Whitehall finance department is required to store and process sensitive data for up to two decades, and is seeking to introduce new technologies to help automate procedures for information management

HM Treasury has awarded a seven-figure contract intended to support the introduction of automation and artificial intelligence tools to help manage the processing of information across a period of up to two decades.

Newly published commercial information reveals that the finance department last week entered into an 18-month arrangement with Salisbury-based public sector digital specialist SVGC. The firm has been retained – a deal worth £1.3m, inclusive of VAT – to deliver an “HMT information management system upgrade”.

The text of the contract reveals that various “legal frameworks [and] standards” require the Treasury to store and process data “for up to 20 years”, depending on the circumstance.

The document adds that the department currently “uses an Azure/SharePoint-based electronic document records management system (EDRMS), called Info Store”. While the “Azure platform is evergreen and has added functionality, the system information management processes – including those for  archive, retention, and disposition – are about 10 years old, and the authority is seeking to upgrade, not replace, this system by adding new technologies to automate the 20-year through life management process”.

These upgrades will involve “adding AI technology to automate through-life management of its information/records holding and create efficiencies and cost savings”.

The scheduled 18-month lifespan of the contract will cover upgrade work, while an optional six-month extension would provisionally address “early-life support of the upgraded system”.

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“The system upgrade includes a discovery exercise to understand the status of the authority’s c18 million digital records, work to assure these records, work to design, develop and implement upgrades to the… information management system to automate through-life management of the records collection within its Azure tenancy, and handover of the upgraded system and transition it into BaU service.”

In delivering this research, design and implementation work will be required to work with various other IT suppliers to the Treasury, including Wipro, CI, NTT and Littlefish, the contract says. SVGC will also be expected to collaborate with Foreign Office arm’s-length body FCDO Services, which runs some tech systems on behalf of the Treasury.

The Info Store system is described in the contract as a “permission-managed system designed to mirror the organisational structure of the [Treasury], where each group has its own persistent Info Store site containing its team’s document libraries”.

Alongside to this core central repository, the department also “uses archive sites to manage old information/records as opposed to using ‘archive in place’ [models] and the authority has recently established a new archive site called the Knowledge Store which it is in the process of populating by moving old content from Info Store”, the commercial document says.

These archive facilities are supplemented by “Team Sites [for] internal collaboration, Policy Partnership Sites [for] external collaboration and other sites for a range of other operational requirements”.