The council must have been pretty unhappy with BTs work to terminate a contract prematurely. You can bet the councils' own lawyers had a good look at the small print before any action was taken. Outsourcing your IT may seem like a great money saving idea, until you discover you have little control or say in the direction your IT goes.

Outsourcing isn't a good fit for most companies with more than about twenty staff. There are some exceptions where its beneficial, but in the main its just initiated by some bean-counting prick who has no vested interest in the company's long-term future - they just want to cut some money off the immediate bottom-line, stick it on their CV, get an enormous bonus then f*** off to the next company and do the same thing. Somehow, it seems that the average executive team hasn't heard about the absolute carnage that outsourcing often leaves behind, because the merry-go-round never seems to end - there seems to be no end of firms/organisations/government bodies out there ready to be stripped bare of all their IT assets and expertise.

I remember once hearing a line in a film that I thought could be applied to outsourcing pretty well:
"Lets rob everybody blind and f*** off to Mexico because nobody ever thought of that before"

We currently have our network fully outsourced and one in house man that runs errands and the quality from the outsource company is very poor.

My manager regrets having giving them the contract, well this is not to say that all outsource firms are the same but would think this is the general consensus

Could this be the beginning of the end of out-sourcing?? I hope so!

As for in-house IT, it's usually the manager's that are the problem. All in-house IT bods I've met are usually quite motivated and know the flaws, it's just that the management are either incompetent, penny pinching or both!