Edinburgh looks to open up IT provision with £2bn tender
As huge BT partnership nears end, city claims it is 'not practical a single-supplier approach will deliver best results'
The City of Edinburgh Council is looking to increase its use of local SMBs as its 15-year ICT services contract with BT enters its last 24 months.
The Scottish capital has issued a tender for services worth a potential £2bn-plus, and is looking to appoint a new service provider to work with for a period of up to 19 years.
The city handed a big-ticket, 10-year outsourcing contract to BT in 2001, which was extended for a further half-decade upon the conclusion of its initial term three years ago. The deal is now set to end on 31 March 2016, and a tender inviting bids from firms wishing to succeed the telco was published this week.
The contract will run for a minimum of seven and a maximum of 19 years, depending on whether two five-year renewals and a two-year transition period are taken up. Its minimum worth is pegged at £150m, with a maximum value of £2bn, excluding VAT.
Between three and 10 suppliers are expected to be invited to bid for the deal, which also provides scope for most other local authorities in Scotland to procure ICT services, as well as a number of national and local health, law enforcement, education, and other public sector bodies.
'Single-supplier approach not practical'
A little over three months ago the council's Finance and Resources Committee published a report on the successes and shortcomings of the BT partnership, details of how the transition will be implemented, and what it intends to achieve with the new contract.
The report makes it clear that the city wants to improve service levels and achieve "much better value for money": a minimum annual cost reduction of £5.5m on the FY13 core spending figure of £26m is identified as the target.
The committee also signalled Edinburgh's intent to keep pace with central government's pledge to award 25 per cent of public business to SMBs. The city wants a quarter of business via the new ICT deal to go to smaller, locally based firms.
"Current ICT market trends (eg cloud computing) mean that it is not practical that a single-supplier approach will deliver the best results for the City of Edinburgh Council," says the committee report. "Making use of the market will allow the council to take advantage of ‘best-of-breed' services and harness external capabilities and innovation."
The committee also reveals that a refresh of 16,000 client devices was completed in October, with the new contract designed to "capture optimum IT refresh cycles... [of] every five years". This means that the incoming deal's initial seven-year term will encompass two refreshes, with an additional one in each of the optional five-year extensions.
Some £1m has reportedly been set aside to fund the tender and bidding process, with the council hoping to have a transitioning window of between nine months and a year before the contract ends.
The tender notice outlines that Edinburgh is "expressly looking for a solution to its ICT service provision which is sufficiently flexible and scalable so as to provide a long-term resolution that offers significant future-proofing".
"The nature of the partnership to be procured, the volume of services to be provided, the method by which those services are delivered and the specific type of services to be delivered may change over the lifetime of the contract," explains the notice.
"The service provider may also be required to participate in the transformation of the City of Edinburgh Council business and provide change management services in connection with the delivery of the ICT-enabled services."