MoJ issues £109m tender for application maintenance, support and deployment
MoJ's prior information notice had suggested the contract would be worth up to £180m
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has issued a tender for application maintenance and support (AMS) services and future application deployment services in a contract worth up to £109m, excluding VAT.
The Official Journal of the European Union notice follows a prior information notice from the organisation in July, which outlined its intention to issue tenders for several IT services at a combined estimated cost of £782m.
The MoJ explained that the ICT contracts that currently exist within the department were negotiated before the creation of the MoJ. The legacy contracts are due to expire in the next few years, with a Future IT Sourcing Programme (FITS) established to replace them. The FITS programme involves procuring separate contracts or "service towers" for the delivery of ICT services across the MoJ.
"In order to minimise any conflict of interest, the successful bidder for AMS services will be asked to demonstrate appropriate ethical walls are in place between the parts of its organisation responsible for the delivery of AMS services, and those parts that may be responsible for the delivery of services in other service towers," the MoJ adds.
The MoJ intends to let two contracts under the procurement, for two separate sets of applications. The first lot is for AMS services to be provided to the courts, tribunals, MoJ headquarters and arms length bodies in a three-year £64m contract.
The second lot is for AMS services to be provided to the Prison Service, in a £44m three-year contract.
The AMS supplier for both lots will be responsible for the maintenance and support of the application layer of the "in scope" business applications that are delivered from the MoJ's ICT hosting environments. In addition, the supplier can have the non-exclusive responsibility for any new developments in delivering new functions to business applications.
The selected supplier(s) must act as a support function, repairing application faults, maintaining software, and ensuring that operational errors, such as those within the database, do not cause service disruption or outages.
Back in July, the MoJ announced that it was looking for suppliers for service integration and management (SIAM), specialist security services, end-user computing services, networks, hosting, mobile telephony, application development and maintenance, and programme management.
At the time it had said that the application development, maintenance and support lot would be worth up to £180m.