Tower hamlets

Paisner & Co won this contract after a competitive tender. The project is a nice meaty one for the soon-to-be-merged firm (its marriage with Berwin Leighton goes live on 1 May).

The project involves the design, development and implementation of a portal and customer relationship management software, as well as the provision of related business process re-engineering services. The services will be made available over the internet, mobile phones and television.

The idea behind it is to bring Tower Hamlets up to date and to make it operate in a way more cognisant of the new economy.

Paisner is making a name for itself in this sort of work. Earlier this year, it was instructed by Accenture on its bid for a Kent County Council outsourcing project worth £350m. This will involve IT and personnel as well as development and finance.

E-commerce may be suffering its own well-documented problems, but public projects tend to stay above the fray, which can only be good news for firms such as Paisner.