Blood-Sucking Consultants and Proprietary Databases

[Graham Durant-Law]

Ten months ago I wrote a blog-post called "Do Even More With Less" . I talked about a government department that had to find savings of a billion dollars a year every year for 10 years. To put it another way that is $2,732,240 a day for 3,522 days! At the time I said it was an impossible task and quite unrealistic. I also said:

I think we are heading down the path of a disillusioned public service. The service will try to be efficient at the expense of being effective, and achieve neither goal. We will see more outsourcing, right-sizing, reshaping and so on, all at the expense of people and ultimately customers. A consultants and contractors paradise is on the horizon as they pick up the slack! From a knowledge management perspective we will see the transfer of knowledge from the public service to private enterprise, and the taxpayer will pay a premium to access it.

Well my prediction has come true, and it's proving to be awfully expensive and disheartening. The first step was to employ two prestigious management consultant companies from this list to provide advice on how to proceed - a step I'm reliably told cost several million dollars, but only added two or three days to the organisations $2,732,240 a day pain!...

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