The agreement is valid for up to 10 years and is an extremely comprehensive IT operations and transformation agreement.
"We’ll no longer own the IT infrastructure or spend time on ordinary operations—this we are transferring to Sopra Steria. We now want to focus on developing and delivering services to the municipality of Oslo’s employees and citizens. By making day-to-day life easier for the municipality’s 53,000 employees, we’ll free up time, which can then be used to provide services for citizens," says Marit Forseth, Director of the municipality of Oslo’s Development and Competence Agency.
She says that when a modern, standardised and flexible operations platform is in place, it will be possible to establish new services far more quickly than before. At the same time, the municipality will be able to benefit from new technological innovations at an earlier stage.
"There will also be better conditions for the exchange of data and functionality across the municipality’s sectors, which can provide services to cover larger parts of the citizens’ daily life and lifestyle," says Forseth.
Massive lift
Sopra Steria won the contract following a tough tender competition. The company will operate and maintain everything from infrastructure and networks to applications and security services. Sopra Steria will also deliver transformation and innovation services to the municipality.
Kjell Rusti, CEO of Sopra Steria in Scandinavia, calls the agreement a milestone for the company and a unique opportunity to create digital transformation in one of Europe’s fastest-growing cities.
"We’re incredibly proud to be involved in the massive lift about to be implemented by the municipality of Oslo. This investment will have an influence on life and work in the capital over the coming decades," he says.
Strong digitalisation ambitions
Oslo has strong ambitions when it comes to the digitalisation and development of new services for the people of Oslo. At the same time, the municipality uses more than 80 percent of its total IT budget of NOK 1.3 billion on operations and maintenance.
" We want to help the municipality free up resources so that they are able to spend time developing tomorrow’s public services. We will therefore both rationalise the IT systems and provide innovation support for the municipality", says Rusti.
Seeking the best innovation
Marit Forseth says that they strongly emphasised the capacity for transformation and innovation in the invitation to tender:
"We are moving from where we are today over to something completely new, so the supplier has to be excellent in both conceptualizing and implementing. We felt that Sopra Steria had a coordinated team which told a convincing story about how to move from a concept to realization, and the whole thing hung together. Sopra Steria also made several of its own transformation recommendations, which showed that they understood the municipality’s needs," she says.
Since Oslo is now moving its internal focus from production to innovation and control, the municipality has to undergo a radical conversion process. A separate transformation board for the area of operation, set up and led by Sopra Steria, will maintain the transformation process that the municipality is to go through.
Around 70 percent of the municipality’s businesses come under the new operations and transformation agreement. Kjell Rusti believes that several more will be added:
"The agreement’s been set up to make it easy for departments, districts and other activities to gradually come on board, which will increase the economies of scale. In the long term, we would also like to include other Norwegian municipalities, something that will mean better digital services throughout the country. In order for this to happen, we have to demonstrate the value that we can create together. It took over a year to win this contract, but the hard work starts now," says Rusti.
IT solutions in the cloud
The RightCloud concept for Sopra Steria gives the municipality of Oslo access to all major cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. This makes it possible to choose the supplier who is the most suitable at any one time while the municipality is assured control of expenses and security and integration aspects.
Datametrix, Telenor and Neisa are involved in the agreement as subcontractors.