Service Birmingham offshores IT jobs
Joint venture firm moves back-office positions to India
Posted in Management, 24th May 2011 09:04 GMT
Watch Now : Virtual Machine Movement with Hyper-V
Service Birmingham, the joint venture with Capita that provides services for the UK's largest council, has confirmed that it plans to outsource a number of IT functions to India.
A spokesman said the decision has already been made as part of its contract extension with the council, and will cover only people working on back-office services.
"It won't have any effect on customer-facing roles," he said.
The plan is for 55 jobs to have been outsourced by the end of the summer, with up to another 45 by the end of the year, although the organisation "will have to look at how the initial deployment goes".
The spokesman said the measure is being taken to provide savings, although there is no firm estimate on how much money it will save.
"As part of our on-going partnership with Birmingham city council we are exploring how we can utilise some overseas expertise to help deliver a cost-effective addition to our existing Birmingham operation," he said.
"As the city council's partner, we are committed to operating as efficiently as possible. We therefore need to offer the council the best combination of operating models to deliver cost savings and efficiency gains while maintaining our existing service levels."
He added that the organisation is working with trade unions on the issue.
This article was originally published at Guardian Government Computing.
Guardian Government Computing is a business division of Guardian Professional, and covers the latest news and analysis of public sector technology. For updates on public sector IT, join the Government Computing Network here.
Watch Now : Virtual Machine Movement with Hyper-V
COMMENTS
Savings?
In every case that I have seen where services were outsourced in this way, the actual savings were minimal at best. The bean counters often fail to allow for certain costs which make the outsourced service more expensive than the original plans; they then have to get a bit creative and hide these costs under different categories.
Worse is that the level of service often deteriorates as well; I've not seen a single case where the service improved. In many cases, they quote response times, but without defining if the issue was resolved.
The worst item that I have seen, the original fault was entered 8 times on a help desk system, showed a really good response time for each incident, but the fault itself took nearly 5 months to resolve. However, because it was entered 8 times, and in each case was then closed within a couple of hours; this then showed that they were achieving their SLAs.
Meh.
Out of curiosity has the council even twigged that the people being put out of work will be the same new claimants turning up in their own job centers for unemployment and housing benefits (ironically using the systems they helped write/run)?
Are we therefore saying that as a nation it is a net financial gain to offshore our jobs and pay unemployment instead?
Down tools one and all, your job can go offshore and you will be paid to sit at home and watch Jeremy Kyle! Bring it on!
"It won't have any effect on customer-facing roles,"
Thanks, Capita spokewonk, that makes it so much easier to swallow. The fact that it'll be server admins losing their jobs and the council's servers being administered from several timezones away.
Great move, Capita. Time to break out the bubbly, toot and hookers!
customer-facing roles to Crapita
Are usually Government Ministers. Not the people that have to actually explain to somebody halfway around the world that their Bin hasn't been emptied yet again.
Or that their mothers meals-on-wheels haven't arrived yet again.
More money saving scheme's which will end us costing us more than we save.
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
The new Office Garage series:
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
