Why Is The Met Police Still Outsourcing Multi-Million IT Deals To Huge Suppliers?

Camden Council’s Shiraji explains that the SIAM model is a “completely reasonable way to chunk up everything that IT does”, but states that the mistake people make is that the company in question can have a long-term contract with a single systems integrator or vendor overlooking those towers – in the Met Police’s case this is Atos – and that vendor can underestimate how complex the orchestration is.

“I think SIAM falls over because of poor vendor selection and not having the right intelligence capability in the orchestration and integration layers – and believing that you can just outsource it,” he states.

Met response

When TechWeekEurope put questions to the Met Police on the SIAM tower, it said:

“It is felt that the SIAM Tower model requires more time to be ‘bedded in’ before we are in position to discuss”.

It is hard to determine whether the approach the organisation has taken is flexible like many of the public sector IT leaders have suggested – or whether there are issues, such as those described by Shiraji.

However, Josh Hewer, a senior analyst at Kable suggests that the total the Met Police has spent on the tower contracts are less than what they had been spending previously – and that this has all been funded by the £340 million sale of New Scotland Yard.

A Stepping stone

He believes that the choice to go down the SIAM tower model route is a logical one. This is primarily because its old £115 million-a-year contract with Capgemini, along with other deals with a selected few partners had left it with a lack of in-house IT skills.

“If [the Met] wants to go down the insourcing route, which it effectively does, then where does it get the skilled-staff from? It has designed a series of contracts which reflects what should be done and that is suitable for its needs,” says Hewer.

He explains that that the SIAM tower model is a stepping stone for where the Met Police eventually wants to be.

“It’s difficult from where the Met was from a standing start [to insource] – it takes a lot of resources. TfL on the other hand were very good with IT and had an in-house workforce, the Met didn’t,” Hewer says.

Government role

He believes that criticism of public sector IT deals should be directed at the government, because of a lack of guidelines on the transitioning period.

“The Cabinet Office and GDS are good at saying this is where you are and where you want to go – what they aren’t good with is explaining how you get there”.

Hewer also defended the Met Police’s decision to not select an SME for its tower contracts.

“If you’re migrating 25,000 users to a new IT system, SMEs can do it, but the Met is going to be risk averse, and the theory for them is that [a larger supplier] is more likely to succeed,” says Hewer.

But the Met Police – which has been criticised heavily for its IT in the past – also has its faults, he adds.

Met has its faults

For example, Hewer is bemused by the Met Police’s decision to not tie its mobile strategy along with the tower model. The Met is buying 20,000 tablets, but it didn’t wrap that procurement into the end-user tower, suggesting that there is an issue with integration in the Met’s IT strategy. The same can be said with its command and control services, which are being procured by operations rather than IT.

There may well be logic in the way the Met Police has undergone its procurement for its tower contracts. However, questions remain over how flexible the contracts are, and how much influence Atos has over the Met’s strategy.

One public sector CIO refused to comment on this article because he was aware of some of the issues at the Met Police and felt too close to the situation, suggesting that there are some wider problems behind the scenes to be tackled; the lack of integration with mobility and command and control are examples of this.

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