Industry news

Capita, the outsourcing giant, has been singled out as the council officers’ preferred bidder in a deal for the management of five district councils’ shared services.

The outsourcing company will provide a variety of corporate services including revenues and benefits, customer services, human resources, IT and procurement to the councils of South Oxfordshire, Vale of White Horse, Hart, Havant and Mendip District Councils.

The contract has a nine-year term and is valued at £139m. It will see Capita introducing a pioneering shared services platform capable of meeting the different requirements of each council.

It is now left to each of the councils’ cabinets to formally appoint Capita as their preferred bidder.

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Related: Capita becomes the UK government’s main supplier of 2015

Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, has announced it will outsource its IT management, including help desk, data centre and application management services, to NIIT, an Indian IT services provider.

The contract, which lasts for 6 years and is worth £23m, sees NIIT implementing a service delivery model with new service management processes and tools.

According to David Doherty, Ofcom’s ICT director, “We set out to select a partner who will align well with our organisational culture, manage the transition smoothly, provide a robust technical solution and focus on innovation. NIIT Technologies’ solution for Ofcom fits well to these needs.”

NIIT Technologies EVP, Satya Samal, declared that the NIIF “is confident that we will be able to deliver value to Ofcom through our strong understanding and proven capabilities in the application and infrastructure management services domain."

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Related: India, the world’s most attractive outsourcing destination of 2016

Barclays decided to downgrade its investment rating on MITIE, a support services group.

For the year 2016, Barclays expects to see increasing pressures on UK employee costs as well as rising employer pensions contributions. Once these extra costs pass through on existing contracts, it would not be a surprise “to see customers asking their services providers to share some of the cost pain when it comes to contract rebids”, a broker at Barclays said.

Analysts have already cut their price target per share by 8.2 per cent, implying a downgrade of the original price.

This Thursday, the 14th of January, MITIE’s share value went down to their lowest value of 268.3 pence per share. However, by the end of the same day the share value went up to 285.2 pence per share.

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Related: Mitie joins Serco and G4S in embracing government’s national wage hike

GMB, a British General Union, sees the expansion of IT outsourcing at British Airways (BA) as a risk to security and UK jobs.

The IT outsourcing project, which is expected to be concluded by April, includes a deal with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), an Indian firm.

GMB fears that up to 900 IT jobs will go to TCS and be filled with staff from India. This Union reported the situation as an “abuse of Tier 2 visas” by BA and TCS.

The Tier 2 allows IT suppliers with UK operations to bring in staff from overseas hence making it possible for these firms to bring in low-cost labour. A situation that makes it harder for local IT professionals to compete.

Mick Rix, a national officer for civil aviation at the GMB, believes it is dangerous to offshore important national security reporting work to companies abroad during “these times of very heightened security measures due to the threat by terrorists to civil aviation flights”.

In self-defence, BA said the “IT services are now provided globally by a range of suppliers… a very common practice across all industries and the UK Government”, BA adds.

As an important employer in the UK – responsible for the hiring of 1000 new jobs every year – BA insisted they “would never compromise the integrity and security of their IT services” and that only 200 of their IT staff would be affected by the deal.

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Related: BA integration with regional airline bmi threatens 1,200 jobs

Is a world where robots can learn to do the work of a store manager too far out of reach? Or what about a world where self-aware, autonomous drones can help data scientists validate complex data models related to traffic patterns and management, for example, in a matter of hours rather than weeks? Or a world where application repair is automatic – where users can submit a defect to a smart management system that could drive the self-healing process for repairing this application, without involving any humans. Is it possible to develop a smart system where managers are given real-time updates on software performance and provided with predictions on potential risks and mitigation strategies? Will we see these solutions come to life during our lifetimes? Perhaps. Many of these scenarios are quickly moving from the dominion of science fiction into reality thanks to the integration of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Data Science and Cognitive methods called Cognitive Robotic Process Automation (CRPA).

Testing services, as an industry, is at the cusp of a transformational revolution that is being brought about by the adoption of CRPA. Many large IT companies are currently working on building platforms or solutions to prepare for this new trend. Why are these systems so desirable? Because there are bound to be anomalies in the application development process, whether large or small; human or machine. Not only that, but identifying and remedying an anomaly within an application is a time consuming process for all who are involved – it can take days, sometimes hours, to locate, isolate, or even fix a given defect. However, with new advancements that the industry is seeing in the CRPA field, solutions and systems – instead of people – can now predict and prevent these anomalies, and drastically shorten, or even eliminate, the time, effort and cost needed to fix them.

Automation is not a new process to those in the IT industry – various automated processes have been around for years and have plenty of time to mature. As these processes have matured, and been fine-tuned, the natural next step is to start looking into how machine learning and intelligence can be incorporated into these processes. With cognitive computing, systems will be able to contextualise and use reasoning to assess problems, instead of just solving the “usual” repetitive problems that IT faces.

Cognitive computing can also help businesses shift their focus towards prioritising “IT wellness” – placing more value on product quality (rather than just process quality). By being able to effectively process businesses’ data, coupled with the ability to learn from past experiences, these systems can learn and eventually master the tasks they are given. In short: continuous improvement. In the Quality Assurance (QA) space, there are two facets of AI technology that could successfully solve this equation:

1. Cognitive Automation: Data analytics forming the foundation of algorithms, pattern recognition and methodologies

2. Autonomic Healing: A one two punch of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning

While not deployed adequately in the QA process yet, both have the ability to inject dynamic intelligence into strong, existing systems and with Continuous Improvement, make them reliable over decades. The following are the key areas where CPA can make a significant difference in the QA process.

