Scottish Water is overhauling its legacy IT systems to meet its changing business needs.

The £250m, eight-year project will cover all of Scottish Water’s IT services, with the utility hoping to begin work next April.

David Brown, Scottish Water’s general manager for IT, says new systems will transform the way the business operates.

‘We are still running with a number of disparate legacy supply and support contracts,’ he said. ‘We are looking to refresh those and at the same time we are taking the internal IT service to the next level of performance.’

Computing reported last May that Scottish Water had completed a £65m, four-year IT consolidation project, merging three regional authorities into one and cutting its annual costs by £18m.

The publicly-owned company made the changes to meet a target set by utility regulators of improving efficiency by 40 per cent.

‘That merger and the ensuing changes underpinned this new transformation of the business,’ said Brown.

Scottish Water has not yet appointed vendors to conduct the work, but hopes to have a number of long-term relationships in place by the autumn.

‘We are not looking for arms-length services, but want partners able to really understand what we are about and drive innovation,’ said Brown.

The contracts will involve provision of a service desk to receive, log and track all service requests, desktop hardware, support for server infrastructure and disaster recovery, as well as continued server development, application development, business intelligence, and a new communications infrastructure.

Butler Group analyst Teresa Jones says project management is crucial. ‘It is the one thing you cannot outsource,’ she said.

‘A huge project such as this needs to be done in stages, because the inte rnal IT department needs to maintain a degree of command and control.’