The Cabinet Office’s newly-procured desktop infrastructure is to be offered to other government organisations as a shared service.

One medium-sized Whitehall department is expected to sign up to the contract in the coming weeks, launching central government’s first standalone shared services programme.

The Flex deal – formerly known as Isaac – was signed with supplier Fujitsu last month and is a managed service covering the Cabinet Office’s 2,500 desktops.

The move is part of wider plans for a common Whitehall infrastructure, says John Suffolk, government chief information officer (CIO) and head of the Cabinet Office eGovernment Unit.

‘The infrastructure will be available to other departments to use and a number have started to review what value it could provide for them,’ said Suffolk.

Users of Flex will benefit from significant economies of scale and the avoidance of the lengthy and expensive public procurement process. As more organisations sign up to the scheme, the price will drop for everyone.

Flex is part of the Transformational Government (TG) strategy and fits into the CIO Council’s aim to cut overall IT costs by 20 per cent and desktop costs by 40 per cent.

The four-year deal is worth tens of millions of pounds for the Cabinet Office alone. But its value could rise to more than £100m if take-up reaches the 100,000 projected seats included in the bidding process.

The programme will act as a test case, says Eric Woods, government practice director at analyst Ovum.

‘The idea was to look at what was required to offer a flexible service provision that could be extended to other organisations, right from the beginning of the procurement,’ said Woods.

‘But it must be about improving service quality as well as reducing cost. Doing one piece alone is not half as difficult as doing both at the same time,’ he said.

Flex is the first standalone shared services programme to be established since the launch of the TG strategy in November 2005.

Departments are also being encouraged to use the finance and human resources systems in place at HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions (Computing, 22 March).