The UK’s Ministry of Justice has signed a £22m, five-year deal with Accenture as it looks to implement a shared services platform across its human resources, payroll, finance and procurement divisions.
The new platform will work throughout MoJ’s business network, including Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service, Her Majesty’s Prison Service and the Ministry of Justice Head Office. It is hoped the deal will smooth the running of its ERP system.
Accenture will work alongside Savvis and Steria to deliver the platform, which the companies estimate will save the MoJ £28m per year by 2014.
Accenture’s role will be that of systems integrator and will involve the running and maintaining of the Shared Services IT Service Desk throughout the five-year deal. Steria will deliver the Oracle ERP application development while Savvis will provide its Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform, enabling it to run in the cloud.
Over 80,000 people will be using the platform when it eventually goes live, which is expected to be sometime in the first half of 2013. It is one of the first pan-departmental shared service solutions in the UK central government, Accenture claimed.
"Efficiency is the cornerstone of transformation in the MoJ and this is our third significant shared services contract in the public sector. We will work alongside the in-house team to implement an agile system that, for the first time, will provide a common operating platform across the department," added John Torrie, CEO of Steria UK.
The deal fits in with the government’s G-Cloud initiative, a wide-ranging project that aims to create a secure cloud infrastructure, hosting services and applications to be used across the government and local public sector bodies around the UK. However the scheme has not been universally popular, with David Wilde, CIO at Westminster City Council telling CBR he doesn’t quite get the idea behind it.
"I think the idea of an overarching G-Cloud for government begs the question: What’s different about G-Cloud? What sets it apart from PSN or managed services? Why would we want to create something with a G on the front rather than just work with the industry to make them deliver what we want? The underlying stuff within there makes sense, I just don’t get the brand," Wilde told CBR.
