QinetiQ: Information Technology Outsourcing

After making a number of management decisions to convert from a government organization to a private enterprise, QinetiQ developed a strategy to capture the commercial potential of its defense technology. The company planned to expand into adjacent industries in the United Kingdom, such as airport security, expand geographically into the US defense sector and take advantage of its proprietary intellectual assets through licensing and joint-venture initiatives.

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To achieve these strategies and attain high performance, QinetiQ needed to focus its core R&D capabilities while reducing non-core expenses. The company targeted its IT function for improvement and cost rationalization. As a government entity, QinetiQ had grown to 62 separate facilities dispersed throughout the United Kingdom, with a comparably decentralized IT governance and application-development approach. QinetiQ selected Accenture as a partner to implement a multi-stage transformation of QinetiQ's entire IT environment to support the organization's new business model. Its immediate objective was to establish a state-of-the-industry IT function, with significantly improved productivity and service at reduced cost.

• In a seven-year contract, Accenture assumed responsibility for QinetiQ's IT infrastructure, distributed networks, corporate applications and IT help-desk organization. A total of 250 IT employees transferred to Accenture.
  
  
• Accenture also agreed to deliver end-to-end solutions for first-line help-desk, desktop infrastructure support, applications development and management, Internet services, data center, voice and data network management and IT project delivery.
  
  
• In addition, Accenture committed to the design and deployment of a centralized IT governance model to give QinetiQ's CIO team a more focused strategic role, through clear operational transparency and greater monitoring capabilities.
  
  
• The agreement called for reaching significantly higher service levels, and reducing operating costs against pre-agreement benchmarks by 30 percent.

• In the first year, Accenture achieved the 30 percent cost reduction objective and the year-two high availability service-level objectives, using new quality metrics, support processes and initiatives to convert the IT support culture from "civil service" to "client service." The benefits realized by the initial transformation have been sustained annually since then.
  
  
• We also increased the IT support function capacity, with new innovations to improve QinetiQ's core infrastructure, networks and applications architecture. Accenture-administered support functions now manage more than 7,500 service calls per month, and achieve an average 90 percent end-user satisfaction.
  
  
• In the second year, Accenture supported QinetiQ's business transformation through technology enablement. This involved replacing QinetiQ's IT infrastructure of 10,000 laptops/desktops and implementing a high-security, virtual networking backbone as well as installing a central storage solution for back-up and e-mail archiving.