1. Proactively Monitor Application Health: Using CPA, application health can be monitored by a variety of BOTS (Software Robots) during application development. These BOTS observe data patterns , discover trends and use models to predict the impact of a given change on the application with allied risks and vulnerabilities.

2. Optimise Testing: Traditional optimisation techniques become inadequate when changes to applications are frequent and where large assets already exist. Manual intervention is ineffective and the QA process could be compromised. Cognitive computing, using continuous learning systems optimise and automate Test Assets to maintain a lean, dynamic risk based Test Suite that self-maintains throughout the application life- cycle.

3. Self-Healing: Identification of anomalies in an application and the subsequent effort required to accurately identify, isolate and fix them is time consuming and tedious. A learning based system coupled with the development of self- service BOTS (which can be invoked when a defect is detected by other BOTS or a human) can make the Defect Management process intelligent. This results in significant effort elimination that current QA systems necessarily entail.

Whether for monitoring application health, self-healing or optimising the testing process itself, there is extensive applicability for artificial intelligence – or Cognitive Robotic Process Automation - in testing. As a result, we will start to see its widespread adoption across the IT industry.

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The NOA has launched the world's first RPA workshop and qualification, ideal for all of those looking to instigate RPA at their organisation.

Whitehall spending on management consultants is on the rise again, the government spending watchdog reports.

The findings by the National Audit Office (NAO) reveal that, in the first years of the coalition, spending on consultants and temporary staff fell, but that it resumed in the past four years going from £400m to £600m.

Despite the recent increase, outlays are still far below 2010 levels, when spending amounted to £1.5bn.

The NAO emphasized that the reported amount is smaller than overall spending since it does not include spending on legal and financial advice, outsourcing contracts and running of IT projects, for example.

The auditors criticised the government for its inability to record temporary staff who have been at their posts for long periods of time. The practice is problematic since, as the report also found, specialist staff contracted out by Whitehall was on average paid twice the amount of equivalent rank in-house staff.

Meg Hillier, chair of the public accounts committee, called out some departments for “playing fast and loose with taxpayers’ money”. She also pointed out that with the contracting out of temporary staff, there is inevitably “a loss of skills when their contract ends, perpetuating existing shortages”.

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Related: NAO survey finds digital skills gap in Whitehall

The telecoms firm hopes to raise the environmental credentials of its supply chain with the introduction of a sustainability assessment tool.

Florian Tremblay, a sustainable development expert at Sagecom, said this tool will enable suppliers to measure their own practices by: “providing useful feedback to suppliers regardless of their performance level, the tool will educate and support individual companies in a tailored and effective way”.

The assessment involves a series of questions to evaluate the company’s existing sustainability practices. The answers are then compared with the best sustainably operated companies in the world. The assessment will finish with some recommendations on how the company can improve its sustainability measures.

The use of BT’s sustainability tool will be tested by Sagemcom, the makers of BT Home Hub. The pilot programme to test the assessor’s result will include the participation of some of BT’s suppliers, in order to study the advantages and limitations of the tool.

“The sustainability assessor means we can extend the benefit and learning of the Better Future Supplier Forum even further into our supply chain”, said Erik Raphael, BT’s wifi and devices director.

This project took off soon after BT’s Better Supplier Future Forum in 2012, where the company sought to develop sustainable business practices.

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Related: Paris Agreement on climate change pushes for a procurement strategies review

Heathrow Airport will create a new procurement hub if the UK government gives the go-ahead to build a new £16bn third runway.

The procurement director at the airport, Ian Ballentin, said the new supply chain would involve the creation of a procurement hub and an academy. The former includes a manufacturing hub and consolidation centre, whereas the latter aims to develop skilled workforce able to cope with the programme.

Despite not being committed with any specific supplier, the Airport is already probing the possible suppliers and working on the plan to develop the new supply chain.

“We are planning to use small suppliers to boost innovation and to act as a broker of opportunity between different tiers of suppliers”, Ian Ballentin adds.

“The trick with all of this, it’s not sort of standing still and waiting for the starting pistol, it’s to get everything in place ready to go”, he said.

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Realated: Heathrow employs single procurement system for T2 Contracts

Fortune has made the claim that India is the only BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) country expected to see notable economic growth over the next few years. PwC has predicted that India will be a “star performer” in 2016, achieving 7.7 per cent economic growth and outshining in this area China for a second consecutive year.

As a result, India is expected to remain one of the fastest-growing major economies between now and 2020. Meanwhile, Fortune reports that scandal-ridden Brazil is sinking into its deepest recession in 25 years, Russia is “rusting like a Cold War-era Volga” due to sanctions and the drop in value of energy (its chief export), while China’s “once-unstoppable” economy is now failing spectacularly.

India benefits from some important trends that contribute to its economic success. Its economic growth isn’t reliant on exports and, as a major importer of energy and other commodities, it has benefitted more than most from the sharp drop in energy prices over the past few years.

On the other hand, the country is a long way from becoming an urbanised, industrial power. Almost half of all its jobs are agriculture-based and 170 million of its citizens currently live on less than $1.90 per day.

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Related: India, the world’s most attractive outsourcing destination of 2016

Sitel’s Newcastle-based customer experience centre has donated over £7,600 to the local Marie Curie hospice, following a highly successful fundraising initiative.

The donation was large enough to cover the hospice’s operations for a whole day, supporting patients with terminal illnesses through specialist nursing care and a growing outpatient programme.

Charlotte Campbell, community fundraiser for the North East and Cumbria for Marie Curie, said: “This is a fantastic donation from a leading employer in the Newcastle area. The response from Sitel was amazing and the donation will go a long way towards maintaining the care and support our patients rely on.”

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Related: Students assist charities through Capgemini’s community challenge