Watch as UK government magically makes value of £500m framework contract swell to four times the size
- Reference: 1603969205
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/10/29/2bn_uk_pangovernment_tender/
- Source link:
In a [1]tender notice published this week, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, acting through the Crown Commercial Service, asked for vendor bids to join a framework worth £2bn, split between lots covering technology strategy and services design, transition and transformation, operational services, major services, transformation programmes, service integration, and management.
A [2]prior information notice published in April this year was designed to offer an early market engagement and price any potential deals up to £500m, a quarter of the eventual price. Clearly, early market engagement offered a least one outcome: convincing the government to spend more money.
There is no guarantee that £2bn will be handed to suppliers during the four-year deal; it is just a strong indication of what could be spent.
The tender is split into five lots – one of which, lot 3, is split into four components.
Taking a deep dive into the near bottomless pit of the IT services listed, technology strategy and services design includes such things as capability analysis, enterprise architecture, and technology gap assessments.
The largest lot, operational services, includes end-user services, operational management, technical management, and application and data management. With all its various components, it could be worth a total of £1.2bn.
Public bodies able to use the contract are set to include central government departments and their arm's-length agencies, non-departmental public bodies, NHS organisations, and local authorities.
In 2020, the UK public sector has seen a spree of big frameworks coming onto the market, including a [3]£400m competition for software including ERP, human capital management (HCM), procurement and supply chain, information management and reporting, also from the Cabinet Office.
Meanwhile, the [4]NHS Shared Business Services got in on the act too just this month, awarding a £500m everything-and-the-kitchen-sink framework to a long list of resellers. ®
Get our [5]Tech Resources
[1] https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:514766-2020:TEXT:EN:HTML&src=0
[2] https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:068836-2020:TEXT:EN:HTML
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/05/uk_government_tender_erp/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/22/nhs_award_500m_framework/
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Lead us into our high tech utopia, oh wise and great ones.......
I get the impression that the UK government spends so much time and money on IT strategy analysis, transformation planning and many other flavours of vapourous grand visiony nonsense that they never actually get round to building things that do things.
Makes sense from a cabinet that all like to see themselves as modern, super performing tech CEOs, rather than the clueless incompetent berks, all with the same sort of humanities degrees, that they really are.
Re: Lead us into our high tech utopia, oh wise and great ones.......
This is exactly what it's like working on an IT project run by the civil service.
Re: Lead us into our high tech utopia, oh wise and great ones.......
Yes. I've seen some of that in my career. No one technical, or even tech-adjacent, is generally involved in decision-making. Makes it so easy for massive IT consultancies to get big contracts; anyone honest enough to tell a doctor or a soldier that what they want will cost X isn't going to get the gig. It'll end up costing 2X the way they do it, but they pick the supplier that says it'll be done for 0.1X.
The only time I've seen decent tech knowledge at senior levels is at [1]GDS . Don't know if they're still like that, but it was pretty cool.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service
Lest one does not know of the dangers present and guaranteed to be launched into concerted action
What one has to be both extremely mindful and particularly wary of, for it is not conducive to the greater functioning good of novel operations, is that private contractors engaged are not in reality/actuality, central government departments and their arm's-length agencies aka capitalising cronies, for that sort of incestuous liaison is an abiding temptation which has always proven itself to be eventually, and sometimes even surprisingly quickly, self-defeating and incredibly destructive to itself.
It is certain more than just immensely wise nowadays, because of all the new fangled and entangling facilities and utilities and abilities readily available for practical virtual use and which can almost immediately be morphed into sustained and systemic abuse and misuse, not to incur the ire of legitimate novel private contractors with such ancient shenanigans.
Final cost
"There is no guarantee that £2bn will be handed to suppliers during the four-year deal"
Well obviously. They should be able to get it up to at least £8bn by then.