BC IT Outsourcing 2016/17

Whoops, it snuck by me in the laze of summer, but the BC Public Accounts have come out, so I can do a (partial) update of my IT outsourcing summary. Why “partial”? Because I cannot include Health Region spending until their vendor spending summaries are released late in the year. So this summary is for central government only.

The year-over-year trend is flat, which means that last year’s steep drop-off of spending on IBM dominates the look of the chart.

The chart by vendor gives a better feel for who is up and who is down:

IBM, up a little year-over-year, but still way down after last years’ collapse. ESIT continues to dominate all vendors by a large margin. Note that ESIT is the new name for HP Advanced Solutions (HPAS) which was itself the new name for the BC operations of EDS.

Maximus is up a little, but with the MSP premium program (and thus the associated administration contract) potentially winding down it’s hard to imagine any long term trend for them but down. At a minimum the 50% cut in premium rates effectively doubles the administrative overhead represented by the Maximum contract, which is not a good look.

One thing I’m going to be looking at once the health numbers are in is whether billings by Cerner move up to compensate for the drop-off by IBM. By rights they should: Cerner has taken over the huge EHR project at PHSA/Coastal. On the other hand, I heard a rumour that much of that spending was shifted out to a “non-profit” entity by the BC Liberals, which would make it disappear from my survey of vendor payments reports.