Environment department retains major consultancy to monitor the performance of its software and deliver maintenance services, which Defra claims will enable civil service professionals to spend time on strategic planning
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has signed a near-£100m five-year tech outsourcing deal to “allow its IT function to continue focusing on longer term, more strategic planning”.
On 14 October, the department entered into a contact with Accenture for the provision of “application maintenance and support (AMS) services”.
The agreement covers monitoring of Defra’s estate of software programs, which will involve “collecting data from applications to measure their performance and availability [which] can then be used to proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact users”, according to a newly published procurement notice.
Also addressed by the deal is maintenance services, such as “continuous updating and modifying of applications… [and a] constant re-evaluating process [which] means that faults can be corrected”.
The third key strand of the engagement is tech support offerings through which “specialist support that can be contacted by receiving escalations from the service desk when they are unable to resolve a user’s problem”. The issues in question will “always [be] on a minor tactical scale as the focus is to enable the application to function – as opposed to large-scale application development”, the notice adds.
The delivery of these three service areas via an outsourced provider is intended to enable the department’s in-house tech team to dedicate themselves to longer-term planning and strategy.
“Typically, leveraging AMS services enables an organisation to improve internal efficiency and increase user-satisfaction,” the notice says. “This is because internal IT teams are not having to spend time fixing applications that are not working as the end user expects them to.”
Related content
- Defra to spend £43m this year on addressing ageing apps
- Defra launches developer recruitment drive
- Oracle and IBM win £850m deal for DWP, Home Office, MoJ and Defra shared services
It adds: “In Defra’s case, there are also regulatory requirements that must be adhered to, which makes the ongoing support of multiple applications even more critical. As well as ensuring that applications do not stop working, the AMS supplier will work to reduce the impact from outages and release fixes if a critical incident occurs. Performing these duties limits the impact to farmers, borders and trade as a number of Defra’s application are integral to them carrying out their jobs. Solving critical issues is also key as the alternative is working via sub-optimal methods or workarounds that can cost significantly more.”
A report published in late 2022 by the National Audit Office found that about a third of the nearly 2,000 applications in use at the time across the Defra Group were no longer supported by the supplier.
The review was released just over a year into an £80m departmental programme to address the cybersecurity dangers of the organisation’s legacy estate. As of January, this initiative had undertaken mitigative work on 180 applications that represented the most severe level of risk.
As well as the Accenture deal – which will be worth about £94.6m after the next half decade, once VAT is included – Defra has also awarded a range of other multimillion-pound contracts for software development and support in the past couple of years.
Between February 2023 and March 2024, the department has awarded three discrete engagements to IBM – including a £28.4m AMS agreement that concludes in January 2025 – worth a cumulative total of £44.1m. Also expiring early next year is a £9.5m engagement with Capgemini for the provision of application development services.
The latest AMS contract attracted bids from three suppliers before Accenture was ultimately chosen.
