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Surprise Surprise - it’s the New Year!

Posted in News, General on January 4, 2008 at 3:51 pm

So Dixons issues a profit warning due to poor Christmas sales – not a surprise really. Dixons, at least in my little world, has an image of being quite expensive plus the days of nipping into one of their stores to look at potential purchases are long gone – so too has the impulse buy. We tried a high street retailer online service at Christmas but they couldn’t even get a simple order right and we ended up having to cancel it at the last minute because they seemingly couldn’t tell a black iPod dock from a white one – needless to say they aren’t high on our preference list anymore – not when there are a myriad of online vendors who can supply the same product quicker, cheaper and more reliably. The thing that never ceases to amaze me though is that these companies always seem to get the cash bit right – the money came out of my account almost instantly – if only service followed through as efficiently?

And in recent news, the Highways Agency is outsourcing its IT infrastructure. Outsourcing is one of those things that goes in and out of fashion. Initially, some high ranking bod in the upper eschelons of power decides that outsourcing is the way to go and let’s face it – it is very hard to argue against it if your core business activity is not IT related – and suddenly the contract is worth far more than the poor IT people, who have struggled thanklessly for years, could ever get their budgetary hands on. Then, after a few years a sense of detachment occurs, communication barriers breakdown, and the IT operation ends up being bought back inhouse under a new realm of empowerment – not that that is ever likely to happen in this case!

Strange as it may seem public sector organisations have apparently been losing data and now MP’s are calling for stricter powers and punishment for data security breaches. It also seems that these data losses may now be linked to job cuts with the unions indicating that job cuts on the horizon may put more data at risk. I would have thought that at its very core any public body that deals with public data would make the security of the data paramount and everything else would ripple out from there – haven’t they read the data protection act? Don’t these systems have auditing or authority control systems in place and if not why not? We are constantly being told, and as IT practitioners we are constantly telling others, to be vigilant in protecting our personal information online but what is the point of this if our important personal data is regularly being mislaid – we may as well put all our personal data onto MySpace. It certainly sounds like a good case for the national identity card – put all the data into one place then police it like crazy.