GDS awards contracts worth £25m for Common Technology Services

PwC and Methods Digital are among the suppliers chosen in new contracts

The Government Digital Service (GDS) has awarded service providers that include PwC and Methods Digital contracts worth a total of £25m in a bid to revamp Common Technology Services (CTS).

The contracts include strategy, testing and commercial exit framework services, as well as application, cloud and infrastructure design services to support CTS.

PwC has been chosen for what GDS calls "commercial exit framework services" in a deal worth £4m. Its job will be to help to collect all contract and commercial ICT information across government. It will then analyse the data captured to identify which commercial agreements need to be terminated and where departments need to be transformed.

Methods Digital has won a £2m deal for the provision of "strategy services to define the strategy of CTS and support collating and analysing commercial ICT information across HMG". DMSG (£5m), Computing Distribution Group (£5m) and M4 Managed Services (£5m) have been signed up to provide the design of service delivery, infrastructure and tools for CTS, as well as supporting cloud infrastructure technology.

Zeefix Consulting has won a £2m contract for quality and testing services, and Ergon has been awarded a £2m contract for a contained and packaged agile programme management office service, and Entech will earn £325,000 by providing a technology leadership service, to provide technical guidance and leadership to CTS's technical services team.

The changes are to take place after former Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) CTO Iain Patterson's returned to the GDS in the role of director of CTS back in December.

He is responsible for enabling the provision of consistent, high quality workplace IT for civil servants across government.

In an interview with Computing in October last year, Patterson argued that the GDS was in need of a refresh following the departure of its chief, Mike Bracken.

"[Bracken] was a bit of a rock star; I worked directly for him. He's a great orator, a great strategist and he's made one hell of a lot of difference. He has set that catalyst going - I think it's always difficult to follow that act," Patterson told Computing at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco.

"GDS was all about creating the right drivers of change, educating people about that, showing that there's a different approach, and I think it's achieved that," he continued.

"I think, like anything else, it has asked the whole of government to change - and it's now changing. It's interesting the thing that manages to create change, needs to change itself," Patterson added.