The death of construction and services huge Carillion has brought fresh scrutiny of outsourcing in federal government. Honestly, you could discover some event practically every year that brings fresh analysis of outsourcing in government– from the IT disasters documented by Computer Weekly for many years, to failures in prisons and even security for the 2012 Olympics.Download this free guide

Due to the fact that of those historical IT failures, IT outsourcing has been examined, prodded and analysed often times, by MPs, the National Audit Workplace (NAO), and independent specialists. This week, there have been plenty of tech analysts searching for “lessons from Carillion”, but the reality is that Carillion just shows the problems that we’ve seen in federal government IT for a long time, and the solutions that have been proposed yet consistently ignored.After 2010, when then Cabinet Workplace minister Francis Maude took aim at the oligopoly of huge IT outsourcers, there was a great deal of progress made in trying to use some of those services. We’re almost eight years into a procedure of disaggregating IT agreements to make them more manageable, and to decrease the sort of direct exposure to a single point of failure that’s affecting Carillion’s projects.However, even after 8 years, development has actually still been irregular. Numerous of those mega-deals are still lumbering along, and because of the distraction of Brexit, many are being extended because it’s simpler than aiming to break them up.Not much has actually really altered. We might not have numerous big offers with a single prime contractor, but the sub-contractors involved are still providing the same services, and they are mainly the usual large system integrators. They still have as much of the pie, it’s just sliced a little differently.In some parts of government, they are getting IT outsourcing right– utilizing it to supplement and complement the skills and resources available in-house, rather than to replace them. Those examples are primarily sporadic.When an IT agreement goes incorrect, it’s unusual that the provider gets punished. The very same old faces constantly show up the next time an offer is awarded.

Blame gets allocated, but no one is held accountable.Let’s not forget that there are times when IT outsourcing works for government– however if there is one thing to be found out from Carillion, it’s that the knee-jerk action

to outsource should concern an end. It’s one of the tools in the digital kitbag, however it needs to never once again be the default choice.