S
Steiny
Guest
Here is the memo I am going to take to my bosses at 4PM this afternoon to stop them from sacking me and replacing me with a crappy contracted-out IT agency. Please comment!
Steiny
----------------
Memo
Re: Contracting Out IT Services
From: Tom Steinberg
Date: Monday, 18 June 2001
I have put together this memo to express my belief that contracting out IT services at the IEA will be costly, will decrease the quality of service, increase management overheads, and will sap productivity.
To that effect I have constructed a list of my concerns:
Summary
1. Employing an agency will significantly increase IEA expenditure.
2. Using a contract agency will lead directly to a sharp fall in IEA productivity, and will greatly inconvenience IEA staff.
3. Without my contacts, the database will need at least an extra £10,000 to complete, and more to maintain.
4. The IEA’s web presence will be seriously harmed, and the IEA’s task of educating about the role of markets will correspondingly be diminished.
5. Using a contract agency will mean seriously increasing the risks of a security breach of politically sensitive material.
6. I have valuable knowledge of the existing systems.
7. I have incentives to work harder than an agency.
8. In my non-IT capacity I have brought the IEA considerable attention.
Details
1. Value - I am better value than a contract agency.
· I cost less to pay than an agency will cost to perform a greatly cut down roster of my duties. From my research, agencies with the right skill sets start at a cost level above my wage as it stands, and will work for considerably less time per month.
· I save the IEA lost revenue from computer downtime. Every week I am here I save many hours of other staff members’ time during which they would otherwise be unable to work. An IT contract agency would directly increase the downtime of IEA computer systems ( see 2 ).
· I save costs due to careful shopping around for goods and services, thanks to my extensive knowledge of the product marketplace. If I am not here, the same mistakes will be repeated that occurred before I arrived, where the IEA purchased a lot of equipment of a substandard quality at high cost.
· I can make use of my highly skilled friends to do important work at sub-market costs.
· Many contract agencies do not use or understand the operating system our server runs on. This would therefore have to be replaced at a cost of several thousand pounds.
· I currently work at below the market rate for an IT manager in a company of this size in London. I willingly take the pay penalty to have the chance to write and research here.
· I am available out-of-hours whereas many agencies are 9-5:30 weekdays only.
· I can see through the mountains of sales bumf we get sent every month, to pick out what is essential.
2. Productivity - If the IEA chooses to replace me with a contract agency, productivity will fall as a direct consequence.
· Industry standard response times for problems that cannot be resolved over the telephone is eight hours, falling to two hours for some agencies. However, delays of several days are not unusual for serious problems. In my experience most IT problems within this office need personal attention, rather than telephone attention to solve.
· IEA staff will be greatly inconvenienced by the lack of a skilled worker on site, primarily because they will have to wait extended periods of time for IT support to arrive. Problems which currently take seconds to fix will take much longer to resolve if dealt with over the telephone. I estimate that a problem which takes 5 minutes to solve at the moment will increase to half an hour over the telephone, if it is solvable at all. If not, several hours will be added to the response time.
· Whilst a staff member’s computer is not working they are likely to stop work altogether, rather than to carry on with other tasks. I estimate from personal experience that every member of the office will lose an average of over an hour a week to computer problems.
· Other staff who are not highly IT literate will be forced to help solve most ‘minor’ problems. This will take staff away from their primary jobs. The solutions that they then implement will be substandard and will lead to further problems.
· The task of administering relations with the new agency will have to be taken on by someone in a senior position, adding to a management burden. An agency will never be as self-motivated as an internal staff member, and so will require someone to instruct and chase them as a regular part of their job. It is not clear who in the IEA has the spare time to do this.
· Senior staff will have to dedicate their time more to dealing with the website. Not only will this divert them from their existing jobs, but the end result will be inferior, due to inexperience and unfamiliarity with the medium. The IEA’s image, reputation and ability to teach market virtues will suffer as a direct consequence.
· The IEA will entirely lose its IT strategy making component. Knowledge about what technologies are arriving and what they mean for us will be entirely absent. We will, in short, be flying blind technology-wise.
