Surrey County Councilexpects to cut its network operating costs by up to 25%
after signing a five-year, £18m deal to move from a bespoke IP
network to Cable & Wireless'sUK-wide IP virtual private network.
The project is the council's first major IT-driven business
transformation project since it restructured its IT division last
year.
The contract will involve the migration of 13,500 network nodes
across 180 locations to the virtual private network. The council
said the switch, which is expected to take 12 months, would also
enable it to sell some of its properties without incurring
excessive costs or significant disruption to front-line
services.
After John Gladman stepped down as Surrey's head of IT in spring
2006, the IT department was restructured and brought within a new
corporate services division, which includes finance and human
resources.
The new head of IMT, Dominic O'Carroll, was appointed on a
part-time basis last autumn. He is now in the post full time and
will work with Surrey's estates and planning functions to
rationalise the number of properties that are owned by the
council.
The move to Cable & Wireless's network should make it easier
for the council to share information with other public sector
agencies both in Surrey and nationally.
O'Carroll said, "There is the issues of sharing on a wider basis
and there will be a lot of work on the optimisation of our SAP
platform."
The last major project before O'Carroll took over was the
migration of front-line council services to an internal shared
services centre. Adult social services was the last service to go
live on the MySAP R/3 Enterprise platform in April last year.
The council spent £10.8m implementing SAP between late 2003 and
April 2006. The shared services systems are expected to save Surrey
£57m by 2013 through being able to answer 85% of customer queries
first time.
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