Defence Events

Babcock team wins UKCeB Excellence Award 2013

Posted 1 May 2013

The 2013 UKCeB Excellence Awards were announced at Defence Information 2013 (DI'13) - held recently at the Defence Academy, Shrivenham - with the accolade of UKCeB Excellence Award Winner 2013 accolade going to a Babcock-led team.

Chosen from six finalists who exhibited at a Good Practice Market Place, this Award recognised work to enable Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the defence supply chain to share sensitive information securely and effectively when working with the MoD and prime defence contractors, by facilitating secure role-based access to Babcock’s Collaborative Working Environment (CWE) on the MoD’s Restricted LAN Interconnect (RLI) via the internet, using an accredited identity management system.

This pilot involved Babcock as prime contractor, MoD (end customer), Capgemini (the IT supplier) and Aish technologies (the SME) and demonstrated how existing MoD and industry capability can be integrated to provide secure internet access to RLI CWE capability.

Benefits of this work include improved security, efficiencies in administration and information exchange, plus time and cost savings to Team Defence. The capability provides SMEs with better visibility of programme activities enabling them to plan effectively, make value-enhancing and innovative contributions, and participate more effectively on defence programmes.

Babcock head of information knowledge management, Chris Rowley, said: “We are delighted to have won this prestigious award in recognition of the work we and our partners have undertaken to provide secure collaboration for SMEs in defence projects. The ability to provide secure access to the CWE for SMEs via the internet overcomes traditional obstacles and opens up significant benefits across the defence supply chain and support network as a whole, with potential to build on this further.“

Congratulations go to the other award winners. A project on deployment of the Data Quality Assessment Tool (DQAT) won a Highly Commended Award for a team comprising the MoD ACDS (Log Ops) & LSC Group Ltd. Four Commended Awards were announced and presented to CGI (formerly Logica) for a Defence Medical Information Capability Programme (DMICP); to Serco, MoD DBS & MooD International for Transforming Business Services across Team Defence including a lean shared-services centre; to Thales UK for their Open ASSET Management Information System to facilitate management of assets in availability contracts; and, to BT in partnership with the MOD ISS Networks for a project on safeguarding the London 2012 Olympic Games.

These annual UKCeB awards were judged on various criteria including degree of collaboration, beneficial impact, innovative approach, potential for wider application, ease of implementation and application of past learning.

UKCeB executive director Steve Shepherd recognised that the independent judges “had a significant challenge to assess a diversity of excellent projects” and added that “delegates to DI’13 had the benefit of learning first-hand about all these projects in the Good Practice Market Place held over the two-day conference.”