Quest IT Outsourcing

[Anonymous]

Re: Quest IT Outsourcing - what now?

So now that the ax has dropped on the programmers/developers with TCS is there any word on the rest of IT? As of 07/15 all after-hour calls for the East/New England region will be routed to the IT service desk in Texas where previously each region was covering locally. What's going on with Infrastructure?

 

[Anonymous]

You may be right that they can build new systems faster and better. However, they are letting so many IT professionals go, that have dedicated their carreers to the company. The amount of knowledge they are losing is crazy. And for what, to have it outsourced to India. Every business unit insisted on keeping the old systems. It was upper management that let this happen.

The company is on a downward spiral.
and unfortunately the only ones that will make out are the leaders that made all the bad decisions.

The upper management "leaders" that made those bad decisions are mostly all gone. Frankly, if they made the right decisions, most of the people being let go in IT would never have been needed in the first place. I'm not saying the new guys are any smarter, but it was pretty obvious what needed to be fixed.

 

[Anonymous]

Would you clarify "what's so obvious that needed to be fixed?
And how all those programmers for Billing, HR, Sales and Marketing would not be needed there
in a first place? Who would be supporting business?

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Quest IT Outsourcing - what now?

So now that the ax has dropped on the programmers/developers with TCS is there any word on the rest of IT? As of 07/15 all after-hour calls for the East/New England region will be routed to the IT service desk in Texas where previously each region was covering locally. What's going on with Infrastructure?

Was announced past May Quest Diagnostics not in business of IT want to outsource much possible. At least many of technical IT employees as clearly IT non-technical employees considered non-expendable. First round subcontracting in place with impacted people notified and transfers knowledge from commencing. Lack of cooperation in transfer of knowledge subcontractor informed developer would lose pay. Specific mention of such in case concept not clear.
Infrastructure outsourcing contract now in negotiations presumably. Stay tuned to know the extent of this, as well as the timeframes of such within the next few weeks.
Do any guesswork as to which teams will be affected after the round of infrastructure?

 

[Anonymous]

My last company sent all of the IT jobs to Iceland. When the server crashed, they had to hire 20 Indians to fix it. But management messed up and hired Native Americans, confused thinking that they were going to have skilled workers that work on the cheap. Instead, our operation consisted of 20 native americans imported to Iceland working on a server connected to the US. When Katrina came, they changed to a Cloud system, and ended up accidentally downloading Super Mario Bros. to the mainframe, which crashed the system. Yoshi got promoted, but so did Bowser who is making layoffs. Luigi keeps eating all of the left over pasta in the company fridge!

 

[Anonymous]

Would you clarify "what's so obvious that needed to be fixed?
And how all those programmers for Billing, HR, Sales and Marketing would not be needed there
in a first place? Who would be supporting business?

It was obvious that costs were out of control due to 30 some-odd labs all being run as individual businesses, instead of as one. There is/was an obscene number of applications and interfaces to be supported. We should have had one standard LIMS connected to one Billing system. Instead, we had too many to count, which meant we had to have way to many IT people on board to keep the overly-complicated mess running. Had Surya done it correctly in the first place, they never would have had to hire all those excess people. On top of that, Surya's paranoia drove him to do far too much in-house, at far higher cost. Even when he finally got in bed with HCL (for all the wrong reasons) he mismanaged that relationship and paid way more than he had to, for worse results than we should have had.

 

[Anonymous]

It was obvious that costs were out of control due to 30 some-odd labs all being run as individual businesses, instead of as one. There is/was an obscene number of applications and interfaces to be supported. We should have had one standard LIMS connected to one Billing system. Instead, we had too many to count, which meant we had to have way to many IT people on board ...blah blah blah ...

The implication that there were 30 different lab systems is obviously totally inaccurate. To further try to tie the current and ongoing IT outsourcing with the number of lab systems is also widely inaccurate. IT never had the clout to be able to dictate to the labs what software they would or would not run. The labs were always the customer and IT was directed to support and work for the labs.
As a matter of fact, currently, the lab systems have NOT YET been outsourced nor have any official communication come down stating that the lab systems are on the chopping block. (Not to say that won't happen in round 3 or round 4 of the IT outsourcing initiative.)

