Credit: Defence Images/Crown Copyright/CC BY-SA 2.0

The Royal Navy is seeking to appoint a digital services partner to help support an ongoing transformation programme.

The Nelson programme is dedicated to delivering digital transformation across the Navy. According to a newly published contract notice, it has already “stimulated cultural change and generated an increasing demand” for digitisation. This has led to a “bottleneck” of planned projects that, according to the Navy, “delays delivery, reduces benefits and undermines cultural change”.

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To help relieve this situation, Nelson is seeking to appoint a tech supplier that can provide a core team to support digital initiatives for the next two years, as well as a reserve force of specialists that can be deployed to areas of high need at short notice.

Over a 24-month period – spanning from the end of the 2019/20 year to the early stages of 2021/22 – the Navy will spend at least £845,000. The upper limit of its budget is £9.69m.

“Nelson needs both a core team and scalable resource, responsive to incoming funded projects that can be run with a light touch as its responsibility and influence grows across defence,” it said. “[The supplier must] provide a flexible on-demand digital service to support the requirements capture of digital applications through the discovery phases of the digital life-cycle; rapidly spin-up digital delivery teams to develop applications to meet user needs to time and cost; support Nelson in knowledge transfer, developing digital leaders and building in-house digital capabilities to be an exemplar digital centre of excellence; [and] enable Nelson to transition to a more sustainable organisational footing with a more efficient means to secure its position in the mid [to] long term.”

Bids for the work are open until midnight on 18 November, ahead of a scheduled contract start date of 9 December.