Capgemini scores £150m contract to help Student Loan Company overcome its IT problems 5 years after £50m superfail
- Reference: 1619090244
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/04/22/cagmini_150m_deal_student_loan_company/
- Source link:
The outsourcing and consultancy firm is to become a "Strategic Partner for Platform Delivery and Technology Services" to the non-departmental public body, according to a tender notice. It is expected "to deliver a wide range of services across our Platform Delivery and Technology Services area with the SLC Technology Group".
The contract started on 15 April 2021 and is set to run until 14 April 2028, [1]the document said.
[2]
Capgemini joins fellow French firm Atos, which SLC appointed "Strategic Partner for Customer Software Delivery" in [3]September last year under a seven-year contract worth £216m .
The two suppliers have some ground to make up to modernise the loan company's IT estate.
In 2015, [4]SLC wasted £50m on a canned IT transformation project , designed to provide a "digital by default" system to cope with a major increase in student numbers. Launched in 2013 in conjunction with the Government Digital Service, it was supposed to be a "robust and agile customer-centred student finance system" to tackle the "very poor" student experience due to a lack of case information.
The plan was to introduce a modern, integrated, and flexible IT system to enable "the safe delivery of Higher Education reform, including changes to borrowers' repayment terms including variable interest rates."
[5]
HCL had been appointed as a delivery partner to build replacement Core Ledger and Security modules, with three online applications going live in January 2014. The Register understands that problems arose between integrating the internally developed software and the core engine provided by HCL.
By July 2019, the situation had not much improved. A Department for Education review into SLC's operations found that the "current technology architecture was created in the 1990s for a much simpler, lower volume service.
Student Loans Company burns £50 million in IT project superfail [6]READ MORE
"The need to upgrade the SLC's ageing systems and adopt new technologies is now critical," [7]the report said [PDF]. "As new products have been introduced, scalability challenges and limited re-use of business rules have led to a fragmented digital offering and an inflexible ICT estate which significantly lengthens delivery timescales, pushes up customer calls, and increases the cost and risk of operational failure."
It concluded: "Despite some incremental improvements, the SLC will need to address the pressing issue of its overwhelmed and outdated IT infrastructure, as well as growing its diagnostics and data management capabilities."
SLC responded by [8]launching in February 2020 a £200m procurement , in which it promised to "transform the commercial framework and delivery models leveraged across SLC's estate when working with strategic technology partners."
[9]
At the time, CIO Stephen Campbell said: "This is the first stage of delivering a new technology model that will see us working with a small number of strategic partners to develop, deliver and support our technology estate and digital services to customers."
In its [10]2020-2023 corporate plan , published in December 2020, SLC pledged to "address our technological debt – upgrade and simplify our IT systems to reduce their interdependencies, outdated components and total cost of ownership."
The country will be watching to see if Capgemini, Atos, and SLC itself are up to the task. ®
Get our [11]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/d4faff93-7a33-416a-a8ea-7b8e744c238a
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YIGdnSHgAjjPQkSJBubyfAAAAJA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/ad5cc8e4-6c21-4d1c-88fa-cacf3482f9fa
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/13/student_loans_company_it_disaster/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YIGdnSHgAjjPQkSJBubyfAAAAJA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/13/student_loans_company_it_disaster/
[7] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/847982/TR_master_external_document.pdf
[8] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/student-loans-company-commences-strategic-partner-procurement
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YIGdnSHgAjjPQkSJBubyfAAAAJA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/slc-corporate-plan-2020-21-to-2022-23
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Realism
don't ever let anyone get anything free of charge
Well someone has to pay for it, so why not at least try to get the person who has benefited be the one who is taxed extra to pay for it. Student loans are quite like an extra band of income tax, though plenty of "students" never earn enough to have to pay it back.
Re: Realism
Someone has to pay for it
Yes someone does, but if the government want a highly educated workforce then shouldn't they be funding the education system as they will benefit from the higher taxes they can collect from the more highly skilled (thus better paid) workforce in the future.
The phrase here is: "free at point of use".
Re: Realism
The high interest rate that stops most students ever paying off the loan is one of the things that makes it more like an extra band of tax
Re: Realism
education is a public good.
Re: Realism
"why not at least try to get the person who has benefited be the one who is taxed extra to pay for it?"
In the good old days, nobody had to try to do that because it happened automatically. University graduates got better paying jobs. So they paid proportionately more in income tax and NI. They paid more in indirect taxes (VAT, fuel duty, stamp duty, etc) too because they had more money to spend.
Re: why not at least try to get the person who has benefited
From what I see the biggest group who benefited by increasing the amount of people heading to university is those who can claim they have lowered youth unemployment and those in charge of universities.
If the person gained benefit from going to college then likely they will be paying with higher taxes over their working lives as they will gain better paid employment - but this is becoming less likely than in past. You'd expect that under normal supply and demand when you increase supply, now add in the increasing tendcy to shift expensive non management jobs to lower cost regions and you are hitting falling value in degrees - so I am not convinced degrees are generally cost effective for the person studying for them now.
Businesses should be gaining benefit for better educated workers - but they seem reluctant to pay for it now.
SLC is a nonprofit? That 6.5% interest rate must be going straight to the banks then.
It makes sense really. Why complete government and government related I.T. projects (I think student loans are government related but not 100% sure) when you can pass your failure's round each other for more cash. Why pay 50m for failure?
Especially when you can pay 150m.
WTAF
AFAIK The SLC has one job to do. Finance and recover student loans over a generational period.
How the actual f*ck does it have an IT estate in the £100's m cost range?
robust and agile ?
In my experience those tend to be mutually exclusive.
Cap G?
Cap G you say? So instead of failing to re-architect their IT internally, they can now fail to re-architect their IT into Azure. Hurrah! trebles all round!
Realism
Given all the expenditure and waste, the student loans scheme is clearly not a way of recovering the costs of education. It looks much more like social engineering on the basis of "don't ever let anyone get anything free of charge".