The London Borough of Waltham Forest has migrated 3,200
desktops to a single network in the final stage of a four-year
project to overhaul its IT infrastructure.
The desktops, supplied as a managed service by Dell, are
connected to a BT network that is also provided as a managed
service.
The council's IT set-up has been transformed from a federal
structure, where different front-line services procured their own
systems, to a single department.
The reorganisation of IT at the council has seen the head count
fall by 20% with the same reduction in costs. A further 15% of IT
costs have been saved by procuring hardware and software
centrally.
Novell's e-Directory has been implemented as the enterprise
managed service for both the desktops and the operating system, and
Zenworks is being used to support desktop devices remotely.
Network managed file storage has been put in place so that
Waltham Forest can migrate more easily to a storage area network.
The San will be implemented in two datacentres when it goes
live.
An enterprise resource planning system from SAP that went live
in April 2003 is expected to generate a return on investment of 72%
by April 2007. Over the past year, the use of the SAP system
throughout the council has been increased by integrating it with a
customer relationship management application and the authority's
asset management software. Business reporting on the SAP system
went live in the past few months.
- Migration of 3,200 desktops marks final stage of four-year IT
overhaul
- Infrastructure transformed from a federal set-up to a single IT
department
- Network managed file storage is in place to allow future
migration to San
- SAP enterprise resource planning system integrated throughout
council