Industry news

A commercial venture set up by the Ministry of Justice in 2012 has cost the department upwards of £1m, the National Audit Office has revealed this Friday.

Just Solutions International, the commercial arm of the MoJ, provided consultancy and training to prisons in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Nigeria. It had been created in 2012 by former Justice Secretary Chris Grayling; however, the company was dissolved last year at the time Michael Gove took office at the ministry.

Michael Gove’s decision came after a human rights row with Saudi Arabia. At the time, the Secretary of State for Justice cited a “need to focus departmental resources on domestic priorities” as the main reason for JSI’s dissolution.

According the NAO report, income generated until the dissolution of Justice Solutions International was not enough to offset its founding costs.

JSI completed a number of profitable contracts, such as a £255,000 deal to train the Royal Oman Police and a £128,000 contract for prison consultancy services in Libya. However, its decision to scrap a £5.9m deal for the provision of training in Saudi prisons has been identified as the main reason for the company’s financial position three years after being set up.

Meg Hillier, the NAO’s public accounts committee chair, declared she was “concerned by the loss of taxpayers’ money on this failed venture, and the Ministry of Justice’s ongoing work with countries with questionable human rights records”.

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Related: Ministry of Defence to oust Serco and bring Defence Business Services in-house

The Islington council and local health organisations have chosen BT for the delivery of a digital data solution which will integrate its social and health care records.

The contract is worth £10m and will run for five years. It is one of the first initiatives to be developed as part of the Department of Health’s wider strategy to transform health and care delivery.

The council had joined forces with Islington CCG and Whittington Heath to ensure the Borough’s pioneer status in the DH’s strategy.

Islington believes the effective use and publication of information to patients, residents, clinicians and other staff in health and social care is a first necessary step to ensure the CCG delivers the government’s digital vision and to integrate care across Islington’s health authorities.

The aim of the initiative is to create a health and social care data platform which will give citizens the ability to regulate access to information. The solution should also enable different authorities within the Borough to easily share information, thus improving efficiency and decreasing the risk of duplication.

Related: 90% of large organisations to employ a Chief Data Officer by 2019, Gartner reveals

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The Department of Health has appointed DXW – a G-Cloud supplier – to achieve savings by upgrading its intranet.

The intranet is the main information and news provider for policymakers, project teams and change makers across health and care services.

The new deal will make it easier and quicker for the 2000 staff to publish and access information, improve user satisfaction and enhance efficiency, as well as saving up to £1m per year.

The intranet product manager at the Department of Health, Chris Fleming, said: “We redesigned out intranet two years ago but even though it is cheaper to run than its predecessor with higher user satisfaction

“One of the key lessons we learned from the initial redesign was that you can never do enough engagement, so together with DXW we are regularly talking to users to understand and address their needs.”

DXW will carry out the development process between now and the end of March with the incorporation of users’ feedback at all stages of the project. The code will be available at GitHub – a software repository – that enables other organisations to build their own intranet sites.

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Related: Accenture beats BT for NHSmail2 contract

A recent study by Gartner reveals 90 per cent of large organisations will have opened a Chief Data Officer (CDO) position by the end of 2019.

According to the report, recent years have seen an increasing number of companies starting to explore the potential competitive advantage and improved efficiencies brought on by the effective use of information assets.

This trend will only grow stronger; thus, increasing demand for data professionals.

CDOs are expected to face a number of challenges, the majority of which relate to the novelty of the position – professionals will more often than not be learning on the job, and will be required to come up with an information strategy with relevant metrics that will tie the activities of their team to measurable business outcomes.

The study also shows that resistance has already been encountered by current CDOs, particularly resistance to change. The latter has been particularly problematic when it comes to IT departments giving up control of information assets and their governance.

Going on, these difficulties will ensure CDOs will find it hard to get the budget and commitment from the company they require to implement a successful data project.

According to Mario Faria, research VP at Gartner, "This raises a political aspect to the role. Building trust and relationships in the organisation will be important to achieving success”.

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Related: Exeter aims at reducing its traffic congestion through a big data scheme

The three Councils of Kent, Hertfordshire and Hampshire have launched a tender process – worth £100m – as part of their plan to cut operating costs.

Led by the largest local authority in England – Kent County Council – the tender process aims to award a four-year contract to five different suppliers.

