[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

The United Kingdom’s Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) has awarded IBM  a contract as part of replacing its legacy IT environment and creating a new centralized information management system.

DIO, an operational arm of the Ministry of Defence (MoD), is responsible for the management of some 4,000 separate sites and includes military barracks; land, air and naval bases; and military training grounds. Using IBM’s smarter buildings software and services, DIO expects to reduce building operating costs and find ways to better utilize its existing real estate.

The MoD is one of the United Kingdom’s largest landowners, covering some 900 square miles and around 45,000 buildings, 55,000 houses and 135,000 Single Living bedspaces. It has real estate in Germany, Cyprus and the Falkland Islands, along with facilities in Norway, Poland, Kenya, Canada, Belize, Nepal and Oman. Charged with managing all of these physical assets and infrastructure, DIO’s goal is to drive greater efficiency and operations of these buildings to support an estates rationalization program that will deliver significant efficiencies.  For example, with these new capabilities DIO can assess if buildings or bases are not being used at full capacity. They can then decide to consolidate resources to either free up space for other uses or eliminate the cost from their balance sheets.

The IBM TRIRIGA solution will provide an integrated property management solution comprising of software and consultancy services. Geospatial mapping capability, created by business partner Esri UK, provides the real-time visualization map. The IBM solution will also enable processes to be streamlined across the MoD by linking with the systems used by DIO’s Next Generation Estate Contracts team.

The upgraded system will be launched in a number of capability releases through April 2014.

[Image courtesy: IBM]