The department has awarded a contract to enable ongoing improvements to a core data platform, as well as its migration from a legacy environment to a new AWS hosting provision
The Department for Work and Pensions has signed a multimillion-pound deal to deliver technical support and ongoing transformation of its management information platform.
The DWP’s central management information (MI) systems incorporate a range of data on the breadth of the department’s workforce, operations and services. According to newly published commercial documents, “DWP MI provides a sustainable and scalable reporting solution using data platforms designed for automation and industrialisation [and] provides a common set of reporting services and solutions across data, metrics, and MI reporting delivery, which support decision making across all DWP lines of business”.
To support the ongoing operation of this platform – as well as transformation activities – the DWP entered into an initial 21-month contract with Capgemini on 2 September. The deal can be extended to a further five months, which would take total spending to £10.8m plus VAT – equating to £13m.
The deal covers four core areas, the first of which is the “cross-cutting” remit of the MI platform, including “supporting DWP-wide product teams to review their MI product development approach and influence/support their architectural design, so it is in alignment with agreed patterns”, the text of the contract says. This area will also address “continuous improvement across the service, based on observations and feedback from stakeholders, internal to DWP MI and external”.
The second strand of the agreement covers the MI platform’s “business-as-usual” operations, encompassing support for the “continuation of the BAU processes providing post-development services to stakeholders of the DWP MI programme”.
The third track addressed by the Capgemini deal will provide support for the core components that comprise the platform itself, including “infrastructure and data management”.
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The final element of the contract is focused on a “transformation” programme. This will include “the migration activity to a new AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform from the legacy AWS platform, and the subsequent running and maintaining of this new, strategic AWS platform”, the contract says.
The document adds the supplier’s “continuous management” of the department’s MI platform will encompass services “including but not limited to data refresh, access management and incident management, for all products already migrated to BAU running, and all future products”. Capgemini will also be tasked with the “identification and deployment of improvements to the product-level data refresh processes, including automation of activities where appropriate”.
The firm will also provide “ongoing management of BAU resource capacity to ensure there are resources to support new deployments”.
For any issues encountered by the platform, the contract also covers the provision of “triaging, responding to and resolving incidents for all.. MI products”.
The transformation element of the engagement will largely be delivered over the next six months, the contract indicates.
The document adds: “This will comprise the following activities: plan, design and develop strategic AWS platform aligned to requirements provided; new platform running and maintenance; [and] continuous management and development of infrastructure platform to support the running of strategic DWP MI AWS platform.”
This will include the “migration of existing Power BI MI products from the legacy AWS platform to the strategic AWS platform” followed by the agreement of a “dual running period with BAU to ensure suitable decommission plan of legacy platform products”.
The provider will then be expected to complete the decommissioning process once all systems and data have been moved to the new environment.
