5 Comments

• Kirsten de Keyser 13th Sep '11 - 8:50pm

  Great tweet.
  I want to explore this a bit more, do we know what Tom’s source is please?

• Winston 13th Sep '11 - 10:21pm

  I once worked for a company whose IT procurement would have made a pen pusher at the MOD dance with glee. £200 for a memory stick a few gigabytes in size and software several times the price of a commercial license and with a service charge invented by the firms IT supplier. Software not on their short list would have to go through checks that would take months.

  The result? Software was bought from shops or pirated and installed ourselves onto company computers we’d disconnected from the net and reformatted with copies of windows from dubious sources. Although the computers at least had windows licenses.

  I like to think the situation illustrates the problems created by excessive government taxation and regulation. Push people too far and they’ll take matters into their own hands.

• Paul Holmes 14th Sep '11 - 11:05am

  Winston -what possible link is there between a company being ripped off by it’s IT supplier and Government regulation or taxation? I’m surprised you don’t claim it’s all the EU’s fault!

• coldcomfort 14th Sep '11 - 3:42pm

  The central point is an obsession with ‘control’. If anyone could go the shop & buy a £1 pack of wipes anyone could do that & take them home – so runs the theory. It assumes that all employees are crooks so you have to have a ‘system’ to keep them under control. A dreadful philosophy & in my experience complete rubbish. Many years ago when I occupied the ‘God slot’ in a company that had been used to autocratic management I go so fed up with being woken up in the middle of the night to authorise a manager or foreman to use a taxi & go & buy a spanner – or something equally trivial that I gave them all a monthly budget which had to be accounted for but could be spent on anything without pre-authorisation. We worked out that if all the managers etc [there were a few hundred of them] were as bent as five bob notes the risk to the business was £x per month. There was a lot of opposition, especially from the money men. But those guys without exception were so thrilled to actually be trusted that every one of them never spent their budget,productivity went up, the company saved a fortune, & I got to sleep at nights. The people who are crooks & fiddle their expenses etc etc are those at the top & they don’t buy wipes.

• balbs 15th Sep '11 - 12:17am

  @coldcomfort

  Absolutely agree – I remember working for a finance director in the 80’s who saw the stationery budget was ballooning out of control, so told me to go out and buy WH Smith vouchers for all the staff – they were then told that that was their budget for stationery for the year and there would be no cupboards to dip into… the net result was that he halved the company’s expenditure on stationery.

  The problem nowadays is anyone trying that nowadays would be outvoted by the bean counters.