The Cabinet Office is launching a review of its IT outsourcing contract strategy – project “Ocean liner” – with the intention of moving away from a number of its long term outsourcing contracts that are due to expire during this parliamentary term.

“Ocean liner” comes with the Cabinet Office’s acknowledgement that many of these outsourcing deals have failed to deliver value and its claim that “the opaque nature of service delivery hides the fact that many [contracts] are not good value for money”. The review follows the National Audit Office’s “Open-book accounting and supply-chain assurance” report last year, where the NAO encouraged every government department to have a solid policy on when to demand more transparency from its service providers.

The Cabinet Office is likely to face criticism from lookers-on, who will speculate as to why the government is only choosing to review these contracts so close to their end-dates.

Recent NOA research has found that the days of the outsourcing megadeal are likely to be numbered, with the notice periods for contracts, along with the actual contracts themselves, expected to become much shorter in the future. The full report, titled Outsourcing in 2020, will appear in the Outsourcing Yearbook 2016 and be released in March 2016.

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