Accenture scores £20m contract extension with UK pensions department: Competition? We've heard of it

The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions has handed Accenture a £20m contract extension, without outside competition, to try to keep some seriously ageing applications and infrastructure running. In a tender document, the DWP said it was extending for up to three years a contract with the outsourcing and consultancy firm in …

[Mike 137]

One wonders

How did the "technology stack" finish up as "aging"? Was there no management plan to prevent this?

Likely answer: there was no management plan. Probably inadequate documentation as well.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: One wonders

What else would you expect? This is DWP.

[David Lewis 2]

Re: One wonders

Given that this is DWP how can these "legacy" systems not have a retirement plan? It is obviously time they were "pensioned off"!

[Warm Braw]

Re: One wonders

Speaking as an aging technologist, my first reaction was to wonder why this was perceived as a problem in the first place if it's working as intended.

I suspect the real problem is that it's suffering from an accumulation of poorly-documented changes that have been applied to deal with arbitrary government policy vascillation and that its replacement will, owing to the complex historic legacy of pension entitlements, have to replicate all of these features before accumulating future cruft and consequently be even less maintainable than its predecessor.

[Gordon 10]

I smell rotting Pork

Given that half the employee's working for Accenture are likely to have been the victims of TUPE TO Accenture in the first place - whats stopping them being TUPE'd again?

This wiffs of the pork barrel to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I smell rotting Pork

As a US citizen I have no idea about any of this, but from that point of view, the entire thing reads like one of those condo time share scams where the scammers keep rotating fictional access times over top of a fictional location. In the 80's, before GPS and satellite, I read a story about a family here in the US that paid into one of these scams for years and when they finally cashed in, they arrived at a carnival ground where a traveling circus was performing.

[Pascal Monett]

Is it just me ?

"The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions has handed Accenture a £20m contract extension, without outside competition, to try to keep some seriously ageing applications and infrastructure running. "

Or does anyone else have an intense feeling of déjà vu when reading that first sentence ?

I started reading that and could almost finish it before I was halfway through. I have the feeling that I've already read that exact same sentence ten times this year.

Oh, DWP, you have a "long established procurement process" ? Yup, and we can all see how it works : you choose the vendor you're already working with and throw more money at it.

[Flak]

Looks like someone painted themselves into a corner

A great place for an incumbent to be - (relatively) short contract extension on a complex, ageing system.

This means the list of potential providers will be short, the cost of change (hard cost and disruption) will be great and the risk high.

Contracts often have extension clauses in them (good ones anyway) which may cover prolonged procurement cycles.

I wonder why they are not going for a replacement system now, however.

[Anonymous Coward]

Very cosy...........

1. Consulting firm is "close" to a government exec

2. Government exec signs off contract with no competing bids (perhaps more than once)

3. Years (not many) later government exec moves to the private sector as non-exec director of <your guess here>

*

Where have I heard this sequence reported before?