Cardiff Council has signed a 15 year deal with Tata Consultancy Services, reportedly worth £150m.
Under the ‘insourcing’ deal, TCS will work alongside Cardiff’s own IT department. Cardiff Council said none of its staff will be transferred to TCS.
The deal will support Cardiff’s ‘transformational agenda’ in which it is attempting to improve shared services across public sector bodies in the city, alongside improvements in citizen services. It beat IBM and BT to the contract.
The supplier will integrate different software platforms used by the council, including SAP, as well as focusing on workflow, automating business processes, and improving knowledge management and business intelligence.
Cardiff is the first council to work with TCS, which has work in central government including a contract with the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission. The council put a £150 million value on the deal when it announced the tender, but a spokesperson at Cardiff Council could not be reached to confirm the final value of the deal. TCS declined to comment.
The council expects to use TCS’ DigiGOVTM platform, which is designed for public sector organisations. The platform has been used in different parts of India to tie together various local government IT systems and to create single patient record systems for hospitals, but has not been used in the UK.
Councillor Mark Stephens, executive member for finance and service Delivery at the council, said: "We have been very clear in Cardiff that we need to think differently about how we do things and be more innovative about how we deliver the services we need to provide to put the citizen at the heart of everything we do.
“TCS will help us to create the technology platform necessary to achieve the Council’s objectives and support our commitment to citizen-centric services.”
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Tola Sargeant, analyst at TechMarketView, said she “wouldn’t be surprised to see more public sector organisations turning to lower cost offshore providers as spending cuts begin to bite”.
She highlighted comments by Cardiff Council leader Rodney Berman who said that it was “clear” that the public sector needed to adapt to the “effect of the recent global recession and the ongoing squeeze on the funding that is available for spending on public services”.
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