IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support

Tender description

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has established a comprehensive technology service architecture to support effective delivery to our customers and utilises one of the largest technology estates in Europe. A key element of the technology estate is the provision of an application deployment service which involves the provision of feasibility, prototyping, design, development, integration, build, test, implementation, maintenance and management of applications, provision of technical consulting, support, and continuing development and enhancement of application functionality to support evolving business requirements. The supplier(s) currently provides an Application Deployment service (the ‘ADEP Contract’) to the authority under a contract due to expire on: 1 November 2021. The ADEP contract was awarded on 1 November 2011. The ADEP contract provided for a 7-year initial term with a right for the Department to extend for a further period of up to 3 years. The option to extend was exercised in 2018 and is currently due to expire on 1 November 2021. The ADEP Contract also contain a right for the Department to extend the term of the ADEP Contract for a further period to be agreed by the parties or in absence of agreement, for a period of 12 months. This notice confirms that an extension of up to an additional 3 years to 1 November 2024 has become necessary and will be executed to mitigate the high risk of disruption to the critical public services these applications support. There is a complex technology stack and legacy applications in the hosting environments written in outdated software languages. The technology stack is aged and requires significant upgrading that would be extremely difficult without existing knowledge of the solution. Transferring responsibility for managing, supporting and modifying the solution to another supplier would therefore carry a high risk of disruption to service continuity, with elements that another supplier may be unable to support or replicate. For example, the application PTP CAM is a customised Siebel CRM application, providing customer account management with integrated telephony across Pension Centres and other departmental offices. It presents processing agents with a customer record based on NINO search allowing capture and update of information provided via phone or by post. The application has interfaces to various DWP applications either calling data as required, and/or updating data to other applications. Therefore, it is a critical application for DWP to capture Pension customer’s data and enabling accurate processing of these customer pension related applications. Therefore, a change of contractor cannot be made due to technical and economic factors and would cause significant inconvenience and substantial duplication of costs for the Department. The extension period is needed to ensure the Department can continue to support live service and provide business continuity for the applications whilst supporting the Department to continue its programme of retiring these end of life applications. — Re-procurement of the service: given the scale and complexity of the services in question, the procurement and transition to a new contractor would mean the new service would not be ready until well after the current ADEP contract expiry date, therefore requiring use of the existing extension options nonetheless. This challenge has also been significantly exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. This approach would result in substantial duplicated costs for the Department compared with its strategy of a ‘wither on the vine’ run down of the legacy service. — Dual transition of the service (transitioning the existing service in-house and then transitioning again to the new digital solution): transitioning the existing service in-house and then again to a new digital solution would result in substantial duplicated costs and inconvenience for the Department. The above options would also carry a high risk of disruption to the critical public services these applications support; namely the systems and services that UK citizens rely on to gain support to maintain their livelihood. Therefore, the Department's strategy is to continue to operate and complete the retiring of these service applications over the extension period. The anticipated value of the contract extension does not exceed 50 % of the value of the original contract. The service is retiring and the contract charges are reducing over the period commensurate with the planned decommissioning of the applications and systems. The modifications are not substantial. There are no material changes to the scope of services proposed. The changes proposed are focused on cost reduction and realignmen