Ministry of Justice Shifts To The Cloud

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has assigned three contracts for the core technology of a shared enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to Accenture, Steria and Savvis, with the technology set to go live in the spring of 2013.

The technology will include an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud offering from Savvis which marks one of the first times a central government department has used cloud computing on such a large scale.

Shift to the cloud

Under the five-year deals the companies will construct a system to handle human resources, payroll, finance and procurement operations for 80,000 users under the MoJ’s Common Operating Model.

The system will cover the MoJ’s head office, the Courts and Tribunals Service and the Prison Service.

Under the £14m deal with Savvis the company will provide cloud-based infrastructure via its Government Wide Service (GWS) platform, a move expected to cut costs.

“The platform eliminates the extensive and costly design, construction and testing process typically associated with infrastructure required for this type of project,” said Neill Cresswell, Savvis’ managing director for Europe, Middle East and Asia, in a statement.

The Home Office also hosts applications on GWS, which provides remote access to systems on a pay-per-use basis.

Accenture’s £22m contract will see it providing design and systems integration and provisioning an IT service desk.

Under Steria’s £20m deal the company will handle business applications development, consolidation of legacy data systems and the implementation and maintenance of an ERP system built on Oracle e-Business Suite R12.

Savings anticipated

This system will handle case management, document management and the management of information applications.

The companies said the system should provide savings of £28m per year by 2014.

Whitehall’s G-Cloud project involves gradually shifting departments to accessing IT services from the cloud, a move intended to provide better performance and lower cost than bespoke systems.

G-Cloud and the government’s approach to ICT implementation and procurement were heavily criticised at last week’s Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) inquiry.

David Wilde, CIO for Westminster City Council, who is committed to making Westminster 100 percent reliant on cloud services by 2015, said G-Cloud was unnecessary when there were private-sector alternatives available.

“If we look at where central government is today, much of the central infrastructure is already outsourced – it’s outsourced to third parties,” Wilde said. “So, in effect, the government is already part way there in terms of commercial, almost-cloud-based services.”