This topic is inexhaustible. I do mean to restrict it to the relationship of business to government, even so ...
Let's try to think about what has happened.
- Government has tried to let many of its functions to business
- Government has tried to restrict its own growth and provide 'better value for money' that is both in times of contraction of the budget and expansion.
What has actually happened is that the basic proposal is not so straight forward. Both in times of contraction and expansion there are considerable problems. It is true the there wasn't an option of doing nothing because the Civil Service had to change and modernise, society had changed and the Civil Service needed to move with it. It is interesting though, that much of what was England was represented by the Civil Service and the ideals that it was believed to embody. Essentially the principal ideal was that or rectitude.
Now we are in a position to think about what has happened, as business is not known for its rectitude! Business operates with about a three month window on income and outgoings. It is immediate to see that Civil Service, as it once was, was a very long way from the mentality of three months. Here we have an organisation realistically being able to plan 4 to 10 or more years ahead have to deal increasingly with business where the anxieties are measured in a few months.
How were Civil Servants to manage this to their advantage?
Obviously the first thing that business would ask for is guaranteed contracts of one sort or another.
I think that this is where all the mistakes have been made. What has happened is that companies have charged mightily to be stable and reliable. But it is not the nature of business to be stable and reliable, stability works against something else that government has wanted which is efficiency and that is driven by competition which, by its nature, must introduce instability.
This is the crux of the whole sorry farrago which has had devastating consequences.
In the difficult, but necessary, transition of the Civil Service, the quality of thinking that would have been needed to manage the new reliance on business has been lost. I expect this 'quality of thinking' is both actual people of quality as well as habits of thoughts and ways of doing things in the institution.
Once lost these things are very difficult to retrieve, they have been built over scores of years through many different political and historical phases defining national need in different ways.
I think this is another key concept - national need or exigency.
It is interesting that concurrent with the loss of rectitude in the Civil Service there is a loss of definition of exigency. What is clear to me that what are often defined as the exigencies of State are not. But what is worse is that those that are are so poorly defined that they are rarely realised.
One such would be the need to narrow the gap between rich and poor, how ever defined. There is unanimous agreement from political commentators that this has not happened at all.
Of course, I think there is a connection between what I am discussing here and and these sorts of issues, which are the failure of policy led development from the top.
What I am proposing is a cultural shift and I am making my case in the area of IT.
I object deeply to the waste that the top down approach entails.
I know that there are going to be savage cuts, the impact of which will be massaged in the public mind. (This is another topic, the manipulation of the public mind, that is propaganda.)
I know that the result of these savage cuts will not be a change in culture, and that the cuts are really indiscriminate, or, possibly, according to some sort of deal structure such as the cost of realise from contract A and the cost of letting contract X if contract B with the same company is cancelled. I would be disappointed if a matrix at least to this degree of complexity was not drawn up?
So we know that the pairing down is fairly random, the loss of personnel is correspondingly random and that benefits apart from crude cost savings, a measure that I also object to, do not accrue.
However, in the midst of this, it is possible that the opportunity be taken to radically stream line many projects, as I believe, taking a different approach, inefficiencies could be cut by, my guess, over 60%.
That means that all those resources are released for other more pressing, activity.
It would also mean that the way that big companies seek to reduce their costs would be seen for the nonsense that it is.
Here I will give a small example - this is how BT conduct their supply as a third party to the Business Link web site account with HMRC. First of all their gross is 40%, most of their work being t&m.
In itself I find this incredible. This is a core of about £13mil with additional annual spend of about as much, not small amounts of money (although dwarfed into insignificance by the billions the government is currently throwing around). The team from HMRC are about 8 strong, really not large enough or sufficiently qualified, having met them, to run such a project. Make no mistake, in term of liability for this mess of inefficiency and poor value for the tax payer, I lay the blame entirely at the door of HMRC who should be protecting our interests, which is not a requirement for their contractors.
BT then, employ an Indian agency who supply people on contract, perhaps a third of the personnel on the contract.
I think this is a rather incredible arrangement.
Once again, let's think about it.