Praise for the PSA
September 30th, 2009 at 11:00 am by David FarrarPSA National Secretary Richard Wagstaff blogs:
A shift in the right direction
The news that Treasury is looking to save 30% of costs and increase productivity in the public sector by centralising back office services may surprise some people. …
While the PSA is concerned for the interests of individual staff caught up in the process to centralise these functions, there is sense in bringing back a whole of government approach to much of the states activities, including the back office functions.
All too often unions are seen as instinctively anti-reform, no matter what its merits, and anti anything that may save money. I’m pleased to see the PSA take a more nuanced position on this issue.
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September 30th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
As someone pointed out earlier, these sort of mammoth IT ideas tend to generate overhead and additional jobs and necessary investments, instead of reducing jobs and costs. Once the silly first decisions for such projects have been made, the poor sod that started them is easily held over a barrel to continue spending a “little bit more” again and again to get it finished, which in practice will simply never occur.
Vote:This is the environment in which unionised IT labour thrives and grows. No wonder the PSA is taking a ‘nuanced’ position. Mind you, that is a negotiation position only, in fact, they are drooling and having continuous wet dreams over this whole idea. They are just playing hard to get, to hide their enthusiasm for this whole stupid idea.
September 30th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
As someone pointed out earlier, these sort of mammoth IT ideas tend to generate overhead and additional jobs and necessary investments, instead of reducing jobs and costs.
Well that just depends how good the people are that are undertaking the project, every consolidation project I have worked on bar one has resulted in: reduced physical assets required to service the users (servers, switches, cabinets) therefore reduced ongoing capital expenditure and a vastly simplified server environment which requires far less support assets to manage. If the objective is to just consolidate the assets, then you will be right – but the cause of that would be a poor project scope and piss poor project management.
Vote:September 30th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
@Bevan, that only shows that you’ve never worked on a large scale consolidation project in a government environment. You don’t have to look further then the gummints attempt a few years ago to create its own communication backbone.. nuff said.
Vote:September 30th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Upgrading and integrating IT is a never ending job for these large organisations. Could be a never ending black hole on the departmental budget. I’d pefer better service than more expensive technology.
Vote:September 30th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Takes years to get these kind of projects up and running correctly. Years of outsourcing resources to private contractors while the unions negotiate what’s going to happen to their staff, who remain on the payroll because the private contractors can’t get something right just yet, so of course they have to have the backup systems in place and staff who know what they’re doing…
…if the private sector is going to take over functions currently provided by the public sector, then enjoy a year or more of shadow running, two payrolls for the one job, just to see if it works. Then carefully scrutinise the contracts, and see what kind of performance assessments the government are requiring from the new contractors – is it based on the old measure, is their target above or below the current measures, is their target operational or financial?
A few great projects that should be checked out are the UK NHS Spine project, UK Home Office Adelphi system (auditors couldn’t close accounts one year because of budget-gap problems with that system), EDS/BSkyB suit, even, because things often go wrong with the private sector’s desires to amalgamate too. Man, even look at the US DoD IT projects for amalgamation – runaway costs into the tens of billions. No one is even sure what they’ve done it for.
And there’s also the chance that if it’s a PPP/PFI model being followed – a favourite to push the money off-balance sheet and in ten year’s time say “Surprise! You’ve just paid twice as much as you would have doing it yourself”, like the current model for new prisons – then the companies involved may not be NZ companies or the lion’s share of the work may not stay in NZ. Carlisle Group, Vertex, British Telecom, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft… these are the companies that are going to benefit. It’s reduced to an ideological motivation to do these things, not a longitudinal plan or considerations of what’s actually going on.
Tax cuts had better arrive as a result of all this, eh?
Vote:September 30th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Who remembers the “Stud Book”, the annual SSC publication that was the size of the Auckland phone book and listed every Public Servant employee, their age, department, occupational grading and salary? Boy that was a great equaliser – you knew exactly what your peers and superiors earned and it kept everything open and above board.
If they are going to centralise the HR management of the Public Service then please bring back the “Stud Book”, just so we can reintroduce standard wages and salaries across the whole Public Service.
Also, imagine the fights erupting in every Government office when people discover they are being paid less than someone else doing the same job!
Vote:September 30th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
@Bevan, that only shows that you’ve never worked on a large scale consolidation project in a government environment.
No offense, but I just cannot stand people who give up before they even try. It is not a foregone conclusion that it will be a failure.
Vote: