The Irish government has appointed Michael McGrath as interim chief information officer for the Irish government. McGrath replaces epic failure, Bill McCluggage. McCluggages big successes include ….
Nothing.
Less than nothing.
In fact, the Irish government just signed a €3,300,000.00 customer support contract with Microsoft for continued “support” of Windows XP after the April 8th deadline.
Let me put it this way. If you’re the CIO of a large organization, and you were not aware of the firm, not changing ever, deadline of April 8th, then you were beyond ineffective. If you did nothing to get off of Windows XP then you were, in my opinion, negligent, more so if your organisation was licensed for Software Assurance under a government enterprise agreement.
It’s worse than that. Like most governments (probably worse really) the Irish government is littered with redundant IT departments and installations. We have our wasteful projects that never end and are the delight (or should that be Deloitte?) of the consulting community. There should be a government cloud with redundant locations. That should have started building years ago.
What’s been done?
Bupkis.
The waste continues.
Let’s see how quickly McGrath gets that cloud project started and the Windows 7/8.1 migration started … or will he be yet-another-crony?
Hi Aidan,
Let me be the first to nominate you for the local elections in May 2014. I’ll make a T.D. of you yet! Get in there and kick some cloud A**
Next stop: Aidan Finn for Taoiseach!
Mike
While I appreciate that, I would not be a benevolent leader 🙂
I expect that figure will look quite small as to what the NHS / HMRC (etc) will cough-up here in the UK. Assorted websites reckon the NHS has 1,000,000+ PCs still with XP.