The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has agreed on a major contract with consultancy Accenture for applications maintenance and support services.
The agreement came into force in October and is set to run for five years, with the newly published contract award notice saying it is worth £94.4 million.
It identifies three main elements to the services, the first being the monitoring of the performance and availability of applications to identify and quickly resolve issues.
The second is application maintenance, with updates and modifications, with a constant re-evaluation to ensure faults can be correct and performance continually improved. Third is specialist support to fix issues with varying levels of priority, always on a tactical scale to ensure the applications can continue to function.
Strategic focus
“By outsourcing the provision of these services to a specialist external provider, Defra can allow its IT function to continue focusing on longer term, more strategic planning,” the award notice says.
“Typically, leveraging AMS services enables an organisation to improve internal efficiency and increase user satisfaction. 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.”
It adds that Accenture will work to reduce the impact from any outages and release fixes, as this will affect farmers, borders and trade.
