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At the start of the outsourcing boom I remember having discussions with the board about outsourcing our IT and, basically, making myself redundant. All the senior managers saw is a reduced spend for IT on the books and in exactly the same way IT brought about cost savings in finance, warehousing, etc. they seen outsourcing doing the same to IT. All risks are ignored and seen as IT resisting change. In the company I worked for we had two highly bespoke systems which were linked to dozens of corporate systems around the world all supported by us. Development was the name of our game and our development team was four times the size of all the networking, PABX and operations staff put together. Well, the pound signs won out and we outsourced our IT and as managing a smaller department wasn’t for me I moved on to pastures new. I still kept in touch as one by one my predictions took place. One was that at the end of the year the costs would exceed the budget we had put in place, another was that within the next year the costs would exceed what we would have had if we had remained in house and another in my list of eight was that we would lose some of our customers. All came true. It was an easy prediction to make as we had a strange set up supporting, via development, a worldwide organisation that required rapid changes. In the new system every change was fully documented and we had to pay extra to get changes rushed through plus it was at our risk. Even then they were always late and after a while most of the remote units took over their own support and development and we lost that revenue stream. The costs at the end of year one was 120% of budget and 150% at the end of year two. Outsourcing was never a good idea for that company and we were sold a pup, and a runt at that.
Outsourcing, IMO, is only of use for core systems that do not change much, add no real value to the company and are complete entities in their own right. HR systems, Payroll, Pensions, etc. They are ideal candidates for outsourcing. Bespoke development teams for a product you sell is not. Outsourcing is great for the right systems.
Anyway, as cost cutting starts to hit globally several people are looking at revisiting their outsourcing agreements. Now for some reason they thing that bringing them back in house will actually save costs. It’s a good plan outsource to save money, in source to save money, outsource again to save money and then err…. hold on! At this rate it will be free. Wow! Let us do this with everything.
Only problem is that the main reason the outsourcers are able to save money is to use the same people on multiple contracts and not have the same requirements for holiday cover, illness cover and training costs. A company might need an Oracle DBA for two or three months a year. He spends the rest of the time idle so he gets cross trained in other things and spends time as an analyst, developer or whatever diluting his skills. Outsourcers use him on four or five contracts and thus cost savings as he becomes a DBA expert. Quicker, more knowledgeable and experienced. More experience means larger salary. Bringing that in-house does not make a saving but brings in a specialist which you don’t want.
In addition now you have transferred all your business skilled people under TUPE they no longer are under your control. Your outsourcer can pick and choose who is returned and you will find that the really good people are long gone. Promoted and transferred to positions that you could never provide because, no matter how big your IT is, there are still only so many opportunities. The knowledge that they have gained is gone with them and you are now looking at rebuilding that skill set in-house. Sure you saved money but now you are going to have to spend some, in the middle of the recession, to ensure that the knowledge is replaced and it will never be replaced as well as the people that built the systems from scratch. The good news is that your outsourcer has people with those skills. It’s your old staff. The bad news is they cost a lot more now as they are on a daily rate.
It gets a lot worse when you are trying to bring in-house one of the largest systems in the world. The Navy Marine Corps Intranet I’m sure it is all planned out to the Nth degree but it won’t work. HP has no real incentive to release its hold on a multi billion dollar system and the Navy won’t really be able to afford to what is necessary. It should simply, *cough*, carve up the systems into manageable components and take them over one at a time building their capability as they go. Trying to do all at once is a recipe for disaster. Of course this is big government we are talking about and so we can expect that result more often than not even on smaller more manageable projects. The bigger they are the harder the landing.
The best thing about it. By the time they are half way through it and have spent billions they will discover that the service they get from their own staff is even worse than HP’s is and, although they have something to put pressure on HP, who want paid, they will have no such pressure on jobsworth IT staff who are following the rules. HP’s staff will be hamstrung by the contract terms which, as usual, are defined by government people and usually target the wrong KPIs.
It is my understanding that, in the US, there is a lot of talk about removing civilians from the military structure. No more outsourcing. Keep everything in-house. It’s a big mistake and we can expect to see the military might of the US looking for much bigger budgets to handle the extra work and the personnel numbers to explode as they implement this policy.
Personally, I think every government department should be outsourced to clearly defined and targeted SLAs with penalties and managed by performing regular reviews and changes if necessary. Jobsworths can be easily replaced and value for money is much better than in sourcing at government level.