3 Database - The IEA will lose the cheap labour contacts that have already saved over £10,000 on database conversion and development. It will also lose cheap server administration contacts. It will have to spend greatly increased extra amounts to finish the database upgrade, possibly as much as an additional £10,000.
4. Web - If an agency takes over the IT administration role this leaves the website in rather an awkward position:
· There will be nobody appropriately skilled to hire an agency or individual to run the site.
· There will be nobody with the correct knowledge to give vision to the site.
· There will be nobody appropriately skilled whose job it is to chase the site designers, and to tell them what needs putting up, how and when.
· The IEA will lose a skilled web statistics analyser, essential for running a successful site.
· The IEA will lose one of its only focus writers for the website.
· The IEA will simply not be able to run as good a site if I am not onboard to assist.
The IEA will consequently suffer from its primary interface with the outside world being seriously diminished. A web agency, however technically skilful, will not deliver the same standard of strategy and direction as I can deliver as an experienced writer and manager of political web sites.
5. Security - The IEA is a politically sensitive organisation which publishes books and pamphlets containing frequently unpopular assertions and arguments. An IT contractor is a serious security problem. Access would be given to a large number of different agency employees, any one of which would have the ability to gain and leak confidential information. Security concerns will also slow down the process of solving problems, because approval will have to be given to new members. Security concerns will also increase the labour of administering the agency, as someone will have to keep an eye on agency staff.
6. Knowledge - I have pre-existing knowledge of the network and all the systems we have in place here. Such knowledge will not be quick to assimilate, and will lead to increased downtime and lowered productivity whilst the changeover occurs.
7. Motivation - Agencies have no company loyalty. They have no incentive to work directly towards the customer interest, not even financial. Instead they have the opposite interest, a company billing per hour has the greatest incentive to deal with problems as slowly as possible. We also have little leverage over companies that tend to deal with larger clients.
8. Research - You will lose the coverage generated that my research brings. I wrote the first and third most read publications on the IEA website in the last year. In addition:
· I have been on the BBC six times since starting work at the IEA.
· I have been written up in every UK Broadsheet paper at least once.
· I have made the IEA known to MPs who did not know about it before.
· I have opened up interest and support in the IEA from the technology community which ignored it before.
Steiny
----------------
Memo
Re: Contracting Out IT Services
From: Tom Steinberg
Date: Monday, 18 June 2001
I have put together this memo to express my belief that contracting out IT services at the IEA will be costly, will decrease the quality of service, increase management overheads, and will sap productivity.
To that effect I have constructed a list of my concerns:
Summary
1. Employing an agency will significantly increase IEA expenditure.
2. Using a contract agency will lead directly to a sharp fall in IEA productivity, and will greatly inconvenience IEA staff.
3. Without my contacts, the database will need at least an extra £10,000 to complete, and more to maintain.
4. The IEA’s web presence will be seriously harmed, and the IEA’s task of educating about the role of markets will correspondingly be diminished.
5. Using a contract agency will mean seriously increasing the risks of a security breach of politically sensitive material.
6. I have valuable knowledge of the existing systems.
7. I have incentives to work harder than an agency.
8. In my non-IT capacity I have brought the IEA considerable attention.
Details
1. Value - I am better value than a contract agency.
· I cost less to pay than an agency will cost to perform a greatly cut down roster of my duties. From my research, agencies with the right skill sets start at a cost level above my wage as it stands, and will work for considerably less time per month.
· I save the IEA lost revenue from computer downtime. Every week I am here I save many hours of other staff members’ time during which they would otherwise be unable to work. An IT contract agency would directly increase the downtime of IEA computer systems ( see 2 ).
· I save costs due to careful shopping around for goods and services, thanks to my extensive knowledge of the product marketplace. If I am not here, the same mistakes will be repeated that occurred before I arrived, where the IEA purchased a lot of equipment of a substandard quality at high cost.
· I can make use of my highly skilled friends to do important work at sub-market costs.
· Many contract agencies do not use or understand the operating system our server runs on. This would therefore have to be replaced at a cost of several thousand pounds.
· I currently work at below the market rate for an IT manager in a company of this size in London. I willingly take the pay penalty to have the chance to write and research here.
