Government planning £1.5bn IT services framework

The government has issued a pre-tender notice for ICT services worth up to £1.5 billion, as part of its ICT Strategy which aims to cut costs and improve procurement.

The government has also previously declared it wants to use more open source software and award a larger chunk of IT contracts to SMEs. It also wants to award smaller contracts to help save money.The pre-tender notice states that the Government Procurement Service intends to set up an application development, delivery and support services framework.

The framework agreement planned is wide ranging and could be worth anything between £150 million and £1.5 billion, dependent upon how many departments take up the deals.

The framework covers ERP deployment, sourcing & procurement, finance management, human resources, customer relationship management, project and portfolio management, information management and business intelligence, data discovery and mining, data integration tools, and data warehousing.

It also covers big data and master data management, enterprise content management, electronic document and records management, web content management, workflow and case management, geographic information systems, application development and security.

Interested suppliers have until 16 February to request further information. This is also the date when a supplier event to discuss the framework will be held at the Government Procurement Service in Norwich.

In spite of the concerted efforts in the IT strategy to aim for more efficiency, according to the National Audit Office (NAO) the government is not measuring whether the strategy is actually working. The NAO said the Cabinet Office had "not yet developed a system for measuring the extent to which the strategy is resulting in sustained change". It said Whitehall needed much clearer timescales and baseline measurements.

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