Consultants should rebrand themselves

Notice how in the latest Watergate scandal everybody gets upset at consultants getting paid €50m. Not much concern about that other 50 bar. The image is of guys and gals getting paid obscene fees for slick Powerpoint presentations dosed with MBA speak. Realising this zeitgest an attempt is made to diffuse anger by pointing out that some of these consultants are in IT. That does seem to assuage as at least IT consultants are "making" something.

Seems to me that consultants need to rebrand themselves as, say, "Hard Workers" or at least this is how they should be described in financial reports. So if we heard a news bulletin saying "€100M of taxpayers money has been spent of which €50M went to pay Hard Workers and the other €50M went on other things" which half would get the most attention?

I've spent the last 15 minutes laughing.

It's a real nonsense of a debate.

I presume that IBM or Accenture are being paid to deliver a billing system? They presumably used some form of proprietary software which they had developed for which they are fully entitled to charge. Then they adapted it extensively to the needs of Irish Water. Now they are actually implementing it.

It might be cost efficient for the government to set up a team of such consultants who would provide these one off IT services to government departments and semi-states who need this level of expertise. But it's probably much better value to outsource it to the likes of IBM or Accenture.

IT projects are complicated and are prone to disaster. In general, the Revenue has produced top class IT systems - the LPT fiasco, notwithstanding. PCARS seems to have been a disaster. But private companies have had the same IT disasters e.g. the ILCU attempts to build a system for the Credit Unions. I was told by one banker that their quotation system for car finance was wrong for about 3 years and they mispriced all new car finance deals giving the customers great value.

Wasn't the point of setting up Irish Water as part of Bord Gais to leverage the Bord Gais infrastructure? Why are we paying for a new billing system from IBM or Accenture when Bord Gais have an existing system sitting on the shelf?

I don't mind paying for new servers, but why new software?

Unless of course, the ultimate objective is to have Irish Water ready to be privatised at the earliest opportunity?

I don't have a problem with money being spent on IT or complicated projects. I do have a problem with millions being spent on consultans for things like branding, HR, PR etc. If Irish Water is going to be a subsidiary of Bord Gais, why weren't things like HR, marketing, facilities management, procurement etc handled by Bord Gais in their existing capacity with extra resources if needed. Why does everything have to be set up from scratch? In this day and age, most companies have centralised functions for their support operations. It really is another Quango.

Do we really need someone in Accenture to tell Irish Water what their guiding principles should be?

RainyDay said:

I don't mind paying for new servers, but why new software?

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Irish Water is probably not covered under the software licenses that Bord Gais have. It also probably requires more user/ server licenses. Irish Water is within the Bord Gais group but the group may not hold the licenses to their current systems, it may be another subsidary.

Saying that the software is on the shelf in Bord Gais and available for free is akin to you buying a DVD and believing that it is reasonable that you should be allowed to make a copy for each member of your family.

Isn't the bottom line here that we had a system of water supply that kinda worked. Is the punter going to see any advantage here other than a possibly efficient method for charging her. It wasn't broken. Why pay 150M to fix it?

ontour said:

Irish Water is probably not covered under the software licenses that Bord Gais have. It also probably requires more user/ server licenses. Irish Water is within the Bord Gais group but the group may not hold the licenses to their current systems, it may be another subsidary.

Saying that the software is on the shelf in Bord Gais and available for free is akin to you buying a DVD and believing that it is reasonable that you should be allowed to make a copy for each member of your family.

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The spend as detailed in recent reports was for consultancy, not for software licences. I assumed it was bespoke in-house software, you assumed it was package software. One of us is wrong!

RainyDay said:

The spend as detailed in recent reports was for consultancy, not for software licences. I assumed it was bespoke in-house software, you assumed it was package software. One of us is wrong!

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You are not supposed to know. It is commercially sensitive information. If Irish Water's competitors got their hands on such information. Competitors like eh.......... Just competitors in general. Stop making trouble.

RainyDay said:

The spend as detailed in recent reports was for consultancy, not for software licences. I assumed it was bespoke in-house software, you assumed it was package software. One of us is wrong!

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The charge is also being described as set-up costs, licensing would be a recurring cost.

Leo said:

The charge is also being described as set-up costs, licensing would be a recurring cost.

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Usually when buying software there is an initial cost (to license each processor used on the server or for the number of users) and a recurring cost (usually 20% of the initial cost).

