blog Those of you with a long-term interest in Victorian Government IT shared services provider CenITex will remember that the agency was several years ago known far and wide for the high rates it was paying its extensive contractor workforce. However, according to an article published in iTNews today (we recommend you click here for the full article), those days are now comprehensively gone:
“The latest annual report for the agency shows that it currently engages just 15 contractors, down from a peak of 251 (a third of the CenITex workforce) in 2011.”
It’s not hard to understand where all the contractors have gone. In mid-2012, after all, CenITex announced it was planning a huge round of redundancies, and there’s also been a directive that the agency should seek to convert as many contractors as possible to permanent staff roles — on normal government salaries.
Knowing CenITex’s previous culture as I do, I have to say that this is the latest indication that the agency has gone through some incredible levels of change over the past several years. It used to be a hotbed of highly paid contractors, unethical practices, poor IT service delivery, and overall, one of the worst eyesores in the Victorian Government. Now things have really turned around. The contractors have all been in-sourced or turfed, the agency is moving towards a more efficient broker model instead of a heavy government workforce model, it’s under new management and cleaning up its ethics. All good things.
It’s even possible that we’ll come to a day quite soon where CenITex has a good reputation inside the Victorian Government, instead of the terrible one it’s had up until now. Now that would be a change.
I met with Cenitex senior staff once to discuss supplying resources to them. The reason they employed so many contractors was that government process in VIC were such that it was virtually impossible to hire full-time employees; any given project would be past due before they could even start advertising for a position. Yes Cenitex was/is a mess but it was/is a mess of the government’s own making.
Also their pay rates are far below the market medians for technical positions. Contractors were the only way they could attract the necessary skilled staff.
This bodes ill for any work being done.
It was also much easier to remove anyone who made waves and pointed out the failings of the CenITex solutuiions.
It is always easy to doubt self-proclaimed expertise. Renai’s comment reveals his total lack of knowledge of the real workings of CenITex. He claims
“Knowing CenITex’s previous culture as I do, I have to say that this is the latest indication that the agency has gone through some incredible levels of change over the past several years.”
Most of the “highly paid” contractors to whom he refers were not employed in the core business of providing shared services to Victorian Government. They worked in the ETS programme centrally funded by Treasury & Finance. The ETS programme was a project almost run as a separate business from CenItex. The fact that contracted staff were poorly controlled while on DTF funded and controlled programme is nearly always ignored by outsiders.
If anyone thinks anything has really changed in the last two years they are probably wrong. There have been few changes to the business and are probably unlikely to be until the as yet undisclosed “Evolve project” happens. Whenever that will be: as usual lots of noise but little action by an impotent senior management group.
The above comment is one hundred percent accurate. If there ever was a case study on how not to give the keys to the Contractors and not bother or too incompetent to supervise them properly (who the hell outsources design and arch) then this is it.
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