So 2009 is upon us: I hope you had a well-earned break over the festive period and have returned to work having shaken off some of the gloom of last year – despite the freezing conditions sweeping the UK.
How is the new year shaping up so far? Well, Indian services giant Satyam ended last year badly and those bad tidings have failed to bring comfort and joy in 2009.
Over Christmas a long festering private dispute flared up in public between Satyam and the World Bank over Satyam's alleged provision of improper benefits to bank staff, and other issues concerning Satyam's relationship with companies in whom some senior managers reportedly had investments.
Satyam has been declared ineligible to bid for World Bank work for eight years (temporary suspension occurred in February last year).
On Christmas Day Satyam formally requested that the World Bank immediately withdraw its public statement, and requested that the bank “issue a new statement apologizing to Satyam for the harm done to the company due to the Bank's actions, and that it provide Satyam with a full explanation of the circumstances related to the Bank's inappropriate statements”.
This came less than a month after the acquisition of Maytas Infra and Maytas Properties was called off – a purchase that had also resulted in legal action from a Satyam client, which alleged it would not have been paid if the acquisition went ahead. Dr Mangalam Srinivasan, an independent director of Satyam, compounded the company's woes by resigning on Boxing Day.
“While none of this is helpful to Satyam, it is also likely to cause wider market repercussions,” says Ovum, citing the credit crunch, bank recapitalisations and the alleged Madoff $50 billion Ponzi fraud scheme, all of which have conspired to damage public confidence in both the finance and services sectors.
It seems that the burgeoning IT services sector in the East will inevitably face similar regulatory and compliance problems to those that characterised the worst excesses of the pre-bust Western economy earlier this century – and at a time when public confidence is low.
Either way it is essential that such public disputes as that between the World Bank and Satyam are resolved swiftly and, above all, clearly.
Elsewhere, public-sector outsourcing is back in the broadsheet headlines once more: first, in the form of the outsourced 2009 SATS exam marking (you will remember last year's debacle – do we look forward to better news this year?), and second, in the form of yet another vast, unpopular and misconceived government outsourcing deal: the 'super database' of all UK citizens' email and Internet traffic.
I will tell you now that I believe the scheme is worse than useless, is hopelessly misguided and poorly thought-through; it will do little to improve security and much to undo public confidence in the privacy and security of their data, and will actively roll back civil liberties; it will vastly exceed its proposed budget, prove massively unpopular, discredit our industry once more, and probably be abandoned in two or three years' time having wasted billions of pounds of public money. There, I've said what most people are already thinking.
Perhaps someone in the industry will speak up before we reach that point? I doubt it: but rest assured we'll be covering the story here.
Happy 2009!