A year has gone by since Richard Steel, head of ICT at
Newham Borough Council, began a 10-year strategic partnership with
Microsoft to refresh the council's IT infrastructure.
The decision to select Microsoft was controversial at the time,
as the council also assessed a Linux-based infrastructure, which it
calculated to be more costly.
People on both sides of the Linux/Microsoft debate pitched in
with their views on what Newham had done, but Steel tried to stay
out of it. Writing in Computer Weekly last year, he said, "Our job
is not to be defenders or advocates for Microsoft, but we reserve
our right to acknowledge its customer service improvements where we
see them, as we do with any other supplier.
"Nor is it our job to champion the fight against the 'evil
Microsoft empire'. If there are better, practical and
cost-effective alternatives to Microsoft products that we can
readily integrate, we use them."
Steel's focus this year has been on major IT infrastructure
renewal. He has opted for blade servers, supplied by
Hewlett-Packard, to consolidate the council's server
infrastructure. "The blades will be the basis for all our central
services, such as e-mail, central file store and a number of
central applications," he said.
By next year the work on the central IT systems will be
complete, Steel said. He also hopes to be halfway through a project
to refresh 5,000 desktops. The council is also planning to move to
a new headquarters building, at which time Steel plans to embark on
printer rationalisation programme.
But even though the new IT infrastructure has been a key focus
this year, Steel stressed the importance of having a "strategic"
relationship with Microsoft.
The council recently withdrew its support from the government's
National Project for CRM, of which it was one of the pioneers. But
Steel is continuing to work with Microsoft on the council's
customer relationship management system and is collaborating with
the firm on an information-sharing database for chil- dren at risk.
The system, due to go live this month, is a good example of a
project that has been enabled by the strategic relationship.
Another collaboration is a shared learning group with councils
including Lewisham, Wakefield, Rotherham and Sunderland, which aims
to show how local authorities can work together on technology.
Steel is also working on a single-sign-on project being developed
by Microsoft.
Along with the Microsoft partnership, Steel has seen his role
change over the last year. "I am working much more closely with the
board on the strategic use of IT," he said.