KPMG wins Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council's £18m everything-and-the-kitchen-sink IT deal

Consultancy and outsourcing firm KPMG has been awarded an £18m contract to, for all intents and purposes, create the entire back-end operations, processes and technology system for the recently formed Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council. Legally born on 1 April 2019 from the merger of constituent councils, BCP Council …

[Anonymous Coward]

Similar to NHSX

These public organisations just get reamed by the big consultancies.

They don’t seem to understand that designing and managing IT is a core function of their own organisation.

A basic rule of using consultancy is to only employ them to do dirty work/ validate what you already know.

If you bring consultancy in to do your core function, you are, by definition redundant.

[Evil Auditor]

Re: Similar to NHSX

You're right.

There is, however, another way to see this: «we have no feckin' clue about IT and what to do with this newfangled stuff. Let's get Big Consult in to deal with IT. And if it fails, we can blame them - after all, we'd like to get re-elected by the plebs who pay the £18m.»

[Just an old bloke]

This is one kitchen sink that'll get blocked. One of two things will happen, or maybe both; the council will find that the KPMG suddenly find they need more consultants to plug legal shortcomings "they have found" or the contract they signed is not the one they thought they signed and there will be extras, lots and lots of extras. Either way, they will be stuffed.

[Evil Auditor]

El Reg, can you please report on this programme again if, and only if, it succeeds*? That would be a true surprise - everything else is expected.

_{* Success defined as: achieved well- and predefined objective within budget and time.}

[Chris Hills]

Disappointing

As a taxpayer it is disappointing that our money is being used for a private company to decide how to operate a public organization. Surely the civil service are far better placed for this, not least because a private company will no doubt engineer a structure that maximise the amount of fat they can cream off in contracts down the line.

[Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse]

How can it be called a win...

How can it be a genuine "win" when 99% of most companies would have been excluded due to the hurdles and beaurocracy put in place during the ITT process itself? And after all of that it'll still no doubt be a shit show... because KPMG.

[TheBorg]

As with most things outsource, it will be an unmitigated disaster .... declared a success by the senior councillors involved and nothing will probably be better than it is now. Putting all your eggs into a KPMG basket indicates total passing of responsibility and KPMG shiny suited grads will not have a clue about how to design, implement or run anything.

[Nifty]

I'm still puzzled as to why LAs all over the country need individually written systems. Isn't there such a thing as a national template which is configurable for each LA? I've noticed in the private sector you see the usual suspects like Workday and PeopleHR across many companies. Backoffice and customer facing websites also have canned solutions.