Sometimes bigger isn’t better.
Three years ago, MoJ launched our Justice Digital Strategy 2025, aiming to become a more flexible organisation, driven by data and led by users. Our Evolve portfolio of projects has played an important role in delivering on this strategy and in Justice Digital’s mission to make things simpler, faster, and better for our users.
As 2025 draws to a close, it’s a good time to reflect on our progress.
Becoming a more flexible organisation requires us to reduce reliance on legacy systems and contracts, and to move services to the cloud. When the Justice Digital Strategy launched, MoJ had recently renewed our Voice, Video and Integration (VVI) contract with Vodafone – one of the monolithic outsourced services Evolve was set up to transform.
At the time, MoJ depended on VVI, largely because the legacy Public Services Network (PSN) standard was embedded in our network services’ architecture. We couldn’t get the benefits of opening up our service provision to market competition without conquering a series of challenges.
We have come a long way since then.
Contact centres
Evolve set about breaking up the services comprising VVI into smaller, more specialist chunks, starting with our contact centres.
The VVI-provided system was one of five solutions used across eight contact centres operated by MoJ and our agencies, each with different requirements. But all of them needed better access to data and the benefits associated with moving to the cloud.
British Telecommunications (BT) won our contact centre system contract, and the new cloud-based Genesys solution is now in use across all eight organisational units. It now handles over 1,000 calls per week and provides improved management control, better access to reporting and quicker response times for customer queries.
Evolving telephony
Desk phones used to be the norm for office workers everywhere. But working practices and communications have changed over time, and it sometimes feels hard to remember a time before Microsoft Teams, Zoom and the like became widespread.
With the prevalence of wi-fi, a fixed cable is no longer essential for many kinds of communication. While traditional phones remain essential for many operational staff, their regular use has become the exception in lots of office-based roles.
In this context, the Evolve Voice project needed to design a modern service to support the varied user needs across MoJ and our different agencies. In 2023, we appointed UC specialists Symity as our Voice Design Partner. With their help, we set out to maximise the value of MoJ’s existing investment in MS Teams.
Because our colleagues work across multiple sites and the public has diverse needs, we need a flexible system that lets staff work from anywhere and gives people more ways to contact us. Transferring to Teams Phone will bring access to modern call management tools and better data to support continual improvement. Additionally, working with five suppliers rather than relying on one also increases our supply chain resilience, among other benefits.
We are now making this new Teams-led solution a reality. With support from our Voice Implementation and Integration Partner, Insight Direct, we have so far rolled out the MS Teams Phone solution to over 900 users across 50 sites.
We have signed contracts with Specialist Computer Centres (SCC) to supply and maintain the devices we need (such as MS Teams-certified handsets) and to manage our voice infrastructure. All our users will migrate to our strategic voice solution by the end of 2027.
Flexible, driven by data and led by users
Our new discrete contracts for infrastructure, devices and contact centre systems bring better tooling and data, as well as an improved experience for end users.
Colleagues in our contact centres report that better data insights support day-to-day decisions such as assigning agents and setting call priorities. Call handlers tell us Genesys is “helping to improve our customer service standards” as well as “much more user-friendly”, with built-in tools to support training and development. And the move to Teams Phone is also gaining positive feedback, with staff describing it as “a real game-changer” which has “made life a lot easier”.
In November, the ‘I’ moved out of VVI when delivery of our integration gateway transferred to our new wide area network (WAN) contract. As part of the new WAN service, Vodafone will implement tooling to give MoJ’s network operations centre real-time visibility of the gateway. Better insight into network traffic and bandwidth usage will enable faster incident resolution as well as making us better equipped to respond to changing demand.
The Evolve Video project will complete the disaggregation of VVI. A new Justice Video Service contract is due to be signed in early 2026, to upgrade our on-premise systems with a new cloud-based solution with improved service resilience and tooling.
Delivering value
The new contracts position us deliver significant financial savings over the next decade, as well as cutting our energy use and carbon footprint.
But another hugely valuable outcome is reducing our technical debt and giving us the flexibility to adapt infrastructure and systems in response to changing times and technologies. We're more agile, more responsive, and better equipped to meet future challenges. As we move into 2026, our tech strategy has four ‘pillars’ and the changes we’ve made have laid the foundations for them:
Resilient – delivering resilient, secure and highly available services Effective – driving enhanced end user productivity Modern – empowering and enabling wider MoJ priorities such as AI and public facing digital services Value – unlocking lasting cost savings“Simpler, faster, better” for our end users depends on smaller, more specialist, and more numerous supplier contracts ‒ a more complex but flexible supplier landscape.
We still have further to go on this journey, but the progress we’ve made is delivering huge dividends.
And bigger benefits are unquestionably better.
https://mojdigital.blog.gov.uk/2025/12/11/our-voice-video-and-integration-journey/
seen at 14:51, 11 December in Justice Digital.