What did Margaret say?

I’ve some experience of working with telephony contractors and the issues were nowhere near as frustrating as those for Computing. We used BT (though had its own quirks for Hull) mountains of money but no real competition, no massive problems either.

We also used BT for the network, the biggest problem there being the contractor was duty bound to cut bandwidth automatically when demand fell but increasing when demand rose required a business case. A problem driven by perceived VFM.

as for IT...
We all know how fast the pace of change is in IT. Can you imagine writing a business plan that scopes for a year, tendering process over 2 years, a year of implementation to run for 5 years.

So your senior manager negotiated a budget to deliver a product that’ll still be fit for purpose in 8 years time??

Add to that if you want >20,000 identical PCs who are your suppliers? That’s not really competition in the true sense of the word, the likes of IBM and HP have you over a barrel.

 

You are absolutely correct re pace of change. Cant give too much detail as , bizarrely, I am still bound by the OSA, but after a major multi million pound project (updating CTI systems)within 3 years along comes VoIP and all the CTI was swept away in a multi...multi million pound upgrade. Funny you should mention BT. I originally worked for Syntegra which was reintegrated back into BT. From a personal perspective it was all downhill from there