The Department for Education (DfE) has agreed on a two-year, £8.3 million contract with Cognizant for data science services.
The contract notice says the company will provide managed services to support critical services , projects and programmes at the DfE, with activities including development, DevOps, architectural support and data engineering in the organisation.
It emphasises the importance of data science to the Education and Skills Funding Agency within the DfE, saying that data service provides functions including data capture, operations, governance, visualisation and analytics to support funding, payments, performance monitoring and policy development.
It also points to the need to support the use of emerging technologies.
Cognizant is already a significant player in the development of data services for central government and its agencies. In recent months the Food Standards Agency has revealed its work with the company on an algrorithmic tool to prioritise inspections of food businesses, HM Revenue and Customs has contracted it for support of its Data Provisioning Service, and last year awarded a contract to support its digital applications development.
