardware. Far more so that say, a PC or a Mac. You couldn't transfer a program from one manufacturer to another although IBM did try to do this with a migration program. It only prodiced very clumsy and unreliable code though. The arrival of Unix was supposed to deal with this but once again every manufacturer had their own version of Unix which also left a lot to be desired on the campatibility from. the other problem with Unix and the machines that used it was that they were both nowhere near as safe or reliable as the average mainframe. ceratinly not suitable in those days for many of the appliactions they do now.

The irony is that with things like Virtualization, Citrix and SQL server we may have made if cheaper with hardware and software but we have put a far larger burden on the end user thanks to the fact that it's far more complicated from their point of view (which it is). The real irony is that we are back with the same scenario as a mainframe with the same costs but they are from other issues rather than the cost of the computers.

 

[Publius Ovidius]

yeah thats the sales pitch. in reality you end up with expensive consultants to admin the virtual infrastructure, outsourced admins who dont know what anything is, a layer of project managers and services delivery managers to email everything between the above groups and pissed off users who cant understand why it takes 3 months to commision a new server when last time it was done in a couple of weeks including delivery of the hardware. AND, you still need the tape monkeys and network guys on the ground to do physical stuff, only they are shit and dont care because there is no job prospects.

i love virtualisation, its bloody brilliant tech, but it needs to be used to improve existing services, not abused to try and cut head counts. I wouldnt trust my data to the cloud and anyone whos ever had an outage with a 99.99999 uptime hosting provider (ie near anyone in the business) will know what im talking about. only last week a flood at one BT exchange knocked out internet for large numbers of west london and also the south east (eastbourne was affected that i know of). all your accounts on the cloud? need to file a return? pay a supplier? tough.

I couldn't argue with a lot of that, however looking at current trends , certainly in my sector, that is the way things are moving forward..traditional DR/BC has changed in the 10 years since I joined as a mere AS400 techie. Managed Services is the way forward, from Managed Recovery to Data Centre management. You will certainly need Workspace for DR, but where you may have had huge floors filled with all sorts of kit from Sun/IBM/HP/Dell/Fujitsu etc, the way cross platform capatibility is going you are nearing a place where everything will run on everything. ( I have a IMB Lap Top running MAC OS).

Iseries machines are now also P series systems in different partitions running Lynux etc

"The times they are a changin"

 

[bhaexpress]

I couldn't argue with a lot of that, however looking at current trends , certainly in my sector, that is the way things are moving forward..traditional DR/BC has changed in the 10 years since I joined as a mere AS400 techie. Managed Services is the way forward, from Managed Recovery to Data Centre management. You will certainly need Workspace for DR, but where you may have had huge floors filled with all sorts of kit from Sun/IBM/HP/Dell/Fujitsu etc, the way cross platform capatibility is going you are nearing a place where everything will run on everything. ( I have a IMB Lap Top running MAC OS).

Iseries machines are now also P series systems in different partitions running Lynux etc

"The times they are a changin"

Not as much as you might think. I have been on MVS/XA machines that supported various different types of IBM system. Now I have a Windows 7 PC that runs VM with XP, Ubuntu and soon Snow Leopard. The thing is only I can use it though.

 

[The-Libertine]

Close all schools. Most kids don't like them and its all on wikipedia anyway.

 

[clapham_gull]

Hate to tell you but 30 years ago IBM were by no means the only players.

I'm fully aware of that, but my point was that this thing they are calling "cloud computing" isn't just to do with virtualisation. It appears to be a catch all term for running software that isn't actually being executed by the processor under your desk.

Rather than being a hundred suppliers they are hundreds of thousands of companies who could potentially offer these services.

I do agree though, the computer industry does seem to have the ability to rename concepts that have been around for years.

..but we have put a far larger burden on the end user thanks to the fact that it's far more complicated from their point of view

There is of course the other kind of user who is very technically savvy, they in many ways can be as bad.

I've lost count of the times someone has asked me "where is the undo button..." on bespoke software or can we have a hyperlink on that screen.

 

[Storer68]

How does your system work? Our's has been slowly eroded so that the PRP bit is a nonconsolidated bonus that 6 in 10 get.

Based on your marking in your annual report. Which can be whatever your senior officer feels he can write and get away with.

Which is basically a 1,2,3 marking system (used to be 1,2,3,4,5). No one, well very few, gets a box 1 marking (outstanding), most get a Box 2 (perfoamnce satisfactory), and the rest get a Box 3 which is known as "improvement needed)

So although its called Performance Related pay, there is little actual relation between the performance and the pay.

 

[beorhthelm]

Close all schools. Most kids don't like them and its all on wikipedia anyway.

thats the sort of thing you'd expect to see in the monster raving looney manifesto, and probably not such a bad idea. i jest, but schooling suffers probably more than most from wasteful bureaucracy mainly because their should be ANY. its teaching ffs, they do better in thrid world countries as they keep to the basics and EDUCATE rather than try to force kids through an assessment programme.

 

[Leekbrookgull]

As i have said before,for me here is one waste of money,why does an Ambulance need to look and sound like a mobile disco ?

 

[Leekbrookgull]

Sorry,the picture is rather large,best i could find with the time i had. However how much has this little lot cost ?

 

[Leekbrookgull]

I try this one ! Its everywhere and what is the cost ?

 

[Postman Pat]

Real current NHS jobs and salaries:

Head of Human Resources - £60, 671 - £73,351
Director of quality (chief nurse) - 90k
Associate Director of Commissioning X2 - £68,809 - £83,287
Chief Information officer - £68,833 - £79,031
Head of finance - 80k
Director of resources - 90k
Director of commissioning - 90k
Director of community services (solihull) - 90k

Qualified nurse - £21,176 to £27,534 !!!

Which of those is adding value to the NHS??