Home Office Reduces Web Risk & Relieves Development Strain with Managed Applications Service from Kainos Causeway

London & Belfast, 4th May, 2011 The Home Office has retained Causeway, the managed application services arm of Kainos, to provide a comprehensive web maintenance and development service to the Department on an ongoing basis. The Home Office is the lead Government Department for immigration and passports, drugs policy, crime, counter-terrorism and police. Under the contract, Causeway has assumed ongoing responsibility for the Home Office's web content management system, Alterian's Morello, having successfully fine-tuned the performance of the system during a previous project. The new service relationship will ensure the performance and availability of the Home Office web site. This will be particularly important this month, as the Home Office formally drops its public-facing web content to focus on corporate information, in line with the Transformational Government programme. Says Emma Charles, Project Management and Technical Team Leader, Home Office eCommunications: 'The relationship with Kainos Causeway is very strategic. Although we have a technical team, it is by no means as big or diverse as what Kainos can offer. We are now covered in terms of service continuity, which was a gap and a risk before.' There is also scope for further development work, as and when necessary, she adds. 'We only have one developer on the team. Now, when things get hectic, we can offload some of the work onto Causeway.' 'We buy a bank of days which we use for service requests first, but if there is any time left over we can use this for development. This makes it very easy to justify what we're getting for our money. Other service providers work on a monthly flat-fee basis, making it hard to demonstrate value. Causeway has a more realistic attitude, which I've never come across before.' This and the success of the original infrastructure project cemented the new deal. 'It says something that, in the last nine months, we have only seen a single Priority 1 incident,' says Emma. 'We used to have a lot more than that!' By monitoring the web site closely, Causeway is able to ensure stable performance despite peaks in traffic in the event of major incidents, political events or the unveiling of new policies or crime statistics. The site receives around 1.5 million page views in a regular month. 'The people at Causeway are very conscientious, and extremely good at what they do,' concludes Emma. 'They understand our pressures and are very flexible in the way they accommodate them.'