The deal aims to outsource the day-to-day management responsibilities and functions including the outsourcing of software, hardware, data security and other IP networking services.

The tender may also include the outsourcing of a digital mailroom, “purchase to pay” automation, cloud storage document workflow management, data loss prevention systems and customer communication management systems.

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Related: Daisy Updata Communications wins Kent County Council Contract

The Society of Information Technology Management (Socitm), the representative body for public sector ICT workers, has published a report this week on the government’s UK Digital Strategy, following a consultation from the government.

The report states that the public sector’s focus on improving the efficiency of existing processes, as opposed to radical service redesign, is checking its ability to achieve better outcomes.

Radical digital innovation has the potential to deliver big savings to the government, particularly in complex service areas such as health and social care. These areas are often overlooked with regards to digital innovation, in spite of costing the government millions in duplication, fragmentation and inability or unwillingness to share data.

According to Socitm, “The current ‘devolution’ agenda is building the momentum for there being more collaboration and digital innovation.”

“A place-based approach to delivering outcomes – note, not ‘services’ - provides the opportunity to deconstruct siloed, paper-orientated processes and proprietary technologies, and separate these out to be more commoditised, simplified and shared capabilities”, the report concludes.

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Related: The UK government seeks global digital leadership through a new digital strategy

G4S, the security services firm, is considering whether to step out of young offenders contracts following a series of high-profile incidents.

The latest incident took place at the Medway secure training centre in Kent, where G4S staff allegedly squeezed a 14-year-old young offender’s windpipe, while the teenager screamed “I can’t breathe” at the officers. The scenes were filmed by BBC reporters for Panorama. Five G4S staff have been arrested in connection to the incident.

In the last couple of years, G4S has been recovering from a 2013 pre-tax loss of £190m, partially brought on by the falling through of a government contract for which G4S was accused of overcharging the Ministry of Justice for the electronic tagging of offenders.

G4S is the biggest security services firms in the world, employing more than 600,000 people across the world. Its youth justice unit accounts for less than two percent of the company’s business but a disproportionate amount of scandals.

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Related: Hedge funds short G4S shares amid turbulent times for the company

Students of the Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa, held a vigil last night protesting the university’s outsourcing policy.

The students refer to themselves as the “Outsourcing Must Fall” movement and are calling for the university to permanently employ its workers and pay them a basic salary of R10,000.

The protests follows decision made by the University of Pretoria and the University of South Africa (Unisa) to insource contract workers in the coming years.

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Related: Interserve cleaners punished after writing to foreign secretary

Scottish cloud and data centre provider Brightsolid closed a new deal - worth £1m a year – with Aberdeen City Council to provide a managed data centre service.

The council migrated its entire ICT estate to the private cloud in the first six weeks of the new contract framework. Willie Young, the Aberdeen City Council finance, policy and resources convenor, admitted the Council was impressed with the quality, flexibility and personalisation of the service.

“We have found a partner with whom we can innovatively work as we digitally transform our council services while also reducing our operational costs”, he commented.

Brightsolid CEO, Richard Higgs, said their intention was to “help the city become a centre of technical excellence”.

The provision of disaster recovery services is also included within the new framework. The deal will last until May of 2017.

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Related: Atos Origin to provide managed services for Aberdeen City Council

Clearsprings Group – the company contracted by the Home Office to run accommodation services for asylum seekers in Cardiff – has decided to drop its controversial policy of making refugee tenants wear red wristbands in order to claim the meals they’re entitled to.

A number of those tenants claim that they have been singled out for abuse by local residents as a result of the policy. Jo Stevens, Labour MP for Cardiff Central, has confirmed that the practice will come to an end today, after speaking to the operations director at Clearsprings.

Clearsprings has defended the policy, claiming it came into effect in the face of a dramatic increase in the number of asylum seekers it was housing: "Volumes of people in initial accommodation sites, including Cardiff [have] increased quickly. Clearsprings has taken steps, agreed with the Home Office, to increase capacity in line with this demand in the form of additional self-catering accommodation.

"Those clients in the self-catering units receive a weekly allowance in the form of supermarket vouchers and those in full-board accommodation are issued with a coloured wristband that bears no other logo or text identifying its use or origin. Full-board clients are required to show their wristbands in order to receive meals in the restaurant."

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Related: Airwave Solutions withdraws injunction blocking Home Office contract award