A friend of mine works for a top 3 consulting firm as an IT project manager. Facing massive budget issues, several states are outsourcing some of their longstanding projects/issues to his firm to simply "take care of immediately".
His firm is one of the most expensive around, and their bid was 2-3m to rework a large data organization, improve the storage capabilities, and reprogram the data entry system.
For each of these projects/organizations the state currently employs between 12-25 IT professionals earning at or above 100k, and roughly the same number of supporting admin. etc. staff. The state has paid an average of $2,225,000 a YEAR over the past 5 years to its own staff. In 3-6 months, his firm does at least twice the quality of work of the state's employees in 5% of the time the state employees say the project requires for a small fraction of the cost. My friend says each state is plagued with massive divisions like this with catastrophically inefficient work forces.
And to top it off, my friend and most of his team is billed out to the state at 200-500$/hr, not exactly a cheap service.
His firm has had the same experience in several states, mostly throughout the south. California has been aggressively courting them into helping restructure their systems, but is completely unable to pay them or even loosely define a payment schedule.
