Nothing will come from nothing.....

Most people in the IT world know, or at least have a passing knowledge of something called ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). It's a framework designed and maintained by the Office of Government Commerce which has some basic concepts in it which help you maintain IT infrastructure. These include, Change Management, Service Management, Incident Management and Asset Management.

Of the last of those an organisation maintains an asset register of all the little bits of equipment it has. From desktop PCs, to laptops, to removable media drives, to servers. Everything is on the asset register. When you get rid of something you remove it, when you buy something you add it.

Incredibly, the Department of Work and Pensions however doesn't have one of these. In fact, the DWP has, according to Jonathan Shaw MP, got no bloody idea what IT infrastructure it has because, well, it doesn't own the stuff you see, they contracted it all out, and,

Consequently, the Department does not maintain a register of those assets.

Now some might say that the contractor maintains the register, and this may be true of course, but there is a little bit of me that just sees nothing more than slopey shoulders here.

There is of course a great plus side to this. If the DWP doesn't own any IT infrastructure then technically they can't lose any either. Everyone's a winner!