The bit that makes me laugh. The claim that HP is holding the Navy hostage. What a load of bunkum. The Navy could have built the system HP did, or bought it but it chose the route that it did. HP gave it cheaper than it would have because it was a longer term arrangement. That suited the government at the time and now it doesn’t and they claim they are being held hostage. Sad really. LOL.
Nothing is that bad that Government cannot make it worse.
Despite all the weapons we develop and the way we go about our business nothing comes close to Mother Nature in sheer force. No matter what hits, a hurricane, tsunami, volcano it almost always devastates more than any human force can do. Even our doomsday devices, nuclear bombs, biological weapons and their like, are not as devastating as nature. Even if our useless politicians went all WWIII we would simply emulate one of the most devastating scenarios that Nature has available. It will be a long, long time until we get to the same destructive level as Nature.
Mother Nature is entering a time of destruction. As with nature it usually happens on a cycle and this is no exception. Changes due to the suns influence has impacted on humans for centuries. Periodically heating and cooling our planet as it sees fit. Only this time morons in charge think that they can stop it and are taxing us into perjury in a king Canute style attempt to fight Mother Nature. How stupid we are for letting them.
Meanwhile a real event is approaching. One of the least lethal but just as destructive events is predicted to take place over 2012 and 2013. A massive Solar Storm. A simple sneeze in the life of our sun. It’s been nearly 100 years since the last Solar Storm and back then, in 1921, our society was not as reliant on electronics as it is now yet that storm caused worldwide chaos and wiped out communications. What will it do to our society this time? For one we will just be entering a period of recovery from our economic woes and we can ill afford the disruption that almost two years of electrical disruption will cause and we are simply not prepared. Sure the power companies, major corporations, air traffic control and the like will beef up their key networks but what about the remainder and the small guy? Who will spend the money beefing up the telephone system to small villages, traffic lights every 25 yards on the UKs roads put in by councils with large pockets now running on empty? There will be significant disruption of our infrastructure. As we direct our money on a futile quest to control Nature we ignore the real issues that we can actually deal with.
Personally, I’ve set up a Faraday cage already. Only problem I have is that I can’t really benefit from what is in it until a year has passed. Makes it kind of useless for this event and so, another project, is to build a Faraday cage with airlock doors that I can use when I need to. I need a bigger house really.
How prepared are you and your community? If you are anything like mine the answer is not at all. It is worth thinking about now whilst we have the time to do something about it. After the first strike of the approaching storm hits you it is too late. Just hope we don’t get an early showing. Your gear is fried and the game is underway with no chance to replace anything. Oh and this will be an Act of God so don’t think insurance is the answer.
I’ve mentioned before that at the rate our disks are growing we will soon have all the data we will ever need stored on our own hard drives. Although there are Petabytes of information flowing around every day most of them are just people like me downloading the same stuff for storage on our own systems. YouTubes, Games, PDFs, Sounds, etc. Just think of how many Petabyes are downloaded from Torrents and consider that some of them are downloaded hundreds of times and the files are then distributed in other ways as well. So the actually amount of real data out there must be significantly lower than the figures bandied about for the Internet where they are talking about some really large numbers and making up new names every six months.
Also consider that many of us already have multi Terabyte systems and they are becoming more common. 1TB USB drives are available for £60 and bare drives even less. The curse of having all this space available is finding your stuff. I try and catalogue the files as I download them but to be honest I fail miserably and put a lot of stuff in folders labelled ‘ToBeSorted’. Sometimes it is easier to search the web again for specific files as I have no idea where they are and can’t lay my cursor on them quickly. I really need a sort out and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
I’ve been intending to write my own indexing solution using a MySQL DB and get it to trawl all the files but so far I don’t have the time. In the meantime my 4TB SAN is creaking at the seams and I’m looking to upgrade it again before the end of the year.
There is also another consideration media type. Originally we had Hard Disks and then we had the option of Solid State Drives with a new media type on the way. Read here about Ferroelectric Data Storage. It sounds to me very much like how Hard Disks work but we will see. The smaller the size and the bigger the storage the better.
I also have differing requirements from most. I want my media to be destructable. I want it to fit in a single safe place and be destroyed at the touch of a key. HDAs are too tough to do easily, although they can be done, although I suspect illegally, and SSDs are not up to replacing HDAs yet with their rewrite 1000 times although they can be destroyed very easily, probably illegally also. Good enough for those with deep pockets and high security requirements but not for us.
