Reviewing IT outsourcing contracts in Government.
Computer Weekly have reported that the Cabinet Office is planning to review the long-term IT outsourcing deals let by Government between 1995–2008, a background document seen by Computer Weekly states:
“The opaque nature of service delivery hides the fact that many [of these contracts] are not good value for money.”
We’ve analysed this market here; despite public announcements that the market needed reforming and the cuts to spending the market for outsourced IT services is still growing.
This market, along with many others, would benefit from greater transparency of contracting, not just details of who won what but also how a contract progresses over time, including amendments to the contract and the spend going to the supplier against that contract.
A genuinely transparent view of contracts would have given all of us clear sight of the contracts that were not delivering and would also have made it clear which suppliers performed the best, whilst highlighting the suppliers most likely to fail.
Which is why the work of www.open-contracting.org is so important, it makes it very easy to publish meaningful data on contracting, we’ve written about open contracting here.
Opaque purchasing obstructs fair competition and rewards failure, true transparency encourages competition and reduces uncertainty in tenders. If Government wants to save money, they should start by declaring that the details of all contracts over £10m should be published using the open contracting data standard.
