The Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in Nothern Ireland has extended a contract for the provision of business intelligence and data analytics first awarded to consultancy firm Deloitte in May 2019, increasing the value of the initial contract by £12 million to £25 million.

Under the contract Deloitte provides services to support DAERA business areas in the processing of EU returns, provision of data analytics and reporting needs, including:

• operational intelligence
• management information
• forecasting
• performance analysis
• trend analysis
• customer analysis
• data analysis
• business planning
• financial and EU reporting

The original contract included the option to extend  for a further three periods of up to and including 24 months beyond the end of the initial contract period

DAERA intends to modify the current contract by increasing the value of services by £12,000,000 on the basis that additional works, services or supplies “have become necessary” which were not included in the initial procurement.

A voluntary ex ante transparency notice published by DAERA explained that changing supplier would not be practicable (for economic, technical or interoperability reasons) and would involve substantial inconvenience/duplication of costs.

DAERA said that the modification is to ensure continuity of service and that any change of contractor would lead to disruption to key digital services, increased costs and risk to delivering key ministerial priorities.DAERA also wantsto maximise technological advances in data analysis, broadly within scope of the contract, which were not foreseen at contract award.