Great British Scaleup: Methods Business & Digital Technology Ltd

Methods Business & Digital Technology Ltd (BDT) has been in existence far longer than other participants in our third Great British Scaleup event. In fact, it will be celebrating its 28th birthday later this year. It’s also much bigger than the other participants -- in the year ended 30 April 2017 Methods BDT generated revenues of £62.8m. However, it’s never too late to scale-up.

Methods BDT specialises in digital transformation services for the UK public sector. It started life as Methods Application Ltd in 1990. CEO Peter Rowlins and Mark Thompson, strategy director, took control of the business in 2011 and instigated a demerger in 2014 to form six individual companies. To reduce duplication of effort and realise internal efficiencies four of those businesses were remerged in 2017 to form Methods BDT, which now operates alongside its sister companies Methods Analytics and CoreAzure. Although Methods BDT has been around for a long time, it’s only at the beginning of its journey in its current guise.

Approximately 70% of Method BDT’s revenue comes from central government customers, including the Home Office, Ministry of Justice, and the Department for Education. Thompson is a regular commentator on service redesign in the public sector and has helped to influence the government’s technology procurement strategy. Not surprisingly, Methods BDT has embraced government frameworks and is one of the leading suppliers in terms of Digital Marketplace revenues. It has developed key capabilities in front-end digital service redesign and back-office infrastructure migration and contract disaggregation.

Methods BDT performed well in 2017, improving revenues by 29%, but, like many technology companies in the UK, it is being held back by the digital skills shortage. It’s good to see it taking positive steps to address the issue by establishing an academy to help hone the abilities of recent graduates.

There is still much to be done to improve service delivery in the public sector and organisations will need to embrace digital transformation to navigate challenging financial settlements. There will be plenty of opportunities for Methods BDT to grow its market share and scale-up as it enters the next phase in its history.

Posted by: Dale Peters at 06:56

Tags: government   transformation   GreatBritishScaleup  

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