Government needs to be more creative with commercial IT deals, says former HMRC CIO

Phil Pavitt points to Specsavers' deals with Accenture and eClinicalWorks as proof that new types of deals can be put together

The government needs to take note of the way some private sector organisations are negotiating deals with suppliers - including the idea of looking at completely new types of commercial models, according to Specsavers global CIO Phil Pavitt.

Pavitt, who was formerly CIO at HMRC, told Computing that the public sector needed to follow the private sector's lead when it came to experimenting with new models to ensure it is getting the best deal possible for taxpayers' money.

"What the private sector is increasingly experimenting successfully with is questioning whether there are different [commercial] models. We talk about reward models, but are there different investment models? Pay-as-you-go models? We're seeing a lot more of those in the private sector which the public sector is yet to embrace," he said.

Pavitt notes Specsavers' recent deal with services firm Accenture as a prime example of negotiating a deal which hasn't ever been seen before.

"[Accenture] aren't just looking after our heritage - our legacy engines if you will - but they are also getting us ready to migrate away from them in the next four to five years. So they've taken out a contract with us, which will ultimately have a low revenue over quite a few years as we migrate from our heritage to our new platforms, and that's built into our pricing platforms," he said.

Pavitt said that the deal was an "unusual" one, which neither he nor anyone at Accenture had seen before. He explained that it was an example of creative thinking about commercial deals.

He added that Specsavers has a similarly unusual deal with a company called eClinicalWorks.

"We have a well-known deal with eClinicalWorks who provide us with a global platform for our retail site. We have a commercial deal with them where they get paid for all of their work as the store goes live, so the incentive on them is that it is a contract.

"But that contract cannot be monetised until they have got the platform [live] store-by-store, country-by-country - so again it's a very difficult deal that you don't normally hear about," he said.