At the enterprise level I know this can be particularly expensive. Also, for the main systems (billing for example) Disaster Recovery would be built in. This would mean, in a lot of cases, that the software costs double - you need to license your DR environment as per the live environment if your DR environment is live and accepting data from live.

Having said all that, the out-of-the-box software costs here would be peanuts compared to the 150m spend. Once you start to customize the software (think putting an Irish Water logo on a bill), this is where the real costs come in. Even worse is the continued support costs...

I accept that Ryanair's own website was dreadful until very recently, but I could only imagine if IBM and Accenture were pitching the sell to Michael O'Leary and the figure of 150m was raised

Without being too pessimistic I think it's fair to say that whenever someone or some company is spending someone else's money (in this case our money) then it's quite easy to over-spend.

RainyDay said:

Wasn't the point of setting up Irish Water as part of Bord Gais to leverage the Bord Gais infrastructure? Why are we paying for a new billing system from IBM or Accenture when Bord Gais have an existing system sitting on the shelf?

I don't mind paying for new servers, but why new software?

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The billing software that you refer to belongs to Bord Gais Energy which is being sold, so you would definitely not want to combine the systems in this case (and would probably be prevented from doing so as these are separate legal identities).

Duke of Marmalade said:

Isn't the bottom line here that we had a system of water supply that kinda worked. Is the punter going to see any advantage here other than a possibly efficient method for charging her. It wasn't broken. Why pay 150M to fix it?

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Hi Duke,

I fully agree. It's just a tax. We're constantly hearing about how the money will be used to improve the infrastructure but I think we've all been around long enough now to know otherwise. I'm sure 150m would have fixed a lot of leaky pipes and better still would have taken a lot more people off the dole than lining the pockets of tax-advised partners/directors of Accenture & IBM.

I'm a bit cynical about consultants myself. Some of them are very good, expert at what they do and provide a great service. But a lot of them seem to be just 'talk the talk' chancers who charge enormous sums of money to tell senior managers things that staff would have told them for free. Also, I think sometimes Govt Depts are a bit quick to bring in consultants and ignore the (often better) expertise already available to them within the Department.
It would be interesting to know how much money has been wasted over the years on consultants' reports which ended up sitting in drawers gathering dust.

liaconn said:

It would be interesting to know how much money has been wasted over the years on consultants' reports which ended up sitting in drawers gathering dust.

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You've just suggested another job for consultants.

Firefly said:

Usually when buying software there is an initial cost (to license each processor used on the server or for the number of users) and a recurring cost (usually 20% of the initial cost).

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We deal with most of the big players in enterprise level software and hardware. For software, all our contracts are based on a fixed annual license cost, it's only hardware that carries a larger upfront fee and then a percentage maintenance cost after that.

We run much bigger in-house developed apps for a fraction of the money being talked about here.

Leo said:

We deal with most of the big players in enterprise level software and hardware. For software, all our contracts are based on a fixed annual license cost, it's only hardware that carries a larger upfront fee and then a percentage maintenance cost after that.

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That can be true. However software such as that provided by say Oracle and Microsoft would have support costs.

Leo said:

We run much bigger in-house developed apps for a fraction of the money being talked about here.

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I'd believe it!

liaconn said:

I'm a bit cynical about consultants myself. Some of them are very good, expert at what they do and provide a great service. But a lot of them seem to be just 'talk the talk' chancers who charge enormous sums of money to tell senior managers things that staff would have told them for free.

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I'd agree. I've seen some in action and cleaned up some messes in my day!

liaconn said:

Also, I think sometimes Govt Depts are a bit quick to bring in consultants and ignore the (often better) expertise already available to them within the Department.

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This can be a cover-your-behind strategy too though. Bring in the big boys so you can always say "Well I brought in IBM / Accenture".

Firefly said:

"Well I brought in IBM / Accenture".

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The old saying of no one was ever sacked for buying IBM.

Latrade said:

The old saying of no one was ever sacked for buying IBM.

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That's exactly it.

Another trend I've noticed recently is that a lot of the technical staff in large companies are moving into more Project Management / Architecture roles and the technical roles are outsourced. It probably makes sense as it would be slow and expensive to keep staff up-to on IT advances and staff would be the subject matter experts anyway so it's a better use of their skill. Good times for contractors though!