The UK's largest local authority,Birmingham City
Council, is looking to a 10-year mega-deal it
signed last year withCapita to deliver
major performance improvements across the board.
Birmingham is likely to change its business model more radically
than most local authorities, after receiving only two stars out of
a maximum of four, in last month's annual assessment of local
authority performance.
Across England, only 21% of councils received one or two stars
from the Audit Commission.
The city now wants to work with Capita to deliver the
improvements it needs to raise its standing, 10 months after the
council set up a joint venture company with Capita called Service
Birmingham to run different services on its behalf.
The 10-year, £420m contract transfers all of the city's IT
functions to Service Birmingham, and council IT director Glyn Evans
said he expects to save £10m a year from outsourcing IT over the
life of the contract.
Evans said the council is well placed to make these savings,
since the biggest challenge was securing the support of key
stakeholders.
When the joint venture went live on 1 April 2006, some 500
council IT employees were transferred to Service Birmingham.
It took until October for work to begin on an implementation of
SAP, and this is scheduled to finish this month.
Evans is confident that it will soon reap savings since it will
be the first time the council has standardised on a single set of
applications, having previously only deployed a SAP application for
its general ledger.
The main objective of the SAP project is to cut procurement
costs at the council, but Service Birmingham is also introducing
flexible working and increasing the time social workers spend
delivering services.
Related article:
Birmingham sets
management plan
Related article: Birmingham aims to save £1bn
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