Up to £80m on the table in University of Nottingham's search for service provider to lace together IT support

The University of Nottingham has begun a hunt for an IT services vendor, wafting between £50m and £80m to tempt them to the table. In an early tender document, the 45,500-student institution laid it on fairly thick. It said it "recognises the need for agile, reliable and robust technology services. They underpin everything the …

[steviebuk]

Annoys me

"reliable and robust technology services" hire a department internally then!!!

An external company will say "Sorry can't do that, its out of SLA" internally they'll say "We should have a ticket but as you're desperate we'll do it now and sort the ticket out after".

Why don't these people ever get this.

A company will now tell them bullshit and maybe do it cheap for a year then put the price up massively the next year.

I wonder what Dr Mike Pound and the like think of this (computerphile)

[anothercynic]

Re: Annoys me

Christ. Given what I've seen some 'digital partners' do to universities in my sector, I can only imagine how bad it could get. And I dread to think...

[TechnicalVault]

It's the "agile" bit that will suffer

When you write an IT services contract you write it for what you are doing now and what you can foresee. Once the contract is signed your contractor is a fool if they do anything other than what is broadly stated on the contract, otherwise they go broke.

This works okay if your business is likely to carry on doing the same thing. Unfortunately for the administrators of universities their means of research production is academics, whose requirements change with the field they are studying. I am not convinced they can write a flexible enough contract to deal with that.

[tip pc]

Who is the current provider?

Is it all currently in house?

Also why such a. broad range, £25m to £80m is a huge difference.

[krakead]

The University of Nottingham has a history of abject failure when it comes to outsourcing (sorry, "partnering"), failure to support it's own internal IT staff, or listen to them or allow them to do their jobs. This will be another disaster that someone will use to springboard their career just before it implodes.

[Paul Johnston]

Good luck!

You are going to need it!

[czechitout]

£35m for HR, payroll, finance and procurement is an eyewatering number. £5m for implementation leaves £30m. £4m per year for licences to industry-leading Workday, £200k for BDO to run the payroll (assuming they don't want to do it in-house), £200k per year for support (1,000 days @ £200 per day), £200k a year for enhancements - that's £4.6m per year or under £20m over four years. There's some massive profits margins/contingency in there for someone.hhhh

[tip pc]

"£200k per year for support (1,000 days @ £200 per day)"

you got your numbers wrong, more like

£200k per year for support (200 days @ £1k per day)

[czechitout]

I suppose it depends who is negotiating the contract.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would imagine the combination of Armando Ianucci and Brian Rix couldn't approach the level of farce judging by the previous track record.

[Anonymous Coward]

Project Transform 2. The Overspend Strikes Back