CGI grabs £90m multi-year deal with UK Ministry of Justice without competition, because organising a procurement with just 5 years' notice is just sooo hard

The UK’s Ministry of Justice has handed incumbent supplier CGI a new £90m contract without open competition in a seemingly desperate bid to keep its Cobol, Fortran, and Pascal applications up and running. In what might be seen as a skin-of-the-teeth procurement, the MoJ was set to see the contract with CGI expire on 30 …

[Julz]

Hum

Fortran, Pascal and Cobol; the first three high level programming languages I learned. Perhaps I should tender...

[Muscleguy]

Re: Hum

If my now separated wife were not gainfully employed otherwise she would also be able to do the work. She works in student recruitment and admissions but when her university redid their student management software she helped write some of the code required, just for the fun of coding again.

She graduated BA in Maths, BSc in CompSci in the early ‘90s.

Not sure our daughter who is bioinformatics has the necessary chops but she and her hubby are into legacy systems so it would not be impossible.

Myself as a scientist largely limited myself to things like SQLat need. I’m a dab hand at FileMaker, benchtop robots etc.

[James Anderson]

Shows the stupidity of outsourcing.

To manage any reasonably complex IT setup requires deep knowledge of the systems, their history and their past problems.

You simply cannot dump the current maintainers of the system and wheel a new lot in. Well you can but expect frequent crashes and outages if you do.

They would have saved the tax payer a ton of money, and had a more modern reliable system if they had kept the whole shebang in-house 20 years ago.

[The Pi Man]

Re: Shows the stupidity of outsourcing.

Even if CGI didn’t get the contract the staff would just TUPE across, some have been looking after these systems for years, under many different employers.

[James Anderson]

Re: Shows the stupidity of outsourcing.

But outsourcers profit from doing nothing.

In my experience the management will block anything but essential maintainence.

[Anonymous Coward]

“estimated to take a minimum of 18-24 months for a procurement to be run and any replacement supplier to be able to deliver the services”

Erm... why not put it out to tender back in 2018

Oh, how stupid of me... its a gov contract

[NeilPost]

To be fair they are already ‘running’ the solution/support - this is an extension.

“Incumbent supplier” n’all.

[Spanners]

"More in the long run"

You say that as if it is an unforeseeable consequence. Or perhaps you think that the government does not approve of large sums of money being moved from the public purse to shareholders or, more likely, owners.