TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION
A new model of systems integrator
The coalition’s new approach to government IT projects and move away from the ‘prime contractor’ model has helped encourage new entrants into a previously closed market. These have included small innovators but also the largest integrators, including Lockheed Martin. Mike Nayler, who helps lead the company’s work with the UK public sector and who represents it on the techUK Public Services Board, spoke to PSE.
L
ockheed Martin is one of the biggest companies in the world thanks to its
interests in the aerospace and military sectors, but it is also a major player in IT, having been the number one provider of ICT to the US federal market for about 20 years.
But it only fully entered the UK public sector IT market about three years ago. Mike Nayler, of the Information Systems & Global Solutions Company within Lockheed Martin, who worked in the UK public sector himself from 2008-11, said the decision to target new business in the UK had two main drivers. “Firstly, the coalition government’s clear desire for change – to move away from some of those big incumbents that had been there for a long while. That had always been something we’d seen as a barrier to entry in the UK market. Secondly, with the government’s move away from prime contracting into much more of a collaborative environment, we saw that as something that fit the Lockheed Martin model far more closely.”
He said the company prides itself on being different from the ‘usual suspects’, with its origins in research and innovation, such as with the ‘Skunk Works’ – its secret projects and aircraft designs during WW2, which has since become an official alias for the company’s advanced development programmes. Nayler said: “That was all about bringing together best-of-breed companies to combine into a single offering. If you take that theory of our heritage and where we’ve come from, and bring it forward into the ICT environment, that’s our DNA.
“At heart, we’re an integrator – it’s a shame that in recent times, the phrase ‘systems integrator’ has had a bad press, but we’re not ashamed of saying that’s what we do. We integrate and bring together innovative SMEs and COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) packages, we use open source software where applicable. What
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we add, the Lockheed Martin ‘secret sauce’, is to get those things working together in a single service platform.”
Ministry of Justice win
Its showpiece win so far has been a £125m deal with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for Service Integration & Management (SIAM), partnering with Skyscape Cloud Services and others. SIAM refers to managing delivery for large clients who multi-source their IT services, which Lockheed Martin implements via a ‘tower’ model with the MoJ.
The MoJ’s legacy IT contracts are even older than the department itself, and were thus aligned with separate business units, rather than integrated. Under the Future IT Sourcing Programme (FITS), different services are provided via ‘towers’ managed and integrated by Lockheed Martin, but which apply across the whole organisation. Lockheed Martin as the SIAM has devolved authority from the MoJ as the client to manage those relationships and the integration of smaller companies’ offerings.
G-Cloud
The company has also won work via the G-Cloud – the frameworks that help the public sector buy cloud-based services in a flexible and open way through the CloudStore: ‘Infrastructure As A Service’, ‘Platform As A Service’, ‘Software As A Service’ or specialist cloud services. Nayler said G-Cloud’s advantage has been its flexibility and that it has continued to change and mature with the market, and its “very transparent pricing mechanism”.
Nayler said: “For the MoJ, this has been quite a significant change. The driver behind all this, of course, is them being told that they had to reduce their IT budget over the next five years by about 30%. If you want to achieve that level of savings, you’ve got to do transformational activity, and change the way you operate.”
The MoJ, in line with Cabinet Office policy, wanted to source services from many companies, including SMEs – but it wanted a partner to help “knit that back together” and deliver it all seamlessly. Nayler said: “In the past, under the old prime contracting model, you didn’t need that because all those elements were provided by the same company.”
But as has been well-documented, that often led to inefficiencies and poor contract management, and a lack of innovation.
Our discussion with Nayler also covered the ‘smart cities’ agenda – the wider use of sensors and networks and the use of data from pieces of infrastructure like traffic lights, lampposts, CCTV to make smarter decisions. Nayler said it was important not just to collect mountains of such data for its own sake – the value only comes when the data is analysed to deliver something useful, on its own or when combined with other datasets.
He said: “It’s all very well if every lamppost can now send an SMS message – but 99.9% of the time, that information is of no use, it’s just data. It’s got to be stored, analysed, and tools and techniques have to be applied to make sense of it in combination with other datasets.”
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