New contract awarded for the provision of design services for the landmark Govt project

Accenture Australia has been awarded a contract worth almost $8 million from the Department of Human Services for the provision of design services.

The contract, awarded to the systems integrator by the Department of Human Services, is understood to come under the $313.5 million funding over four years from 2016-17 that the Federal Government has set aside for its leviathan Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation (WPIT) program, which has been slated to cost upward of $1 billion over the course of its life.

“Accenture has been contracted to provide design services to the Department following a competitive dialogue procurement process,” a Department of Human Services spokesperson told ARN.



The spokesperson confirmed that the contract is part of the Department’s WPIT program, which it touted as a business-led, technology-enabled transformation aiming to progressively transform the way the department delivers welfare services to the Australian community.

The $7.99 million contract runs from 1 June this year through to 30 June 2018, and was procured through a competitive tender process with a handful of other businesses that sit on the Systems Integrator Panel that the Department of Human Services created.



The Department established the Systems Integrator Panel through a Request for Tender Process in 2016, with and Accenture Australia ione of four firms that make up the procurement arrangement which also includes IBM, Capgemini and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

“The panel will be drawn on over the life of the WPIT Programme and the panellists will be able to compete and be engaged for specific work packages to provide integration, data migration and other services,” the Department of Human Services spokesperson said.

In March, Accenture was named as the preferred supplier to provide system integration services for the next phase of the Centrelink payment IT systems overhaul.



The new deal follows the recent $13.7 million Department of Human Services deal that IBM Australia won in April for refreshed IBM Mainframe Disk Storage Arrays to replace the ageing IBM Mainframe Disk Storage Arrays that were approaching end of support.

The scope for that deployment included the supply of hardware and operating systems, installation and secure disposal services, ARN reported at that time.

It also follows a $6 million server and network storage contract that Dell Australia inked with the Department of Human Services, as reported by ARN on 27 June.

“The deal, which runs from the end of April to the end of June, sees Dell provide servers to “enhance the DHS applications' monitoring capability,” a Department of Human Services spokesperson told ARN previously.

Accenture Australia has been making a big push into the innovation and system integration services space, following its transformation into a digital-first enterprise.

In March, the company was named as the preferred supplier to provide system integration services for the next phase of the Federal Government’s landmark Centrelink payment IT systems overhaul, beating out Capgemini, with which it had been competing with for the project since last year.

It was also awarded an $8.38 million contract by the Department of Defence for the provision of software support activities as part of its payment system overhaul.

Accenture Australia has also most recently opened the doors to its new Liquid Studio in Sydney, as part of several new initiatives that the system integrator is investing across the country. This includes expansion in recruitment, partnerships and training, the company said previously.

In May, the company formalised a collaboration agreement with Sydney-based hosting and managed service provider, Bulletproof, on cloud advisory, DevOps, cloud migration and support.

Accenture Australia declined to comment on the contract win.