So I’ve built a hybrid system. 4Tb of downloaded files on a HDA SAN with my private stuff on SSD. I have about 50Gb of private stuff. Only problem is that the way windows works I have to keep my private stuff off line on a different system so I’m actually keeping it in an awkward to get to place where my SSD data, easily destroyed, is actually all over the HDA, not easily destroyed, because of the way windows works and swap files. Bugger.
I wish someone would create a Storage Array that would have a mixture of HDAs and SSD and have a destructable component that I could just buy. The alternative is that I build one myself and we know what will happen there. Although I would have thought a SAN with destructable components would be very popular with the world the way it is today. Maybe I should invest some time and effort on it.
When I was younger I was told a story where a woman had wrecked a kettle by switching it on without any water in. In those days kettle didn’t have all the safety features we have now and the kettle simply burned out. When questioned why it had been switched on without any water in it the woman replied. ‘You mean wet water?’ How we laughed and the implication was that there was another water type. I look back now and think how this woman was ahead of her time.
Cue dry water. A method which could be used for storing CO2, methane and other harmful gases. Isn’t it handy how these new storage devices are being made available when we need them. Isn’t the market wonderful.
Of course, I think the best thing we could use them for is storing fizzy drinks. After having wiped up another spill today I’m beginning to see a market for drinks that can be ingested where the outer casing just fizzes away and yet just wiped up with no residue if spilt. However, I can also see a market for storing many liquids. A cup of bleach or lemon juice would be handy. A bit much just use a spoon to pick the excess up. How about medicines? Would this be a good way to store and transport them. Like sugar or rice. Just another commodity using standard transport. Just add to whatever is available in liquid form and drink.
On the negative side the way the powder looks reminds me of the gas chambers used in the US for executions. It is likely to be able to also store more dangerous chemicals which could be released easily and leave no traces once the gas has dissapated. If our government had had these in its toolkit David Kelly would probably have had a heart attack or fainting spell in his car or something and not gone for a walk in the woods. How can you protect yourself from a pile of powder? A pile of dust will never be looked at the same again.
Despite the fact that CCTV footage never seems to record Plod beating up citizens or used in the prosecution of any criminals they seem to spread like a unwanted rash over our cities and towns.
Although now it appears that CCTV cameras can have a use after all. Read the full story here and another here and discover why the UK is the most watched society in the history of the planet. Stalin would have loved it, he was just ahead of his time.
So basically, wrong bin for recycling, drunk people being stupid, not drunk people being stupid and the like just don’t expect any real crimes to be solved though. No plod or criminals. They have rights you know. You are simply asking too much of them.
Microsoft is a software firm. Over the last thirty years it has made hundreds of billions of dollars writing software. It has revolutionised the world we live in and changed everyone’s lives for the better with its software. I hires some of the smartest and talented people on the planet.
So quite why everyone thinks a glider made by Microsoft staff, primarily developers, should be the best glider in the PARIS programme and the builders are losers because it isn’t is beyond me.
Big behemoths like Microsoft are more like the Government than they would like to believe. They think because they are good at one thing they can turn their hand to anything and interestingly enough the public, and journalists, think so to. I believe it is because we have this belief that if you throw enough money at something it gets done even though we now from 90 years of government that it is untrue. This shows that having bright people fromanother discipline and throwing money at something doesn’t get it done either. You need some skills in the area and then it gets done. Money helps but doesn’t enable.
I liked the quote “This is kind of like the most Microsoft thing we could do. We took a team of smart guys and girls and we built this thing from scratch.”. Smart computer tech guys where everything worked on the computer but not in real life. Who would have thunk it?
In a way it reminds me of the climate change group. They have models that show something but the real world isn’t playing along. At least the Microsoft team went away and were wondering where they went wrong. The Climate nutters still think their model is 100% right and it’s the world that is wrong.
So skills do matter. What a bummer. Politics and sex are still the only areas where no skill is required and they are similar in so many ways.
This must be the life. Get a course that pays you to record some data on your hobby and keep yourself busy having fun. If only there was a real life job that paid well for the same task. Good luck Guys. I had to do boring set stuff.
If this research pans out then we can all look forward to having our brains scanned on a regular basis. All to prevent terrorism of course.
On the plus side of course everyone will trigger this alarm as showing pictures of a city which they have associations with or a bomb should elicit strong reactions in anyone. If they showed me a picture of Cameron, Clegg or Obama they would whisk me away pronto and I have not thought, yet, about bumping them off.
I would envisage that despite what they say they may only get anough info to put the suspects in Guantanimo Bay without trial as they would certainly not get enough evidence to charge them with anything in a court of law.