 

[Anonymous]

The implication that there were 30 different lab systems is obviously totally inaccurate. To further try to tie the current and ongoing IT outsourcing with the number of lab systems is also widely inaccurate. IT never had the clout to be able to dictate to the labs what software they would or would not run. The labs were always the customer and IT was directed to support and work for the labs.
As a matter of fact, currently, the lab systems have NOT YET been outsourced nor have any official communication come down stating that the lab systems are on the chopping block. (Not to say that won't happen in round 3 or round 4 of the IT outsourcing initiative.)

A) I never blamed IT for the excess of applications to support. IT did pretty well controlling costs given the cards they were dealt. But IT costs are still way out of line despite their good efforts.

B) I didn't intend to imply there were 30 labs systems... 6 maybe? But consider that with all the systems the LIMS need to feed, and the complexity and costs are multiplied. And LIMS are just an example (though obviously a big one) of the excess, redundant apps being supported. Anything more than 1 is excess cosst that needs to be eliminated.

C) If you know why TCS was chosen, you would know that lab systems are very much in play, ASAP (just not soon enough). First you cosolidate the lab footprint, then you consolidate the systems. It may not be happening right now, but you can be confident it is all mapped out.

 

[Anonymous]

Surya blew it. The LIS should have been consolidated/standardized in 2007 when Quest lost the UHC contract. Wall Street was expecting a decline in revenue and earnings. It was the perfect time to fix the LIS and billing systems. To have the same tests in 23 different labs with different test codes is absurd. In some labs (TBR),you have more than four test codes for the same test!

 

[Anonymous]

Surya blew it. The LIS should have been consolidated/standardized in 2007 when Quest lost the UHC contract. Wall Street was expecting a decline in revenue and earnings. It was the perfect time to fix the LIS and billing systems. To have the same tests in 23 different labs with different test codes is absurd. In some labs (TBR),you have more than four test codes for the same test!

Exactly. But it should never gotten to that point - every lab should have been standardized immediatly after its aquisition. When you do it that way, not ony does it make more sense operationally, you roll the costs of the integration into the purchase accounting so it doesn't impact earnings. Surya's head was just too high up in the clouds to think that stuff through. I mean, what CEO who understood or cared anything about operations, or bulding a SUSTAINABLE business model would keep a lightweight like WS in charge of running it??? All he did was hide behind fake growth, worry that LH would steal his non-existant trade secrets, and throw shareholder's money at his friends back in India.

 

[Anonymous]

Whoever said GE would be the winning bidder is mistaken. Wipro and Cognizant are the companies being looked at for IT Infrastructure org, and I have to believe the announcement is coming soon.

 

[Anonymous]

Whoever said GE would be the winning bidder is mistaken. Wipro and Cognizant are the companies being looked at for IT Infrastructure org, and I have to believe the announcement is coming soon.

lol - I don't think the previous post meant that GE would be bidding on a low-ball contract to sit warm bodies in the recently vacated seats of former employees. Rather the way I read that post was they thought GE would be bidding to buy some or all of Quest Diagnostics (assets / business units / labs / etc...) once the balance sheet looks temporarily better due to the outsourcing. It would be quite the shit if Philips Healthcare were to be buying up pieces of the company after our Dear Leader finishes dismantling all possible long term prospects. (Unless perhaps you think all this outsourcing crap is really to build a stronger company for the long term? ha ha ha)
As for Cognizant vs Wipro - do you really think Cognizant can even come close to the pricing that Wipro would be able to do? IMHO the only reason Cognizant would even have been floated would have been for the pretense of competition to encourage Wipro to be aggressive in their pricing.

 

[Anonymous]

It is just a matter of time before all of IT is outsourced. Upper management in IT just returned from a trip to the far east. IT employees should start to look for other employment opportunities. The only IT employees to keep their jobs will be the upper management level. They will get rich on this new initiative. Then the company will be bought.

