Without Malice
- 10 October, 2001 15:30
- Comments
Nor did all agencies handle issues of staff transition adequately. Many former staff were left with a sense of betrayal and feelings of being unappreciated. Some agencies - including the Department of Veterans' Affairs and the Health Insurance Commission - did all the right things, including communicating well about the future of staff and using the clean break system. In most cases, staff in these agencies were reasonably well aware they would still have a job.
However, one agency promised on its formation that it would never outsource then broke that promise. It promised staff would be retained despite the outsourcing, then broke that promise. It promised it wouldn't outsource anything else, then broke that promise.
"What all that does is builds up what they call survivor shock', which means that the people who haven't yet been outsourced promptly expect that they will be next, despite what management are going to say. They are either going to have problems of stress and morale and they leave. Good people, not just from IT but right across the organisation, will start to leave as soon as they can. And these agencies are now starting to pay the price."
What Auditor-General Barrett did correctly focus on, Lewis says, is the importance of maintaining the capability for contract management. Without good contract managers in the agency, and good account managers within the outsourcer, you're in serious strife because you're dependent on the contract to maintain the relationship.
"Even if you're in a partnership, that contract is important because the organisation becomes really vulnerable to that link between contract management and account management," says Lewis. "And it's certainly my experience there have been some agencies with less than adequate contract management skills, and some vendors with less than adequate account management skills."
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.
- Bookmark this page
- Share this article
- Got more on this story? Email CIO
- Follow CIO on twitter
-
Phones are distractions during catch-ups
-
Google's Sidewiki lets people post comments about Web pages
-
Leaving your job? Take your data with you
-
Australia's first 4G smartphone is the HTC Velocity 4G
-
Social networking, ignorance, and apathy
-
Transforming Your Business by Transforming Your Processes
In this white paper, we build on the “Intelligent Guide to Enterprise BPM: V olume One” in which we described the three entry points where you can begin to build true Enterprise BPM. In this white paper we explain the value of Process T ransformation, the entry point to strategy and design. Successful implementation of Process T ransformation will mean you have successfully documented, standardized, harmonized, managed—as well as analyzed and improved—your business processes. T he next two white papers will detail the other two entry points: Process Automation and Process Intelligence. -
Managing IBM License Complexity
IBM provides thousands of products in its portfolio and uses a variety of license models, contract terms and conditions. These license models can be very complex, causing frequent confusion for organisations trying to grasp the concepts while maintaining license compliance. While at first IBM licensing may seem incomprehensible, some education on the license models and licensing scenarios will help minimise the confusion. In addition, a more automated approach to managing licenses enables organisations to gain control, reduce ongoing software costs and minimise license liability risks. Read on. -
Oracle Exadata - Extreme performance, lowest cost.
As organizations contend with escalating demands for greater quantities of information, more sophisticated data analysis, and a burgeoning user population, Oracle Exadata makes database workloads faster, easier to manage, and less expensive. Oracle Exadata is the world’s first database machine to provide extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications. Read this whitepaper.
Get exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis. 
Comments
Post new comment