One to be put aside for specific use I think. And not one in any way associated with real Justice. Maybe UK/US justice though.
Well it seems that Mexico is now turning into more of a surveillance state than the US. At least now I understand why so many of them are risking death to escape to the US. I used to believe it was because there was a better standard of living in the US. Now it looks like they are running to escape Big Amigo.
Leon — one of the largest cities in Mexico, is being fitted with Iris scanners with a laughable aim of making it the most secure city in the World with Fraud completely eradicated. Criminals Iris scans will be loaded into the system and they can be tracked wherever they go. Limiting their access to certain areas and alerting Plod to their whereabouts. Of course, ordinary people will also be picked up and the hope is that they will sign up voluntarily to be tagged like animals scanned where they can be validated and have the ‘benefit’ of not needing to carry a bank card or ID. The implied threat for those that don’t sign up is ‘Opting out actually puts more of a flag on you than just being part of the system’ Read that as you will be stopped at every door and checkout until we validate your ID and Plod will pull you over every ten minutes until you give in. Make like you are resisting and suddenly you will find you do have a criminal record, if you live.
There are so many things wrong here that it will be interesting to watch. People being scanned to pay for others drinks, people being denied access to services because they have a criminal record and people breaking in your home when the system detects you are just entering your local restaurant for a meal and someone informs the local crooks. However, regardless of the outcome you can be sure that controlling eyes in other countries will be watching this social experiment. If it succeeds then it will be rolled out here soon enough. If it fails then it will be rolled out here with a few minor mods that the Mexicans got wrong. It will make the the old USSR, China, North Korea and New Labour look like amateurs and you can be sure they will be quick to pick up this technology, for security purposes of course.
The manufacturers claim that with the advance in technology no one can fool the system with dead eyes which is fair enough. Interestingly enough though by hiding your eyes you can avoid the system completely. How useful is ‘I was mugged and the scanners couldn’t identify the assailant’. Plus I keep hearing how there are frauds over the internet worth billions and they are increasing with real life fraudulent transactions reducing. How does it stop that?
In addition once the Iris scanning is the subjugation tool of choice then there will be many bright young minds turned into cracking the system. False eyes will be created and contact lenses, glasses etc. will be produced to counteract them. Everyone knows that once cracked, and it doesn’t take long, it takes a lot longer to find a fix and then apply that fix to every scanner out there. I claim Blair’s Iris scans. Let us see what trouble I can get him into. In the meantime a can of spraypaint should be fine.
Personally, if I lived in Leon I would be making my move now. Leon is turning into the biggest open prison on the planet. As well as this the US border looks like it will be tightening up and you may leave it too late.
We now have a touch interface in a roll on form that can be used to cover any surface. It is a thin polymer skin that can detect up to 16 touches at once. And as this picture shows it can be used to cover excising output panels and add touch capability.
This is going to make the production of interfaces so much easier. Print out your custom interface on card and then apply this to cover it. Configure the software, which I would guess would be supplied, and test each coordinate and away we go. It will make an ordinary monitor into a touch screen monitor at a fraction of the price and enable tables and walls to be used for the input of data from projection outputs. Soon we can all have futuristic displays and input devices in our homes and offices on our existing devices and on our walls and furniture.
It would be ideal in security field as well. Having an alarm panel that was a montage of photographs. Just touch Uncle Bob (No sniggering at the back) and disable the alarm while touching Little Johnny sets off the alarm (serves you right). Having light switches and volume controls that are actually just pictures on a wall. Having a MP3 player that is a picture of a jukebox on the wall.
The next stage, hopefully a quick step away, is for this to layered on top of the roll on screens we have already developed to make a roll on wallpaper that can display images and also take input. This can enable photographs that cover a wall and will change when you touch them or a wall as a TV that pops a panel up where you touch and allow you to change the channel, volume or see who is at the front door via a camera.
If this is EMP proof it would also be very useful in military situations. Making consoles easier by allowing them to be configured by programming. Drop a config for a weapons control system in and see what is on a weapons control panel. Next person along configures it for a communications panel whilst it is reality a cardboard box covered in this new film. A bargain at $30K. Hell, there will be a console in every house that we can use for all our games than can interface into our computers and consoles.
