Credit: Peggy and Marco Lachmann-Anke/Pixabay

The Home Office has signed a £72m three-year contract to support all of the department’s existing applications and assist with the development of new tools.

The deal with Atos will see the IT consultancy support the Home Office’s Shared Application Service (SAS) over a 36-month engagement that began on 17 April. The service was first trailed in 2021, in a department-wide digital, data and technology for the period up to 2024.

According to the text of the newly awarded contract: “By establishing [the] Shared Applications Service for the development, maintenance and support of all products across the Home Office… Estate, SAS in conjunction with [Atos] will deliver a mature, effective and efficient capability, bringing convergence between portfolios and allowing DDaT to: scope, develop, build, deploy and operate applications or products as part of multidisciplinary product teams; support, maintain, enhance and decommission or replace products/applications; [and introduce technical, commercial and cultural convergence across the Home Office.”

The document adds that the SAS initiative will reduce costs and enable the implementation of “standardised processes, technologies, tools and teams”.

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Adopting a cross-department approach to developing and managing digital services will also deliver “increased agility, enabling more rapid deployment of new applications and capabilities in response to changing business requirements [and] improved design, development and testing of applications, leading to more secure and resilient application”, the contract says.

In the near-term, Atos will be tasked with helping to develop and tweak the strategy for the Shared Application Service and begin on-boarding products to the centralised function. During the next three years, the company will assist with maintaining these services and developing new tools, as well as supporting the decommissioning process for platforms being taken out of service.

The Home Office also requires support the “identification, evolution and design of technology services… to meet current and future SAS Function service needs and demand”. The IT consultancy will be expected to ensure “the transition of skills and expertise in-house”, to support the department in managing its application estate in the longer term.

Another technology giant, IBM, has also been retained by the Home Office to assist with the SAS initiative. The company signed a £9m two-year contract in October 2020 to act as a “DDaT delivery partner” for the then-nascent programme. Another two-year deal, valued at £4.9m and covering “on-boarding and support activities”, was awarded to the firm in June 2022.