The Ministry of Justice has become one of the first UK government departments to truly embrace the Cloud and shared services. It has awarded contracts for a five-year shared services programme, which has the potential to be a poster-child for the coalition government’s IT policy. The shared service will deliver a common HR, payroll, finance and procurement system across the MoJ business network, which includes the Courts & Tribunals Service, HM Prison Service and the MoJ. The pan-departmental programme is expected to deliver savings of £28m per annum by 2014 and be fully operational by spring 2013.
The MoJ has chosen three suppliers to deliver the Shared Services Programme and each has been awarded a relatively small contract (by previous government standards). Accenture is to be the overall systems integrator and run the Shared Services IT Service Desk under a five-year deal worth £22m. Steria will implement an Oracle ERP system that will serve as a common operating platform across the department and, in the future, its associated agencies (the value of Steria’s contract was not disclosed but we assume its scale mirrors the other two deals). Both these suppliers are well known to the UK public sector and will welcome the chance to be part of a high profile shared services programme (assuming it goes to plan!).
But by far the most interesting choice of supplier is cloud infrastructure and hosting provider Savvis. Savvis will provide the MoJ with "Infrastructure-as-a-Service" (IaaS) under a £14m/5-yr contract. The US-based player is making a strong push into the UK public sector market with its eye on the “G-Cloud” prize. It has just launched its ‘Government Wider Service’, a secure IaaS platform that it is making available to all government departments and third-party suppliers in the UK. Both the MoJ and Home Office will now be using GWS to deliver centralised applications. If these projects go well we can see its GWS offering appealing to other government departments, not least because of the reductions to upfront capital costs and quicker deployment times that IaaS enables. Savvis is clearly ‘one to watch’ for other incumbent and would-be infrastructure providers to UK government.