In Reply to: re: work to rule posted by Trenchrat on February 18, 2010 at 00:21:44:

Your innocence is touching.

The party line is that private is better than public so anything that can be purchased from private sources is preferred no matter how much it costs and regardless of whether it can be done better by a non-profit motivated worker. So replace public with private regardless.

It galls to be paying 1000 euros per day to so-called IT consultants who wear their underpants on their arms. Unfortunately that is the mantra, predominantly a PD ideology, that has infected the body politic and led us to where we are today.

It's not as simple as an individual public servant deciding that he cannot pay the going rate to a consultant company - the politicians have effectively decided that - just as with the fees for tribunal lawyers and not even to suggest that cosy deals were done in the Galway tent. We are getting very bad value for money I'm afraid as incompetence is RIFE within the PRIVATE sector which when combined with a profit-driven motive makes egged-on by a political ideology makes it doubly damaging - and we see the effects in stuff like PPARS.

The consultants come around they spend as much time talking to the people who know what has to be done as it would take them to do the job in the first place (remember at 1000 euro per day).

Then they go away and write up the spec and come back and say we are going to do what you said they should do but it will cost 1000 euro a day for every day worked - including the weeks or months already gone through asking you how you do your job. And of course it's going to take years to finish it off.

After all that it's discovered that they didn't actually understand the system and there was a reason they were wearing their underpants on their elbow. But it's too late then. The answer of course is to employ any additional staff directly at a reasonable rate of pay and do the job it inhouse. But that is not the current PD/FF ideology that you voted for.