Council's IT revamp saves taxpayers £9 each

Published on Saturday 25 August 2007 01:13

A ROOT-AND-BRANCH replacement of Edinburgh City Council's IT system, in conjunction with BT and Microsoft, will save council-tax-payers £9 a year, the council has claimed, and £12 million in operational savings in the period 2006-2009.

The project, which is being seen in Microsoft's US headquarters as a global model of large-scale public sector collaboration, is estimated to have cost 7.8m to complete, and involves replacing or upgrading 6,500 computers.

Andrew Unsworth, head of e-government for Edinburgh City Council, said: "After 20 years of tactical IT investment the council had a huge proliferation of different types of PCs, applications and programmes.

"We undertook a whole process with Microsoft and BT, saying we were going to standardise all our IT infrastructure, building a stable platform that was more efficient to, more reliable, and easier to use.

"Prior to the 'Service Re-Design' [SRD] project, which was launched in 2005, Edinburgh had 100 different types of desk top PCs and laptops, lots of different servers, many very different from each other. We decided to move a common standard".

Bob McDowell, Microsoft vice-president, said: "The work Microsoft and BT have recently completed with Edinburgh Council is one of the biggest examples of its kind of a local government migrating their existing IT infrastructure onto one platform.

"Organisations seldom choose to streamline their IT systems, and this is a great example of how this can be done on time and within budget.

"In Redmond [Washington] we view this case study as a great example of best practice.

Installing this new IT infrastructure shows how the Edinburgh Council is leading the UK and Europe in their IT systems and how choosing one platform can help improve organisational performance, reduce operational costs and help move the organisation forward."

Unsworth said that of the 12m in savings, 4m went towards directly reducing the level of council tax increases in the current financial year and 2008-9, representing a cut of 9 a year for every council tax payer.

Among the improvements of the new system are that 60 per cent of all faults raised by staff can now be fixed "on the spot" and most IT can be remotely managed.

Hardware faults have been reduced from 292 per 1,000 users per year to 90.

Unsworth said: "Having standard infrastructure means we can develop and deploy new IT services and applications for staff more rapidly, making it easier for staff to use IT in creative ways."