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1 week ago | 
publictechnology.net | Sam Trendall
HM Treasury has signed a six-figure deal for a round-the-clock service to support the identification and mitigation of cyberthreats. On 24 March, the finance department entered into an initial two-year agreement with Nottingham-based tech supplier Littlefish, which has been contracted to provide a “managed detection and response service”.
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1 week ago | 
publictechnology.net | Sam Trendall
The Department for Work and Pensions’ plans to make greater use of email in communicating with citizens are “being progressed”. A little over a year ago, ministers indicated that the department wished to explore the possibilities of increased use of email in its engagement with service users – beyond its existing uses in cases where it is necessary in order to meet a citizen’s accessibility requirements.
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1 week ago | 
publictechnology.net | Sam Trendall
The Information Commissioner’s Office is seeking to recruit a leader for its growing work with artificial intelligence and analytics. The data-protection regulator has advertised a new post as head of analytics and AI, a role which comes with a salary of up to £79,732.
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1 week ago | 
publictechnology.net | Sam Trendall
The Government Digital Service has signed a pair of deals set to be worth up to £200m to retain the two core suppliers whose services underpin the sending of billions of public sector text messages via the GOV.UK Notify platform. On 1 April GDS entered into new two-year contracts with long-standing Notify commercial partners Firetext and MMG. These engagements follow directly on from the previous deals with the two firms, which concluded at the end of last month.
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1 week ago | 
civilserviceworld.com | Sam Trendall |Jim Dunton
An intensive programme of research conducted by the Government Digital Service has found that many civil servants continue to hold “misconceptions” about artificial intelligence.
During a six-month period from late 2023 to early 2024, the digital unit ran a programme of surveys and interviews in which it engaged with 150 officials across more than 20 departments.
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1 week ago | 
publictechnology.net | Sam Trendall
The Department for Work and Pensions is building a new “transformational in-house digital service” to replace government’s existing public job-searching tool for citizens, PublicTechnology can reveal. The Find a Job service was launched in 2018 and is based on technology from digital job board specialist Adzuna – which beat off competition from rivals Monster and Hireserve to secure the delivery contract. Find a Job replaced the previous Universal Jobmatch tool launched by government in 2012.
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1 week ago | 
publictechnology.net | Sam Trendall
NHS England has signed a £500m-plus deal to cover its cloud hosting needs over a potential term of five years. The deal – awarded to IT reseller Softcat – came into effect on 21 March. The Buckinghamshire-headquartered company has been a key cloud partner to the NHS form some time, having provided consolidated “public cloud cost management services” via a multimillion-pound deal first signed in 2019.
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2 weeks ago | 
publictechnology.net | Sam Trendall
Westminster City Council is embarking on a £4m project to implement a major new data system to support its ambitions to use artificial intelligence and personalised services. The central London authority has published a commercial notice outlining its intent “to develop its next generation, strategic data platform, to underpin its reporting, analytics, AI and personalisation goals”.
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2 weeks ago | 
civilserviceworld.com | Tevye Markson |Sam Trendall
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has appointed a “celebrated scientist” as its next chief scientific adviser
Prof Anjali Goswami will succeed Prof Gideon Henderson, who is leaving Defra after six years in the role, on 1 July.
Goswami is a lead researcher at the Natural History Museum and president of the Linean Society of London – which is dedicated to the study and dissemination of information concerning natural history, evolution, and taxonomy.
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2 weeks ago | 
publictechnology.net | Sam Trendall
The Department for Education has been alerted to more than 50 ransomware attacks suffered by schools and other institutions since 2022. According to early education minister Stephen Morgan, schools manage their own tech and security infrastructure and “there is currently no mandatory reporting requirement legislation for schools to report a cyberattack and no central register of cyberattacks” across the sector is kept by the department.
