Good, old-fashioned trade-unionism made outsourcing seem a better option. I honestly thought that by now, we’d have started seeing through it.

Five years ago, IT Week reported a Gartner survey, predicting that “50 per cent of IT outsourcing arrangements would fail in the next 12 months because of bad management”. As far as I can see, this remains the pattern today.

There are truly serious problems with managing IT staff. As with specialists of any sort, IT workers are capable of bamboozling those who give orders. Good management has to engage those who are managed. When managers and staff have common objectives, these silly games are abandoned.

Too often, what I see in outsourcing is a simple case of “I can’t manage you operators from hell, but I’m the boss, so I’m downsizing you and paying money to someone else to solve the problem”.

Inevitably, this doesn’t solve the problem of bad management. It simply prevents the company from understanding its own problems. Why should we admire that? I suspect we only tolerate it because of our collective memories of truculent trade union activists from the 1970s. We fear giving “workers” any power, and fail to understand that a properly educated workforce could actually contribute to management, not obstruct it.