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TCS makes a breakthrough in UK local government

Peter Clarke

TCS makes a breakthrough in UK local government

Cardiff City Council has announced that Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is to be its strategic ICT partner. TCS will help drive the council's mission-critical Strategic Transformational Change Programme. The contract is thought to have a total value of £150 million over its 15-year lifetime.

Breakthrough rewards diligent TCS

TCS has made the breakthrough in local government that it has long desired. This is a major contract that could bring big dividends to TCS across the local government sector if it can tame the Welsh dragon. However, TCS is well aware that Capgemini's partnership with Swansea unravelled in 2007 before it could deliver the “biggest e-government programme in Wales”.

Brian Woodford, Director of Public Sector at TCS, said “We will bring our experience to stimulate new ways of delivering citizen service excellence. We want this to be an outstanding example of innovative engagement between the public and private sector.” Woodford and his team have worked hard during the past two years to talk a different language in the UK public sector. Back in April TCS won its first UK public sector contract, at the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission. Cardiff is its first win in UK local government. TCS, in partnership with T-Systems, came close in Essex but was beaten by IBM. It must have been pleasing for TCS to have won Cardiff against IBM and BT Global Services.

TCS complains that a lack of brand recognition holds back its UK public sector win rate. Maybe, but it is perhaps also because the public sector thinks of TCS as simply an outsourcer and offshorer. This win in Cardiff demostrates that it is not and that it has onshore delivery capability.

Cardiff is an insource which is set to achieve major efficiency savings, improve service delivery, and protect and enhance local jobs. It aims to sell shared services across the public sector in Cardiff. If TCS's delivery is as good as its message, other local authorities will be willing to embrace it. But delivering in Cardiff is going to be a very big task, especially against the background of South Wales politics.

Cardiff Council Leader Rodney Berman seems optimistic enough. He said, “This exciting collaboration will help us make savings in our spending on technology, such as hardware and software, and enable the council to raise money through the development of technology-enabled products”. The council wants TCS to “bring their global technical expertise and private sector commercial know-how to support a major change to the way in which the council's technology infrastructure supports its day to day operations and facilitates improved service delivery to the citizens and communities of Cardiff.”

A new service delivery model for Cardiff

This is a big task because Cardiff is planning to use the TCS technology to put in place a completely different service delivery model. The plan is for TCS to support the council's ICT function and take over the management of the council's SAP implementation from Logica CMG. TCS intends to bolt on its own DigiGov Solution. This will allow it to deliver the first priority project Connecting Citizens and, TCS claims, save Cardiff money on its SAP licences. DigiGov is unknown in the UK but TCS points out that in India it is currently supporting its delivery in the state of Andhra Pradesh to a population of 75 million in an area 10% larger than the UK. It is also delivering integrated workflow and data management in Gujarat which, among other things, provides a platform for Gujarat's VAT system and its Hospital Management Information System.

TCS plans to build a new innovation centre in partnership with the city council to develop new approaches and technologies for delivering public services. As a first step, Cardiff is building an internal shared service for HR and payroll.

Cardiff has bigger ambitions

Cardiff wants to use its new shared service delivery model for joint working between all the public bodies delivering services in the city. It also wants to sell these services across the public sector in south-east Wales. This may not be easy, especially as Cardiff has just pulled out of the South East Wales Regional Parntership (SEWRP), which was trying to develop the same shared service across the ten constituent authorities. The trick for TCS is to build a service that is so good and so cheap that other authorities will want to buy it despite the politics.

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