Central Government

This week the Government Digital Service @GDSteam informed the market which suppliers had successfully passed the first qualification round of the Digital Services public sector tender. This public sector procurement is looking to select 50 organisations to compete on a Framework for digital contracts worth an estimated £40m within the next 9 months. The contracts on offer are the 25 exemplar services identified by the core central government departments and agencies. 

While the GDS has to be applauded for their innovative and open approach in supplier sourcing I do question whether a positive outcome will be achieved. It is too early to confirm but my reservations are as follows:

The ESMCP programme announced on September 19th their commercial operating model with the dual approach of selecting a Network Services supplier and a Delivery Partner. With the cancellation of the programme's planned conference calls this week PFC provides insight into one of the key questions suppliers must be asking themselves - What is the scope and role of the "Delivery Partner"?

The client documentation indicates that the "delivery partner" will have a key role from transition through to business as usual (BAU) with an emphasis on programme, service, supplier interface and contract management. There is no further information on accountabilities, allocation and management of risk and how much if any the Delivery Partner is involved in the actual design and delivery of core services.

So is the role of the delivery partner there to provide scale and expertise into programme, change and service management?

As forecasted in my article ESMCP commercial model to be announced soon the Emergency Services Mobile Communications programme have announced today their commercial and target operating model to enable them to commence a public sector procurement.

As predicted the model has been simplified and is now formed of two primary service towers: one covering Network Services and one covering the procurement of a Delivery Partner.

Yesterday the GDS announced the launch and timetable of the next procurement round for applications to join G-Cloud, which is called G-Cloud 4 (G4). Instructions detailing next steps can be found at the GDS website.

The procurement has supposedly been improved offering clearer instructions on how to apply for suppliers new to G-Cloud; clearer instructions on how to carry forward services for suppliers already on G-Cloud ii (Gii) or Giii and the use of two systems for tender submissions.

In a study conducted by the Hay Group it reported that Senior management and frontline staff have lost their sense of pride in the public sector and are poised to leave. Their study revealed:

1. Almost three-quarters (72 per cent) of public sector workers do not feel proud to work in the sector and seven out of ten (70 per cent) state that their morale is at an all-time low.
2. More than two-fifths (43 per cent) want to leave their current employer and four-fifths of those (78 per cent) are planning to wave goodbye within the next three years.

More alarming is data on Senior Public Sector managers. According to Hay Group's research, almost a third (32 per cent) of senior managers who are looking to leave their organisation want to do so this year – higher than for any other job level.

If market conditions weren't hard enough for System Integrators now the Office for Fair Trading (OFT) has got in on the act infering anti-competitive practices exist that act as barriers to entry for all but a handful of major IT suppliers. The barriers to entry cited inclue the costs and difficulties of switching because of factors such as the terms of licence agreements / contracts; lack of interoperability with other systems / software and the risk of disruption to critical services.

The OFT project will also examine the degree to which procurement practices interact with supply side anti-competitive practices and whether they could create additional barriers to entry in public sector ICT markets. Cited procurement processes that could be creating barriers to entry in various ways include:-

NAO presented at csLive today providing an interesting perspective on the importance of digital services on government. Please see below for a review of their slides.

Only weeks after cancelling the EUD procurement  the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is to go out to tender again but this time, however, the procurement will have a much stronger small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) involvement, the MoJ says.

The pre-tender just issued by the MoJ ICT Procurement team 'for the provision of various ICT devices and services including consulting, software development, internet, computing, application maintenance and support' says that suppliers should note that the MoJ is likely to run a number of different procurement exercises for the services, starting on different dates.

Skyscrape announced this week that they have been awarded a contract by the Home Office to provide Cloud PaaS for the Disclosure Barring Service. The contract was awarded via GCloud and is reported to be valued at £1.5m per annum.

This award is significant as it is one of the first sizeable infrastructure/hosting contracts to be awarded through GCloud. It also demonstrates SMEs have a real role to play bringing to market innovative offers that offer's government departments and agencies value for money.

GDS announced today their third major update to their Transactional Explorer service. The list shows the breadth of transactional services provided by the government, from tax-based transactions with volumes in the millions per year, to applications with only a few.

As part of the announcement was the inclusion for the first time the publish of data on digital take-up: the number of transactions completed through digital channels. The agency stated "As departments start to implement their digital strategies, and as services are being transformed, the Explorer tool will track the rise in digital take-up and the effect this has in reducing costs per transaction."

Cloud First at last - at least across central government. That's the long-awaited announcement from the Cabinet Office today as minister Francis Maude backs a mandate to ensure that Cloud is the first port of call for the public sector.

In future, when procuring new or existing services, public sector organisations must consider and fully evaluate potential Cloud solutions first – before they consider any other option.

Spend by GCloud amounts to circa £18m to date. In the spirit of transparency the Cabinet Office release data related to this spend at GCloud sales information. An interesting analysis and breakdown of this spend has been conducted by Andy Powell who is head of research at Eduserv.

Andy Powell's analysis can be found at this site. He concludes the following: