IT, Outsourcing, CSC, UK

Interview: CSC refines outsourcing bids

04 Nov 2004 | (Interview)

Keith Wilman of services firm CSC explains the latest trends in IT outsourcing in the public and private sectors in the UK

IT Week: As head of IT services giant CSC in the UK, can you explain your firm's current business priorities?

Keith Wilman: Firstly, it's to be number two [in the market]. Which might seem like a crazy goal, but in terms of worldwide revenue, CSC is at $15bn but IBM Global Services, at number one, is around $40bn. That's too big a gap to close in the medium term, but EDS is at $21bn and dropping, so our goal is to overtake EDS.

What about your position in the UK market?

[Analyst company] Ovum Holway would say we are already number two in outsourcing in the UK, behind EDS. And again we expect EDS to fall back. It's now at about £2.1bn revenue; we're over a billion.

How will you increase revenues?

We're changing the business to try to gain a stronger reputation in business transformation. We do a lot of business transformation in our IT outsourcing, it just doesn't come across as strongly as it does for some competitors, such as Accenture. So we've set up a separate business unit. Another area is world sourcing.

Do you mean offshore outsourcing?

We pitch it differently. We take a lot of people on board from our clients when we do outsourcing. The [client's staff] don't want to hear that you're going to sack them all, and the client doesn't want to hear it either. We wouldn't win business, or hearts and minds, that way.

So what does world sourcing mean?

We look at our assets globally. Sure, we are putting work into India - we have 2,000 people there and it's growing rapidly - but we will put work where we need to put work. For years we ran some operations out of Australia, because that let work follow the sun. But no one thought of that as offshoring.

Why the recent move into public sector outsourcing in the UK?

Three years ago, when we had absolutely no government business, the government said, look, we'd really like more than one top-tier firm bidding. And it said the same thing to IBM. Government business is counter-cyclical. When the private sector is not doing so well, government tends to spend money. So we decided to go for 40 percent of revenue through the public sector.

Has this proved successful?

After a couple of false starts [on tenders for work with the DVLA and Crown Prosecution Service] we learned how to bid for government contracts. We were ticking all the right boxes but then there was the price. We were used to bidding for commercial contracts but government is fundamentally different. Government has to have an open tender and tough competition. It's also pretty expensive to get involved, so we had to change our ways.

The Office of Fair Trading is concerned about public sector IT procurement processes. Are there positive examples?

I think Richard Granger [director general of IT at the NHS] showed us all how to do it [with the NHS's National Programme for IT]. He got so quickly to contract, he has to be applauded for that. He's shown that it can be done.

But there are predictions that the project will run 400 percent over budget...

There is a cost of procurement and a cost of deployment. The users will have to learn to use [the new system]. But there's nothing special about that - most people have computer skills across the board these days. So I don't know why anyone thinks it's going to be so expensive.

ABOUT KEITH WILMAN

Keith Wilman is president and chief executive of CSC's UK division.

He joined the IT services firm in 1997 as vice-president responsible for the British Aerospace account, then CSC's largest global outsourcing contract. He has also served as UK chief operating officer.

Before joining CSC, Wilman was managing director of Easam, a UK software and services firm.

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