HMRC Chief Digital and Information Officer Jacky Wright has completed the insourcing of the tax collection department’s lengthy, £10 billion Aspire contract, to give the organisation greater command of its remit.
“It’s a lot of work to insource a large, multi-year, multi-million pound contract and organisation,” she says. “To insource that, to be able to now effectively run your organisation, you own it, and you run it – you determine what gets done in a way that you didn’t before. “It takes a different capability, a different focus, a different organisational structure, a different interaction with our suppliers and partners. Frankly, just a different mindset.”
Most of the IT companies involved in the outsourcing contract still work with HMRC, but the agreement is now focused on partnership and collaboration rather than a transactional relationship based on delivering to a contract.
“It’s completely broken up,” says Wright. “However, the majority of the suppliers who provided the service are still in play. They do still provide a great deal of our services that they did before.
“But before they owned it and ran it for us, and today we’re looking at something different; we’re looking for them to really partner with us and help us understand what we need to do to reduce our operating cost, to become more agile. It’s becoming a true partnership, versus an order-taking relationship, which I think has been historically, for the most part, the way our partners have worked with us.”
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