 

[Anonymous]

lol - I don't think the previous post meant that GE would be bidding on a low-ball contract to sit warm bodies in the recently vacated seats of former employees. Rather the way I read that post was they thought GE would be bidding to buy some or all of Quest Diagnostics (assets / business units / labs / etc...) once the balance sheet looks temporarily better due to the outsourcing. It would be quite the shit if Philips Healthcare were to be buying up pieces of the company after our Dear Leader finishes dismantling all possible long term prospects. (Unless perhaps you think all this outsourcing crap is really to build a stronger company for the long term? ha ha ha)
As for Cognizant vs Wipro - do you really think Cognizant can even come close to the pricing that Wipro would be able to do? IMHO the only reason Cognizant would even have been floated would have been for the pretense of competition to encourage Wipro to be aggressive in their pricing.

Yep that is what I meant by GE being a buyer it makes sense good ole Phillips health buy up whats left of dismantled quest diagnostics.

 

[Anonymous]

... IMHO the only reason Cognizant would even have been floated would have been for the pretense of competition to encourage Wipro to be aggressive in their pricing.

If its down to Cognizant and Wipro (thats what many are saying), they are the finalists - it was bid it out to all the usual suspects, and supposedly narrowed it down to those two. By the time you get tot this point, the pricing differences for all these guys are usually minimal; the decision is made on their specific technical strengths, and comfort level between the senior executives. Having HQ up the block in NJ actually gives Cognizant some advantage, but something like having a bigger footprint in the Phillipines (lately preferable to India) might help Wipro.

 

[Anonymous]

... the pricing differences for all these guys are usually minimal; the decision is made on their specific technical strengths, and comfort level between the senior executives. Having HQ up the block in NJ actually gives Cognizant some advantage ...

lol. It is price all the way. Or are you seriously buying into the kool-aid where the SLT is appearing to say that a bunch of newly hired fresh out of college kids are going to be doing a higher quality job than 10~30 year IT veterans? If it was really that easy - then the various IT positions over the years would have gotten filled a whole lot quicker. Bottom line - it is always easy to denigrate somebody else's job and say it is so easy that anybody could do it. But say it as much as you want and it still doesn't make it reality.

I will shit a brick if the contract does not go to Wipro.
This is all about short term making the books look better. Nothing to do with long term.

 

[Anonymous]

lol. It is price all the way. Or are you seriously buying into the kool-aid where the SLT is appearing to say that a bunch of newly hired fresh out of college kids are going to be doing a higher quality job than 10~30 year IT veterans? If it was really that easy - then the various IT positions over the years would have gotten filled a whole lot quicker. Bottom line - it is always easy to denigrate somebody else's job and say it is so easy that anybody could do it. But say it as much as you want and it still doesn't make it reality.

I will shit a brick if the contract does not go to Wipro.
This is all about short term making the books look better. Nothing to do with long term.

The price between Wipro and Cognizant will be virtually identical. Fact. Price will not be the deciding factor between those two. Wipro likely has the edge, but not on price.

You can continue believing that it takes 30 years of experience to bang out code, but its ridiculous. You need a small number of architects and designers, and maybe you want them to be your 30-year Americans for whatever reason, but the kids overseas can bang out code faster, cheaper and better. If you ever visited these places and saw the training, facilities, tools, and supervison they are getting, you would understand better. Its far superior to anthing DGX has or could have at its scale. All the best run companies in the world (which Quest is not) are over there for a reason. But ignorance is bliss.

 

[Anonymous]

Circuits have been ordered between quest and wipro data centers...so that would answer any question.

 

[Anonymous]

<clip> You need a small number of architects and designers <clip> the kids overseas can bang out code faster, cheaper and better <clip> All the best run companies in the world (which Quest is not) are over there for a reason <clip>.

Keep drinking the kool-aid. You clearly have no experience with the actual Quest systems. The current app teams are not banging out code regardless of whatever you seem to think. This strategy is 5 years behind the times. It is a long term path to failure. But that is ok - you are obviously not one of the technical IT staff so this outsourcing has no impact on you. Other than destroying the company of course but that is just a minor point that will not come to pass for another 9 months.

 

[Anonymous]

Circuits have been ordered between quest and wipro data centers...so that would answer any question.

Yeah - regardless of what the IT SLT would have you believe this was decided months ago. This was just confirmation and working out the details. We should have the contract announced shortly (next week perhaps?) and find out the number impacted by this one. Don't expect this to be the last contract.