HM Treasury hopes to encourage SMEs with ICT 2015 programme

HM Treasury has said that it is planning to break up its current outsourcing agreement with Fujitsu into a number of discrete contracts from 2015, in a bid to encourage SMEs and deliver efficiencies in its supply chain.

The Treasury signed the outsourcing deal with Fujitsu in 2009, which covers networks, hosting applications, development, end-user computing, and is due to expire in January 2015.

It has now established the ICT 2015 Programme in order to plan for the end of its current agreement. According to a recent government report on SME spend, HM Treasure currently spends approximately 5 percent of its overall procurement budget directly with SMEs.

The Department hopes that the new programme, made up of a number of service towers, as opposed to being delivered by a single provider, will provide a new, secure corporate IT system to serve approximately 1,200 people in central London and a further 35 in Norwich.

A document detailing the plans states: “All future services should be fully scalable as it is possible that other government delivery organisations could be on-boarded over time and the size of the Treasury will change.”

HM Treasury wants the new programme to provide a choice of devices for employees, with the default being a hybrid (laptop/tablet) device. However, it would also like to give employees the option to access some ICT services from a non-corporate device.

It hopes that the new contracts will improve the user experience, increase efficiency for users, be more flexible, scalable and agile, whilst also reducing costs and providing better value for money for the Department through better use of commercial, utility technology.

Transition to the new providers and services will not take a ‘big bang’ approach and the Treasury wants dual running of current and new services to be minimised as much as possible – it would like to see primary data only existing in one place at any one point in time.

The ICT 2015 document states that the transition of each of the services will take a ‘nimble approach’ and will consist of the following phases: design, build, pilot, migration.

All HM Treasury system users must be migrated to the new providers as of the end of December 2014.

It is expected that around six contracts will be awarded across all service towers, which include core IT services; line of business applications, hosting and delivery; wide area networks; printing services; media and wireless services; and other services, such as telephony, hosted applications and end user devices.