Britannia staff issues force £21m outsourcing deal

Britannia Airways Ltd (BAL) has handed over the day-to-day running of its desktop strategy to Logica after finding it difficult to retain IT staff.
The seven year contract - worth £21m - will overhaul the Luton-based charter airline's entire software suite.
Britannia has already outsourced its accounting, sales and support, and engineering systems to Logica in the past 12 months, after finding it hard to keep staff. As part of the deal, 34 of Britannia's IT staff will be transferred onto Logica's payroll.
Steve Burnett, director of the business process and application management division at Logica, said: "This process got underway about a year ago when the airline decided to put a toe in the water and see how it went dealing with a commercial IT contract.
"Part of the difficulty Britannia had was in attracting and retaining people in Luton, as they were working for an airline and not an IT services company. Some user organisations find it hard to offer a career path attractive enough to make people want to stay."
The contract will cover full support of BAL's applications, including finance and desktop applications, as well as intranet and database administration.
Burnett added: "Britannia wanted a high quality service instead of having good and bad days. Even if staff had not been a problem, they still wanted the discipline of a commercial contract with parameters and fines for not meeting the requirements in contacts."