Atos wants out

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People also need to distinguish between Atos the IT company and their sister company Atos Healthcare who all the problems were attributed to. When in reality, it's still the Government that are ****ing things up for disabled people.

yeah its the stupid idealistic **** the sick, poor and disabled agenda thats to blame. Plus it helps if you donate to the party to get a contact it seems
 

GAC

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Except the fact that they made the promise as part of the bid that it wouldn't be an issue, they had a plan.

and the plan had to change 6 months from the olympics when the gov wanted even more staff on top, something a lot of the media miss.

dont get me wrong im not saying g4s didnt act like idiots but when this contract was handed out it should have been obvious it would be a farce. and should have been passed around to various companies so you had different companies working different sites. rather than one big mess of a contract.
 
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People also need to distinguish between Atos the IT company and their sister company Atos Healthcare who all the problems were attributed to. When in reality, it's still the Government that are ****ing things up for disabled people.

To be fair my dealings with Atos the IT company were probably just as painful..

However even if they do quit the contract another company, probably from abroad will just step right up, it's not going to stop the process, some of which is justified.
 
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People also need to distinguish between Atos the IT company and their sister company Atos Healthcare who all the problems were attributed to. When in reality, it's still the Government that are ****ing things up for disabled people.

Atos as a whole doesn't have a reputation for high quality work.
 
Soldato
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You should have a look at government procurement which is usually done badly and encourages unrealistic bids and then accepts overrruns later on.

Disgusting way the country is run, on paper "Oh look this private sector firm can do it really cheap" in practise it costs 2-3x as much and prioritises the profit as opposed to the service.
 
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My point was more that people blame Atos as a whole when it is the Healthcare sister company that attracts all the bad press.
 
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All of these big government contractors are terrible. It's the same with the ones who do the IT work. Their business model centres around winning work rather than doing work. They all have very well-funded sales departments but then cut every corner possible when doing the work.

It's amazing that anyone thinks that this is a more efficient model than doing the work in-house.
 
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All of these big government contractors are terrible. It's the same with the ones who do the IT work. Their business model centres around winning work rather than doing work. They all have very well-funded sales departments but then cut every corner possible when doing the work.

It's amazing that anyone thinks that this is a more efficient model than doing the work in-house.

The obvious solution would be to in-house the work. I'm sure they won't though.

There are many benefits to having IT specialists carry out the work over taking it in-house.

  • Staff budgets (not having to pay staff costs as well as hardware/hosting/licensing)
  • Opportunity for managed services
  • Temporary uplift costs
  • Increased specialist knowledge
  • Greater capacity for additional numbers when the **** really hits the fan
  • Vastly superior infrastructure
  • Lessons learnt across multiple Governmental departments (and private sector too)

Of course, these only really work when you're talking about the biggest and best. It doesn't work for smaller, cheaper, less able and less mobile companies.

There is little secret around the fact that bids all have to be the cheapest. When work is put out for tender it is with very, very strict spending criteria. Many companies discount the big stuff, and the ones that don't end up having to tack onto it further down the line or not being able to provide a service. They need to look after themselves as well, after all.

Ultimately taking support and infrastructure in-house isn't cost effective at all for a single department. Unless they rationalise across department (something that should have been done long ago before they were too heavily reliant on IT) a Government support network is unworkable. The only way to do it really is to give all the work to my company bit by bit and allow us to improve the services provided by others, and ratikonalise it as we progress :D
 
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The obvious solution would be to in-house the work. I'm sure they won't though.

We try to do a lot of our work in-house as far as possible, we have a couple of large projects that we develop, but we are a small arms-length body so not exactly your typical government agency. We still don't have the developer capacity to do all the work, but we are considered incredible value for money whenever we are reviewed, still we are always attempting to be pushed under heel by the powers that be.
 
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All of these big government contractors are terrible. It's the same with the ones who do the IT work. Their business model centres around winning work rather than doing work. They all have very well-funded sales departments but then cut every corner possible when doing the work.

This. Every large IT company I've ever worked for seemed to have an incompetent sales team, who promised to deliver what was actually impossible in order to secure the work.

99% of calls answered within 5 seconds? Yes, we can do that. *
30-minute turnaround on user account creation? Yes, we can do that. *
99% availability of your 15-year-old NT4 systems? Yes, we can do that. *
Deliver a full service with 20 analysts sharing a single 'management server' with 2 concurrent connections? Yes, we can do that. *

* No we ****** well can't.

But the single biggest problem in my opinion is that the salesperson who secured the work gets an enormous commission based on the estimated value of the contract at time of signing. If salespeople's commissions were based on actual realised profit, maybe they'd stop selling things that won't make any money (or worse, will make a loss). Then ALL companies would have to start making realistic bids.
 
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This. Every large IT company I've ever worked for seemed to have an incompetent sales team, who promised to deliver what was actually impossible in order to secure the work.

99% of calls answered within 5 seconds? Yes, we can do that. *
30-minute turnaround on user account creation? Yes, we can do that. *
99% availability of your 15-year-old NT4 systems? Yes, we can do that. *
Deliver a full service with 20 analysts sharing a single 'management server' with 2 concurrent connections? Yes, we can do that. *

* No we ****** well can't.

But the single biggest problem in my opinion is that the salesperson who secured the work gets an enormous commission based on the estimated value of the contract at time of signing. If salespeople's commissions were based on actual realised profit, maybe they'd stop selling things that won't make any money (or worse, will make a loss). Then ALL companies would have to start making realistic bids.

But yet not many IT services companies actually make a loss do they? Which would happen if the sales people were promising things that couldn't be delivered.
 
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It certainly proves that sales staff are good at pushing contracts and getting companies to accept low levels of services without mashing the penalty clause button.
 
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There are many benefits to having IT specialists carry out the work over taking it in-house.

  • Increased specialist knowledge

I used to work for a very large company that did a lot of government IT work. Anyone with experience or specialist knowledge was restricted to working on bids. The people actually doing the work were either fresh graduates or people overseas. Nearly every project was a complete fiasco.

If the government did this work in-house, those experienced workers could be moved back from sales work to doing something useful.
 
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I used to work for a very large company that did a lot of government IT work. Anyone with experience or specialist knowledge was restricted to working on bids. The people actually doing the work were either fresh graduates or people overseas. Nearly every project was a complete fiasco.

If the government did this work in-house, those experienced workers could be moved back from sales work to doing something useful.

A very large company, or a very large IT company?

The doers are almost always more skilled in their specific tasks than anyone else - including bid teams, management and P&PM.
 
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