I guess one fundamental point to make is about whether or not politicians and
senior civil servants fully understand what they mean by terms such as
'off-the-shelf' and 'open Source'. Also do they fully understand what they mean
by 'small' and 'big' contracts or projects and when it is appropriate to use
them.
Politicians are very good at sound bites but one has to be wary of the depth of
understanding they have about anything. For instance by way of an analogy - How
is it that prior to the current economic problems they were not warning that
things could badly go wrong and yet appear to be more than keen to believe that
Fred Goodwin should have known? Politicians of all political parties have
advisers so why didn't they know of the dangers and why were they not able to
warn Fred Goodwin of the dangers of the actions RBS were taking?
My understanding is that under the previous administration in-house central
government expertise was virtually removed whilst at the same time outsourcing
around 80% of IT contracts to handful of large organizations. Hopefully there
are enough people in the current administration who have got a reasonable
understanding of IT because it is doubtful that this is the case within the
Civil Service due to action taken by New Labour.
I would further argue that to truly be able to embrace 'Open Source' there must
be enough IT people working directly for the Civil Service who are then be able
to connect to Open Source projects by contributing to as well as making use of
Open Source. In other words if they work for an outsourcer how motivated would
they be do this? The outsourcer might well make use of open source to satisfy
the beliefs of Ministers who think they should be, but that is I would suggest
a different matter to fully embracing the concept.
Fully laying my cards on the table I would argue that staff who work directly
for an organization are going to be more motivated towards its well being as
long as that organization also has the interests of its staff at heart. Staff
who are hired and fired at short notice in my view generally won't.
Interestingly for all the curtailment of Trade Union powers and reluctance to
embrace provisions of the EU social chapter such as 'Worker board
representatives' how come the UK economy is not stronger than the German or for
that matter the French? As we know as well both those countries have made far
more use of 'Open Source' than ours. Is there a causal link?
Mark Elkins
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