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Outsourcing isn’t all about money
At the start of the outsourcing boom I remember having discussions with the board about outsourcing our IT and, basically, making myself redundant. All the senior managers saw is a reduced spend for IT on the books and in exactly the same way IT brought about cost savings in finance, warehousing, etc. they seen outsourcing doing the same to IT. All risks are ignored and seen as IT resisting change. In the company I worked for we had two highly bespoke systems which were linked to dozens of corporate systems around the world all supported by us. Development was the name of our game and our development team was four times the size of all the networking, PABX and operations staff put together. Well, the pound signs won out and we outsourced our IT and as managing a smaller department wasn’t for me I moved on to pastures new. I still kept in touch as one by one my predictions took place. One was that at the end of the year the costs would exceed the budget we had put in place, another was that within the next year the costs would exceed what we would have had if we had remained in house and another in my list of eight was that we would lose some of our customers. All came true. It was an easy prediction to make as we had a strange set up supporting, via development, a worldwide organisation that required rapid changes. In the new system every change was fully documented and we had to pay extra to get changes rushed through plus it was at our risk. Even then they were always late and after a while most of the remote units took over their own support and development and we lost that revenue stream. The costs at the end of year one was 120% of budget and 150% at the end of year two. Outsourcing was never a good idea for that company and we were sold a pup, and a runt at that.
Outsourcing, IMO, is only of use for core systems that do not change much, add no real value to the company and are complete entities in their own right. HR systems, Payroll, Pensions, etc. They are ideal candidates for outsourcing. Bespoke development teams for a product you sell is not. Outsourcing is great for the right systems.
Anyway, as cost cutting starts to hit globally several people are looking at revisiting their outsourcing agreements. Now for some reason they thing that bringing them back in house will actually save costs. It’s a good plan outsource to save money, in source to save money, outsource again to save money and then err…. hold on! At this rate it will be free. Wow! Let us do this with everything.
Only problem is that the main reason the outsourcers are able to save money is to use the same people on multiple contracts and not have the same requirements for holiday cover, illness cover and training costs. A company might need an Oracle DBA for two or three months a year. He spends the rest of the time idle so he gets cross trained in other things and spends time as an analyst, developer or whatever diluting his skills. Outsourcers use him on four or five contracts and thus cost savings as he becomes a DBA expert. Quicker, more knowledgeable and experienced. More experience means larger salary. Bringing that in-house does not make a saving but brings in a specialist which you don’t want.
In addition now you have transferred all your business skilled people under TUPE they no longer are under your control. Your outsourcer can pick and choose who is returned and you will find that the really good people are long gone. Promoted and transferred to positions that you could never provide because, no matter how big your IT is, there are still only so many opportunities. The knowledge that they have gained is gone with them and you are now looking at rebuilding that skill set in-house. Sure you saved money but now you are going to have to spend some, in the middle of the recession, to ensure that the knowledge is replaced and it will never be replaced as well as the people that built the systems from scratch. The good news is that your outsourcer has people with those skills. It’s your old staff. The bad news is they cost a lot more now as they are on a daily rate.
It gets a lot worse when you are trying to bring in-house one of the largest systems in the world. The Navy Marine Corps Intranet I’m sure it is all planned out to the Nth degree but it won’t work. HP has no real incentive to release its hold on a multi billion dollar system and the Navy won’t really be able to afford to what is necessary. It should simply, *cough*, carve up the systems into manageable components and take them over one at a time building their capability as they go. Trying to do all at once is a recipe for disaster. Of course this is big government we are talking about and so we can expect that result more often than not even on smaller more manageable projects. The bigger they are the harder the landing.
The best thing about it. By the time they are half way through it and have spent billions they will discover that the service they get from their own staff is even worse than HP’s is and, although they have something to put pressure on HP, who want paid, they will have no such pressure on jobsworth IT staff who are following the rules. HP’s staff will be hamstrung by the contract terms which, as usual, are defined by government people and usually target the wrong KPIs.
It is my understanding that, in the US, there is a lot of talk about removing civilians from the military structure. No more outsourcing. Keep everything in-house. It’s a big mistake and we can expect to see the military might of the US looking for much bigger budgets to handle the extra work and the personnel numbers to explode as they implement this policy.
Personally, I think every government department should be outsourced to clearly defined and targeted SLAs with penalties and managed by performing regular reviews and changes if necessary. Jobsworths can be easily replaced and value for money is much better than in sourcing at government level.
The bit that makes me laugh. The claim that HP is holding the Navy hostage. What a load of bunkum. The Navy could have built the system HP did, or bought it but it chose the route that it did. HP gave it cheaper than it would have because it was a longer term arrangement. That suited the government at the time and now it doesn’t and they claim they are being held hostage. Sad really. LOL.
Nothing is that bad that Government cannot make it worse.