Accenture wins £86m Met Police application management deal

Accenture becomes third big-name IT provider to become part of Met Police's SIAM/tower contract

Accenture has been selected by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) to deliver application management services to the Met, in a five year deal with a potential value reaching £86m.

Accenture is the third big-name IT provider to become part of the Met Police's SIAM/Tower model, under its Total Technology Programme. It follows the Service Integration & Management (SIAM) contract awarded to Atos, and the £250m end-user computing and hosting towers won by CSC.

Under the terms of the agreement, Accenture said it would help the MPS to manage its core IT applications, including enhancing them and "rationalising the application portfolio".

In addition, Accenture will aim to increase the use of digital technology by the service, implement new mobile and analytics solutions, and increase digital interaction between police and citizens.

According to Chris Naylor, digital policing lead at the Met Police, Accenture will help the service to "move to a more modern, flexible IT environment", which in turn will enable it to reduce costs and improve the technology available to help its officers service the public.

The five-year contract has options for one-year extensions, and Accenture claims that 60 new technology roles will be created in Newcastle as a result.

Accenture will be expected to work with Atos, which was awarded the SIAM contract in November. The Met Police decided to press ahead with the SIAM tower model despite a blog by Alex Holmes, deputy director of the Government Digital Service (GDS), suggesting that the tower approach was not in line with government policy and is "not condoned".

While many other public sector bodies, such as the Ministry of Justice and Transport for London (TfL), are in the middle of a SIAM implementation and would therefore find it near impossible to change their strategies midway through, with a fresh contract the Met Police could feasibly have taken a different approach.

However, Computing has questioned the suggestion that the tower model is "no longer condoned" by government, as it had been working for the Tri-Borough council.

Failures may be more to do with the implementation than the model itself. TfL CIO Steve Townsend recently told Computing that some public sector organisations were dressing up old outsourcing methods as the tower model - and that's why they were likely to fail. However, he declined to name the public sector bodies he thought were doing this.