Public body awards seven-year contract to consultancy
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The Student Loans Company has added Capgemini to its strategic partner programme in a long-term deal worth £150m.
Newly published procurement documents reveal that the arm’s-length body entered into a deal with the consultancy on 15 April. The contract runs until 2028.
Scant information is provided on what the deal covers, but the contract notice indicates that it relates to the “procurement of a strategic partner for platform delivery and technology services who will be able to deliver a wide range of services across our Platform Delivery and Technology Services area with the SLC Technology Group”.
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The Student Loans Company is in the midst of a wide-scale reform of its IT estate and technology strategy. As part of which, it announced in February last year that it would be “undertaking a programme to appoint a number of strategic technology partners to support delivery of its technology refresh and modernisation agenda”.
The first stage of this initiative was related to “the development of customer-enablement services”. Following a procurement process, Atos was appointed as the SLC’s strategic partner in this area. The firm was appointed to a seven-year contract worth £216m beginning on 1 September 2020.
“This ambitious programme will transform the commercial framework and delivery models leveraged across SLC’s estate when working with strategic technology partners, developing enhanced capabilities while delivering better value for public money,” the SLC said in February 2020.
The IT and digital overhaul came on the back of a review, published in 2019, which identified an “inflexible” and “fragile” technology infrastructure as one of the major challenges facing the company. Over the course of a seven-month investigation, officials from the Department for Education also found that the organisation had not kept up with the growing popularity and increased functionality of online services.
