The Synergy cluster of four of government’s biggest departments, collectively employing almost half of all civil servants, have assessed four joint bids and chosen their preferred software and SI combo
Four of government’s biggest departments have picked Oracle and IBM to fulfil shared-services agreements worth more than £850m over the next decade.
Led by the Department for Work and Pensions, the Synergy group of departments also contains the Home Office, Ministry of Justice, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
As part of the ongoing rollout of government’s Shared Services Strategy, the four departments and their various arm’s-length agencies will implement a centralised and cloud-based Oracle back-office software infrastructure. As lead department of the cluster, the DWP entered into a 10-year deal with the software vendor on 30 August.
Alongside this agreement is a five-year contract with IBM, which will serve as the project’s system-integration partner. This will entail implementing the underlying enterprise resource planning technology, as well as working with the four departments and Oracle to “jointly develop a new common operating model (COM) and introduce a new user-centric service including common data standards,” according to a newly published commercial notice.
“The COM design will continually evolve throughout… five programme delivery phases,” the notice added. “As a result, benefits will also continue to evolve over time. This will help identify additional benefits for the programme and provide more robust data and narrative to justify the current benefits profile.”
During the tendering process, systems integrators and ERP software firms were asked by the departments to team up and put forward joint submissions. The Oracle-IBM union beat off bids from three other duos.
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The contracts with the two winning bidders are cumulatively worth about £853m – once tax is included – and both deals can be extended for up to two further years. A discrete financial value for each agreement was not provided.
The notice said: “The [programme] seeks to deliver value and efficiency across all transaction services, including the separation of technology from service centres. The Covid pandemic, and the challenging fiscal environment that followed as a result, has heightened the drive and need for more effective and efficient delivery by all government departments. Key to this ambition is the ability to capture, manage and improve the quality of finance and HR data to enable better-informed decisions. The Synergy programme will drive significant business transformation across four major departments in support of this ambition.”
All four departments already use Oracle as their main back-office software platform, with the Home Office working directly with the vendor to support its deployment. The DWP, Defra, and MoJ, meanwhile, are currently supported by SSCL – a specialist public-sector shared-services provider formed as a joint venture between the Cabinet Office and consultancy Sopra Steria.
Across the course of an eight-year timeframe and total expected spending of £2.5bn , the Synergy programme will roll out infrastructure and services to a cumulative total of 250,000 civil servants.
Alongside this cluster – which represents government’s most delivery-focused departments – is: the policy-centric Matrix cluster of nine departments; a Defence grouping for the Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces; an Overseas cluster largely comprised of the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office; and the HMRC-led Unity cluster, which also houses the Department for Transport and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.
