Love me, love my .....
Is it fair to compare a state cabinet minister’s press announcement with a service station retail offering? When both are stretching the definition of Valentine’s Day, we reckon we can.
Commerce Minister Simon O’Brien raised a few eyebrows in this office when we received a press release on local content smothered in love hearts. A bit desperate, we thought. Equating love with contract wins; but this government is all about sharing the love.
Then again, we hadn’t banked on an operative who visited a BP servo and snapped us this Valentine’s moment. Is it just about the Doritos nestling up to the Smith’s potato chips, or does BP really think its customers are that romantically challenged?
Speaking of sharing
We shouldn’t find pleasures in other’s misery but there was a moment of schadenfreude when an operative kindly send us a note about the creation of new state government body – the Decommissioning Office of Shared Services.
With the former Office of Shared Services now officially being closed down following millions of dollars of wasted time and energy, the Department of Finance has been left holding this costly baby.
Just to remind ourselves that how something looks on paper doesn’t always match up in reality, the net cost of the service has been more than $400 million, five times more expensive than originally estimated in the first business case put up in 2003.
So it may be good riddance, but a beast like that doesn’t die that easily. Given the importance of some services, such as payroll, the state can’t quite turn the lights off at OSS yet.
So it has created a decommissioning steering group and decommissioning office to soften the landing as vital administrative functions briefly taken over by the OSS migrate back to state agencies from whence they came. Which, of course, will add to the ultimate cost of this mistake.
