Edinburgh Councilhas renegotiated its
10-year IT infrastructure withBTto reduce IT costs. The savings
have enabled the council to pass on a reduction of £9 per person in
council tax bills to the public.
The project, which is set to free up £23.3m in savings over 10
years, will also allow the council to plough back savings into
major IT projects.
Andrew Unsworth, head of e-Government at the City of Edinburgh
Council, said, "The savings represent 10% of our IT budget and have
allowed us to reinvest in a self-service human resources system and
a new school administration system."
The savings follow an 18-month project to build a new IT
infrastructure based on
Microsoft Windows and Exchange.
The council has simplified its IT systems, consolidated its
servers and introduced technology to manage IT remotely to reduce
technical support costs.
Unsworth said the council previously ran multiple desktop PC
configurations, which meant BT needed to do costly site visits each
time something went wrong. "Now that we have implemented remote
management, 70% of faults can be fixed remotely," he said.
The council has reduced the number of desktop applications from
4500 to just 400, lowering IT maintenance and improving the total
cost of ownership of the council's desktop software. "We have
implemented a lock-down strategy," he said. All applications are
installed remotely and no staff can load software themselves.
BT and the council implemented a major change management plan to
consolidate the 4500 applications. "We audited each service area in
the council and appointed a co-ordinator who worked with BT to
determine which applications were really needed."
The audit resulted in several desktop databases being replaced
by Microsoft Access and Adobe replacing a multitude of graphing
tools.
Unsworth said the contract with BT has been a long-term
partnership. "We are actively looking at shared services where BT
and Edinburgh can offer a shared IT services platform and
consulting services to other local authorities."
The council is set to review the partnership in February 2008.
If it has been deemed to be a success BT will be rewarded with an
extended five year contract, providing infrastructre services for
Edinburgh until 2016.