This is a little pat on the back for the Elephant. I’m pleased to report that Agile Elephant has been awarded a place on Digital Outcomes and Specialists 2, but what’s that?

It’s part of the UK Government’s Digital Marketplace. The marketplace was set up to in part to help reduce the friction, overhead and cost of Public Sector organisations procuring technology, services and expertise, but also to help more and smaller IT services firms gain access to bid on Government projects.  Historically, most of government IT was being handled by a small number of well known systems integrator and IT services firms. Now Public sector organisations, including agencies and arm’s length bodies, can use the Marketplace to find a wider range of people,  technology and firms for digital projects.

You will have probably have heard of the term G-Cloud, which is often used by some synonymously with the Digital Marketplace.  The marketplace actually provides the ability to buy and sell:

• Cloud services covering everything from web hosting, business applications, website development projects or even IT health checks, all through the G-Cloud framework. You can also buy access to physical datacentre space through the Crown Hosting Data Centres framework.
• Digital outcomes, digital specialists and user research services through the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework.

The first area is all about Cloud services – SaaS, PaaS and IaaS products and services of various kinds. The second is about finding the right digital and cloud experts and consultants to help tasks and projects, or about developing bespoke systems and software projects.

We’re delighted to be involved and we’ll report news of our progress here. Please contact us if you are a government department that needs any sort of digital expertise or help making sense of the transformation challenges ahead of you.