Brit tax collector HMRC wants fireside chat with suppliers to discuss ways to spend the annual £900m IT budget

UK tax collector Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs wants to reboot its supply chain by opening up its entire £900m annual IT budget to the wider supplier landscape via a new Technology Sourcing Programme (TSP). In a tender document published today, HMRC, which is responsible for the collection of £600bn in tax annually, said it …

[TechnicalVault]

When will they learn?

If you are spending £900m on it and it is pretty much your "means of production", IT is a core competency. You cannot afford to palm it off to some third party as if it is workaday stuff like desktop support or cleaning. It's not like you're going to be using that much off the shelf software because having a monopoly on tax collection is pretty much the definition of a national tax agency. HMRC is a software company, they should embrace that.

[Pascal Monett]

It's nice to have ambition

Ambition is a good thing.

Start by having the ambition to succeed in your IT projects. You'll tackle being best in the world later.

[Eclectic Man]

Consultants

I hope they get well qualified civil servants, rather than consultants to manage any procurement.

My own experience of being a consultant at one company, was one of the partners telling me that the job of a consultant is to find out the client's budget and spend it.

In a different employment I was a member of a bid team to an HMG department wanting a seriously large ICT system. On a trip to the client it became evident to me that the consultants running the procurement bid process were just trying to prolong it to line their own pockets. The senior member of their 'team' entered the room, said something along the lines of 'how about we change it in [this fundamental way]?' and walked out, expecting a serious change to be evaluated in half an hour. He returned later that day to change the same area to yet another possibility and left without listening to any response from us. The client should have cancelled the bid and done a serious requirements analysis, but that would have meant the bid process management consultants being out of a job, and that would have cost them money, so they would never recommend it. In the end we 'no bid' due to completely unrealistic bid requirements.