UK government rings £1.5bn dinner bell for software design and implementation, 54 vendors come running

So the UK government awarded contracts to the best 25 vendors based on their rankings in an alphabetic list, or were there no contenders beyond H?

The government were asked to arrange a shortlist for software design and implementation

They reported back that they had sorted it.

Huh........more "agile", more "devops", more "cloud".....................

.....more "scrum", thousands of "product owners"....................

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Lots of money for the consultants.......................................

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..................and pretty poor service provision for tax payers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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By the way, when was the last time a "product owner" talked to one of the tax payers footing the bill....and getting lousy service in return?

The Trough of IT Spending

The public sector is fraught with these wretched frameworks that are supposed to make procurement easier and cheaper, The reality is usually completely different where you end up forced into buy something that is a compromise because there is no reseller on the framework that has what you need.

Then you have mediocre companies charging higher prices that has somehow got into these things in the first place by responding with a load of fiction to the tender.

The fact that they have been responding to a tender that has no real value, only some arbitrary ££££ figure of what might be spent makes it completely safe.

Procurement teams love them because it then means they don't have to do any work.

Suppliers on the frameworks love then because they can supply poor service at above market rate.

The fact that what actually gets delivered is often over priced and riddled with holes is quietly ignored as it is just considered to be techies talking bollocks because their favourite reseller has been overlooked.