· I am available out-of-hours whereas many agencies are 9-5:30 weekdays only.
· I can see through the mountains of sales bumf we get sent every month, to pick out what is essential.
2. Productivity - If the IEA chooses to replace me with a contract agency, productivity will fall as a direct consequence.
· Industry standard response times for problems that cannot be resolved over the telephone is eight hours, falling to two hours for some agencies. However, delays of several days are not unusual for serious problems. In my experience most IT problems within this office need personal attention, rather than telephone attention to solve.
· IEA staff will be greatly inconvenienced by the lack of a skilled worker on site, primarily because they will have to wait extended periods of time for IT support to arrive. Problems which currently take seconds to fix will take much longer to resolve if dealt with over the telephone. I estimate that a problem which takes 5 minutes to solve at the moment will increase to half an hour over the telephone, if it is solvable at all. If not, several hours will be added to the response time.
· Whilst a staff member’s computer is not working they are likely to stop work altogether, rather than to carry on with other tasks. I estimate from personal experience that every member of the office will lose an average of over an hour a week to computer problems.
· Other staff who are not highly IT literate will be forced to help solve most ‘minor’ problems. This will take staff away from their primary jobs. The solutions that they then implement will be substandard and will lead to further problems.
· The task of administering relations with the new agency will have to be taken on by someone in a senior position, adding to a management burden. An agency will never be as self-motivated as an internal staff member, and so will require someone to instruct and chase them as a regular part of their job. It is not clear who in the IEA has the spare time to do this.
· Senior staff will have to dedicate their time more to dealing with the website. Not only will this divert them from their existing jobs, but the end result will be inferior, due to inexperience and unfamiliarity with the medium. The IEA’s image, reputation and ability to teach market virtues will suffer as a direct consequence.
· The IEA will entirely lose its IT strategy making component. Knowledge about what technologies are arriving and what they mean for us will be entirely absent. We will, in short, be flying blind technology-wise.
3 Database - The IEA will lose the cheap labour contacts that have already saved over £10,000 on database conversion and development. It will also lose cheap server administration contacts. It will have to spend greatly increased extra amounts to finish the database upgrade, possibly as much as an additional £10,000.
4. Web - If an agency takes over the IT administration role this leaves the website in rather an awkward position:
· There will be nobody appropriately skilled to hire an agency or individual to run the site.
· There will be nobody with the correct knowledge to give vision to the site.
· There will be nobody appropriately skilled whose job it is to chase the site designers, and to tell them what needs putting up, how and when.
· The IEA will lose a skilled web statistics analyser, essential for running a successful site.
· The IEA will lose one of its only focus writers for the website.
· The IEA will simply not be able to run as good a site if I am not onboard to assist.
The IEA will consequently suffer from its primary interface with the outside world being seriously diminished. A web agency, however technically skilful, will not deliver the same standard of strategy and direction as I can deliver as an experienced writer and manager of political web sites.
5. Security - The IEA is a politically sensitive organisation which publishes books and pamphlets containing frequently unpopular assertions and arguments. An IT contractor is a serious security problem. Access would be given to a large number of different agency employees, any one of which would have the ability to gain and leak confidential information. Security concerns will also slow down the process of solving problems, because approval will have to be given to new members. Security concerns will also increase the labour of administering the agency, as someone will have to keep an eye on agency staff.
6. Knowledge - I have pre-existing knowledge of the network and all the systems we have in place here. Such knowledge will not be quick to assimilate, and will lead to increased downtime and lowered productivity whilst the changeover occurs.
7. Motivation - Agencies have no company loyalty. They have no incentive to work directly towards the customer interest, not even financial. Instead they have the opposite interest, a company billing per hour has the greatest incentive to deal with problems as slowly as possible. We also have little leverage over companies that tend to deal with larger clients.
8. Research - You will lose the coverage generated that my research brings. I wrote the first and third most read publications on the IEA website in the last year. In addition:
· I have been on the BBC six times since starting work at the IEA.
· I have been written up in every UK Broadsheet paper at least once.
· I have made the IEA known to MPs who did not know about it before.
· I have opened up interest and support in the IEA from the technology community which ignored it before.
