Britain: Council signs contract with IBM for service privatisation

[Hannah Bell]

Conservative-run Essex County Council has signed an eight-year contract with computer giant IBM to supply and manage public services in the county. The privatisation deal has been welcomed by the Conservative Party, and is being touted as the model of local government to be followed by an incoming Tory administration...

The council has already put some £800 million of services out to private contracts. IBM’s first task will to be review these contracts, with the intention of making further savings...

The deal marks a shift in IBM’s involvement in government privatisation. Hitherto they have acted largely as a supplier, rather than administrator...

IBM also holds 75 percent of the £400 million joint venture company Southwest One, established with Somerset County Council, Taunton Deane Borough Council, and Avon and Somerset Police. Although the County Council is obliged under the Audit Commission Act to disclose accounts information from the previous financial year, in 2008 IBM moved to block disclosure of information about their contract...

Last month Southwest One belatedly filed its accounts for its first operating year. They showed a loss of £2.5 million. These initial losses will be borne by IBM. Southwest One’s Chief Executive, Richard Jones, has now resigned. There is the clear implication that taxpayers will be paying for the company’s incompetence, as has happened before when private companies have taken over the running of public services...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/coun-j04.shtml

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

1. Yeah, hire the outsourcers bad enough to be fired by the State of Texas!

The state of Texas has stopped work on an $863 million outsourcing project under which IBM is transferring state records to a centralized computer system.

Governor Rick Perry said in a letter to a state IT officials that IBM failed to perform "the crucial backup of data for more than 20 state agencies," according to a report Wednesday in the Dallas Morning News. The Governor also said that project overseers failed to implement a series of check and balances meant to ensure the project's security. The newspaper reported that, in one instance, half of eight months' worth of Medicaid fraud records were lost due to a server malfunction and that the state has fined IBM $900,000 for the failures.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/outsourcing/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=211800068

[Hannah Bell]

2. what are you talking about? "more efficient & cheaper, more efficient & cheaper..."

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

3. IBM could hardly be as incompetent as the current Essex county council.

But hey, that's what you get when you elect a bunch of Tories to run things.

[vadawg]

4. lets be honest dude, dosent matter if they are tories, labour or lib dems

at that level of government they are all head cases and nutballs...

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

5. Yeah, but Essex is particularly bad in this respect.

This stupid deal they did with BT has just been an unmitigated disaster, and they've lost tons of money on it. Hell, I don't blame them for getting out of it early, but I fail to see how IBM is going to help things (with the possible exception that IBM is clearly more competent than BT.)

[vadawg]

6. dude im a cynic in regards to local government, i think the guys working at the local are more

competant than 90% of the politicians in the county governments, mayby having business involved more will help them but its got to be businesses that are better than BT and some others...

[vadawg]

7. PS i forgot to add Essex sucks :)

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

8. Shut yo mouth.

Essex girls rock. Essex girl jokes rock. And cheap flights from Stansted to the Continent rock. (I used to live in Cambridge and referred to it as "Saffron Walden International Airport.")

[vadawg]

9. difference between an essex girl and an essex boy?

essex girl has a higher sperm count. lol met many a sloan ranger from essex in my time...