Couldn't agree more with parts of this.

Without naming names, the techies are just outgunned by the big suppliers.

On one project alone this year, I could conservatively save one subsection of one government department, 40 million a year, simply by bringing it in house.

The whole, "Government's job isn't to do the work" is rubbish. The same staff doing the same jobs, would do them better if there wasn't an agenda of "Forget delivering our commitments until you've got more commitments" bordering on what I consider the criminal, by senior consultants in outsourcers.

Progress meetings aren't even remotely related to meeting about progress, and in fact seem to me to be little more of catch ups where slick salesmen (who are technically illiterate but describe themselves as principal consultant or something equally facile,) turn up, flash beguiling terms and name drop, but don't let the government staff out the door until the question "how much have you got to spend?" has been answered.

At this point, they invent a new job role, or just anything to suck the money.

Need more staff on the job? Let's invent a new job called "Performance tester." Isn't poor performance self evident? Let's invent a new role, business analyst. (don't the staff know what their business is about? Why not ask them instead?)

Hey presto! 1200 quid a day please!

And it's not just government. On one job, I turned up and designed a Global reward system, (from scratch - having first had to learn the business,) in 12 days. the implementation of which, would have cost less than the Oracle licences. The big consultancy which had dozens of people on site, and were flying people who I could only think of as seat covering non-entities (charged out at over a grand a day,) down from places as far as Cumbria for meetings, had taken two years to fail to do it.

What they did make sure was done though, was that every move and inducement was signed off by an indigenous manager. The company thought nothing of it at the time of sign off because they thought the consultancy knew what they were doing, but they surely came aware of it, when they tried to sue the consultancy, and found the consultancy did know what they were doing.

That said, the government will never change the rules to allow genuine competition between the big consultancies et al, and the SMEs though, for two reasons.

1. Big companies hire care in the communty types, under the guise of diversity officer, cleaner, etc. Unemployed people vote the government out.

2. Big companies also hire ministers as non-exec directors, on six figure salaries.

I don't suppose the odd political donation hurts either, though can't say whether this ever happens. I really must look this up on Google.

The article writer, whilst almost perfectly correct, is wasting his breath. He may as well write an article about the injustice of agencies refusing to forward uncleared people for jobs requiring DV or SC. Both articles would be equally a waste of time.

Two things

a) There is a need to radically reduce the number of systems, most of these are supporting concepts that can be scrapped - for example the BBC licence fee and the database backing that up (fund from general taxation as most of us have a TV, and all are assumed to have), the road fund licence and the database there (just raise the fuel tax and therefore tax those who use most fuel and cause most polution), local taxation (fund from central government per head of population and use democracy to decide how it is spent).... There are more depending on how radical you feel but those small things woudl be a great start.

b) Buy British, its British tax payers money and if it is to be used to support profits and jobs they should at least be British profits and jobs. This applies not only to IT systems but all government expenditure. Sort out the current mess which is government procurement, it doesn't need to be complex or difficult, and certainly shoudln't be expensive or impossible to tender. (I've tried and believe me it really is impossible).