The Home Office is ready to rip up large IT contracts and use the G-Cloud to overhaul its tech infrastructure.
The Government department is set to become the latest Whitehall division to use the public procurement framework to tender to SMB IT suppliers.
CTO Denise McDonagh used a pre-recorded webinar yesterday to invite smaller cloud firms to be part of its transformation project, ‘Reset4’, claiming that by 2020 the Home Office "will look very different".
She added: "Reset4 was established to change the way we build, procure and manage our IT to ensure we can deliver the high-quality responsive service the Home Office needs.
"Between now and 2016, we will move away from being locked into massive end-to-end contracts, or tied to particular technologies, to a model in which we have far greater flexibility to change our IT in response to changing needs."
The CTO is keen to replace two large IT contracts with Fujitsu and Atos that will expire in 2016, separating its technology needs into four distinct areas: end user computing, hosting and systems, networks and service integration.
Home Office head of technology strategy, Simon Bond, confirmed in the webinar: "We aim to move away from long-term monolithic contracts and replace those with short-term, agile, flexible and disaggregated services."
The G-Cloud will be used as often as possible, according to McDonagh, but the department will use the Public Services Network (PSN) for most of its networking requirements.
Local government IT body Socitm recently denounced the G-Cloud as not meeting councils’ needs, but said PSN was of interest to local authorities.
The Home Office news comes after think tank the Institute for Government revealed that the ‘Big Six’ IT suppliers netted a total spend of £4.3bn via Government contracts last year, though the figure has been disputed by one department.
