News: 1624966152

Merci encore, mes petites biches anglaises. (Aux idiots l'argent brûle les doigts...)

I'd happily pop down to the local hospital and install whatever free/libre and open source software they want, and I wouldn't charge for a good deed.

You chose not to keep a competent IT staff internally, then don't be surprised to pay for anything when outsourced.

If you ain't happy, contact the bean-counters who told you it was the right thing to do.

The NHS isn't £350million a week better off, they could do with it to pay the French.

Is there no one in the British government whp has an idea of how to write and spec a tender?

There may not be anyone in British government who knows how to write.

Crayons only huh?

I wonder if they have a pin board for cabinet meetings and award a gold star for drawing of the week?

Thats bollocks. There are certainly enough skills in the UK where 20% of the work force is sitting idle and a very large number of software guys are underpaid or out of work.

At current salaries 6k is about a month, it doesnt take a month to package something for deployment. It might take a month to find a package system and get it ready so any package can be deployed with it.

If I had known that i could have earned my yearly salary by packaging 3 applications I would have taken a lot more holiday time!

I would say higher because it puts a lot more people at risk.

...this is how (especially public sector) outsourced contracts are designed and written from the ground up.

Initially seem cheaper than your own staff. Great.

However, they are very precise in exactly what you can expect to get for that money and anything even vaguely outside of that prescribed detail, you pay.

As others have pointed out, this falls on the shoulders of the people who thought it would be better (read: cheaper) to outsource. They always look at the top line and miss the devil in the detail.

They always look at the top line and miss the devil in the detail.

Or, they read and understand the whole thing, and calculate that they can grab the glory and be long gone by the time the details bite.

Cynical, me?

Cynical, moi?

FTFY

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You forgot to add: these people make sure they are not around when the true, actual costs of outsourcing are realized. By that time they have already collected their saving targets bonuses and have moved to another organization where they are treated as star innovators (and have agreed another huge bonus for doing exactly the same thing)

The cycle ends when they retire or move as executives of one of their outsourcing partners.

It seems like the quality took a nose dive and costs rocketed after IR35 changes.

How is that good for the tax payer?

In what universe has this anything to do with IR35?

Outsourced contracts have had these types of service since forever, long before IR35 was even a thing never mind recent interpretation changes. This is how outsourcers make a profit, provide the basic service at or below cost, but charge through the nose for everything above and beyond the basic service.

Freelancing is small scale outsourcing. It's the sort of task that could and should have been handled at that scale.

> In what universe has this anything to do with IR35?

IR35 drives flexible, lower-cost, independent contractors into the arms of the big companies since it rapidly becomes pointless to be anything other than a paid employee with accompanying benefits.

The big companies then have to be used because of a shortage of other options and can continue to charge outrageous prices for simple tasks.

Is this the same shop that was caught out by Excel 97's row limit last year? I feel sorry for their analysts. I work for a different part of the NHS and when I needed Python, my boss approved it and our internal IT set me up.

Can you add libraries with pip and all yourself?

(Just thinking of possible future project costs Altos could come up with...)

I can. I get the impression NHSE staff can't.

"Is this the same shop that was caught out by Excel 97's row limit last year?" - No that was PHE.

So just because some software has a free license, it costs nothing to install and maintain? What rubbish.

While £5-7k is certainly crazy expensive, it is ridiculous to think that packaging, testing, installing and supporting "free" software is itself free. It isn't.

The quote at the end of the OA included the phrase "Such activities and costs associated are always carefully considered and are proportionate and are not on a per user basis."

A one off fee for packaging something like R (in such a way that packages can be added as required by the user - remember that means fetching code from CRAN and possibly compiling fortran/c++ bits) for the whole NHS or for a given network could be envisaged.

Anyone got more information?

Given that R is sitting, ready packaged, a my and I guess most Linux distros' repositories this doesn't seem to be a massive task. £6k for something that can be done with apt install r-recommended?

The article reads like it's 5k for Matplotlib, another 5k for Pandas and so on, at the organisation level rather than per seat. This strikes me as expensive, given the bulk of the work is done by the library developers upstream from Atos.

The work isn't done by library devs at all. There isn't even a proper single standard for installing apps on Windows.

Each app has to be checked for suitability for delivering to a secured, locked-down desktop via SCCM.

It then has to be tested to ensure that it doesn't mess things up for the 15k or so users on that platform. Of which there are several flavours due to differences in organisation and departments.

It also has to be reviewed for security and privacy - how many times have we now seen where even a seemingly benign minor version "update" to an open source application has introduced insecurities and even malware or at least adware.

People need to stop applying consumer grade levels of "reasonable" to enterprise systems.

There is a VERY good reason that NHS England didn't fall foul of Wannacry or indeed that it has NEVER had a malware outbreak.

As I say, I agreed that the price seems excessive. But the price HAS to be more than zero.

Nowhere in the article did it mention support. That price was just to package and deliver it, I would imagen that support would be extra.

It would be good to think that politicians would realise that "going digital" or being "data driven" involves more than making the announcement, showing each other PowerPoints about it and discovering the hard way how to handle more than 32K rows of data. They should at the very least work out what might then be their core competences - stuff that they shouldn't outsource but have in-house.

What is wrong with outsourcing app packaging?

Answer: Nothing - as long as you get the price correct.

Well colour me shocked, outsourced IT support probably costs more when exorbitant fees for such free software installation is considered. I’ll bet it’s the tip of a very large iceberg too.