Industry news

Local authorities in Norfolk have joined together to create a new public sector network, designed to promote costs savings, greater flexibility and efficiencies.

Core council services are being shared between Broadland District Council, Borough Council of King's Lynn & West Norfolk, South Norfolk Council and North Norfolk District Council as part of a virtual private network (VPN).

The 100 Mbps network is provided by Claranet which provides full management and support of the service.

Huddle has enjoyed strong performance in 2012 through collaboration with the G-Cloud.

The content collaboration software vendor doubled the number of public sector contracts held in 2012 from 2011 to a total of 40 contracts.

Contracts secured through the G-Cloud include content collaboration service delivery to Essex County Fire and Rescue Services, Surrey County Council, Dorset County Council and the NHS.

Alastair Mitchell, CEO, Huddle reflected on the companies G-Cloud success: “the UK public sector is clearly placing cloud technology at the heart of its efforts to drive productivity, increase efficiencies and reduce IT costs”.

Google has purchased a new site in London with expectations that the new site will become the location of the organisations new headquarters.

The site situated at Kings Cross Central property development is 2.4 acres in size and is expected to be finished by 2016.

A Reuters source said that Google was investing £250 million in the site, Google’s current UK headquarters is situated at Victoria.

T-Mobile Austria, part of Deutsche Telekom, has transitioned support services to a cloud based platform.

Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Centre (CIC) was selected for its ability to provide high levels of flexibility and proven efficiencies. The service is expected to go love by 2013.

Werner Weiss, T-Mobile’s project manager said: “CIC’s flexibility, cloud deployment option, and value for the money were key in winning us over. However, the deciding factors were our very positive impressions based on customer reference site visits, and Interactive’s exemplary approach to project planning.”

The National Audit Office has highlighted five key risks to the value for money of projects included in the government’s national infrastructure plan.

The government expects £310 billion to be spent by 2015 and beyond on new infrastructure projects in sectors such as energy, rail, roads, water, waste, flood defences and digital communications. Such large-scale infrastructure projects pose significant challenges. With limited funds available, the government is looking to private companies to wholly own and finance around 64 per cent of the £310 billion, with the burden of funding likely to shift towards the public as consumers rather than taxpayers.

"Economic infrastructure keeps the country running. Demand for infrastructure is set to increase, fuelled by population growth, technological progress, climate change and congestion.

"But there is a lot at stake in taking forward the national infrastructure plan in an environment of straitened resources, with real risks to value for money and uncertainty about the sustainability of piling costs on to consumers.

"I have made a number of recommendations which look to the Treasury, departments and regulators to provide greater clarity on the costs which taxpayers and consumers will bear. Work is already in hand to drive down the costs of delivering new infrastructure and this should continue."

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office.

Andrew Forzani will join the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as procurement director in March, it has been announced.

Forzani, currently head of procurement and commissioning at Surrey Country Council, will report directly to DWP commercial director and past CIPS president David Smith.

An employee of a US infrastructure company had outsourced his job to a Chinese company, and spent his days surfing the Internet at his workplace.

The incident came to light when the company called the security team of a company, Verizon, for reviewing a suspected security breach on its virtual private network (VPN) logs.

An employee of Verizon, Andrew Valentine, said that the breach was then traced to the employee''s workstation from Shenyang, China, that went months back, BBC News reports.

Infosys Ltd., India’s second-largest software exporter, is tapping demand from U.S. President Barack Obama’s push to overhaul the nation’s health-care system to include an additional 30 million Americans.

The Bangalore-based company has won four state contracts, one valued at more than $100 million, and is vying for business in four more before a 2014 deadline to build online exchanges that will link customers to insurance plans, said Ashok Vemuri, the head of the company’s unit in the Americas. Obama plans to expand medical coverage through the Affordable Care Act, which includes setting up marketplaces where consumers can evaluate and select service providers.

The Financial Services Compensation Scheme has defended its outsourcing arrangement with Capita, insisting the company is not involved in claims relating to Arch cru.

Capita is the parent company of Capita Financial Managers, which acted as the authorised corporate director for the Arch cru funds between June 2006 and March 2009 when the funds were suspended.

The FSCS says it outsources some claims to third parties and has had an outsourcing arrangement with Capita in place since 2005. It says all claims relating to the Arch cru funds are outsourced under a separate agreement with Deloitte.

Yesterday a news story did the media rounds concerning a high-paid US software developer outsourcing undisclosed work to China. This example represents one of the most resourceful and innovative uses of outsourcing available and should be commended, if not for the violation of multiple company practices.

The story was that the software developer had outsourced his own workload to a contractor based in Shenyang, China. The cost of this undisclosed sub-contractor for the software developer was less than one fifth of his own wage, leaving the developer with a free day, spent apparently in this case on viewing cat videos. This action was discovered after an audit surrounding fears of a security breach following the discovery anomalous activity on the company’s network.

An analysis of the employees computer revealed his day-to-day activities while he outsourced his work-load:

9:00 a.m. --Surf Reddit, watch cat videos

11:30 a.m. -- Lunch

1:00 p.m. -- Ebay

2:00 p.m -- Facebook and LinkedIn

4:30 p.m. -- Send end-of-day e-mail update to management

5:00 p.m. -- Go home

The reaction to the discovery by the company saw the termination of the developer’s employment, this is clearly a missed opportunity; the correct response to this discovery would be to give the developer a seat on the board and a raise.

The practice of the worker should be taken on board with the company moving to outsource all work of this type to the Chinese contractor. Based on this one example, the company at worse could expect to make cost savings of 80 percent through outsourcing work carried out by the developer, other developers carrying out the same work, and similar job positions, with greater savings presumably available from economies of scale. The amounts to be saved are not inconsiderable with the developer earning a six-figure salary.

Just as the developer increased his available free time, so to would the employer increase savings (although the developer’s use of his savings made invested in cat clips might be best avoided).

You might ask yourself was the work carried out poor in quality, ineffective or inferior? No, in fact the work carried out by the Chinese developer was viewed to be of a high standard, with the employee viewed as being a talented individual. The developer’s performance reviews including descriptions of the coding as being “clean, well-written”, he had even been described as "the best developer in the building", despite the actual 'best developer' not even being in the same continent. Rather than delivering a poor quality service, the Chinese contractor delivered a high end service.

Copying the practice of the unnamed developer does pose difficulties. The original outsourced action was brought to light because of security concerns and these issues would still exist. While issues common in outsourced services including security would exist, other common obstacles including control and transparency hardly seemed to be present in the delivery of the original ‘in-house’ service anyway given the employees ability to outsource his entire job, and issues of a reduced quality in service would seem to be a non-issue given the reviews of the work provided.

The developer found an effective third-party to which he outsourced his work to, he delivered the service that he was paid for as an employee. It is a failure of the company to carry out a wide reaching procurement that should be focused on. This example should be leaped upon and paraded to demonstrate the efficiencies of outsourcing.