By Tony Hallett, 16 December 2003 16:30
NEWS Local and central government are not likely to follow private sector companies in moving operations to other countries, principally to save money.
The trend towards so-called offshoring has been strong recently. Banks have grabbed the headlines but many different types of company have chosen locations such as India for work including application development as well as call centres.
Peter Gershon, head of the Office of Government Commerce, said in an interview with the FT today that he has assured unions jobs won't go overseas.
However, he didn't take an ethical stance - along the lines that the public sector should adopt a 'UK first' approach - but rather stressed data security.
"We have to be very careful about the extent to which customer data actually moves offshore. That is a key issue," he said.
He also suggested it would be beneficial to look at better use of UK facilities, perhaps involving "rationalisation of contact centres" rather than move them overseas where costs can be much lower.
Comments
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1. anonymous
Thank goodness someone is at last talking sense. I suggest that we need to be careful not only about the data being handled but also about the lack of control over the development of the applications doing that data handling.
If companies want to do this then let them do it honestly and say that they are no longer a UK but an Indian (or wherever) organizaton; at least, then, people would know what they are choosing.
2. anonymous
This article is misleading. It sounds as if local government are not going to move their operations to other countries but, as many local governments have 'outsourced' their IT or 'taken a strategic partner', they are not able to make that decision.