Northern Irelandhas begun an £800m
programme to consolidate IT systems and share services across its
11 government departments.
The flagship programme could provide a blueprint for the rest of
the UK public sector.
Rakesh Kumar, research vice-president at analyst firm Gartner,
said Whitehall had a lot to learn from Northern Ireland's approach.
"Whitehall and big local authorities should look at this seriously.
What Northern Ireland has done in a short period is quite
remarkable."
The programme features a raft of integration projects, including
the merger of at least 10 datacentres, the creation of a single
network, and a single finance system to cover 11 government
departments.
Bill McCluggage, director of
e-government at the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS),
said, "We are consolidating into shared services and standardising
purchasing and licensing. Each department had different systems,
and having separate islands of activity is suboptimal."
McCluggage said the NICS had invested time to build support for
the programme across departments. "We formulated a concept, then
ran a series of group engagement activities, getting business
leaders together and socialising the idea. There was a lot of
legwork, but it was beneficial because we have generated a degree
of consensus," he said.
The NICS has signed a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement for desktop
software worth £1.5m a year over three years, and it is negotiating
a deal with
Oracle for back-office functions. It will use
Dell and
HP desktops and server hardware from HP,
IBM and
Fujitsu.
Departmental datacentres will be replaced by two BT datacentres
in Belfast. The single finance system project, dubbed Accounts NI,
will centralise accounting transactions using an Oracle finance
package.
Separate departmental centres will be replaced by a central IT
helpdesk and a human resources shared services centre. The human
resources centre will be outsourced to Fujitsu.
The NICS has also rationalised departmental communications
networks into a single wide area network.
McCluggage said Northern Ireland expects huge cost savings. "We
are in a relatively good position when it comes to the
government's Comprehensive Spending Review and the tighter
financial climate."
He said each project began with a different motivation - such as
HR systems reaching the end of their life, or the Gershon
efficiency review for IT - and they came together under one reform
programme which began a year ago.
● A rating system, written by ICS Computing, to calculate
residents' council tax bills
● Deployment of 18,500 cut down PCs over three years to reduce
power use and free office space
● Mobile working will mean the civil service only has to provide
80% of the workforce with PCs
● Software provided by Steria and Dell for the Records NI
project will automatically save documents centrally, eliminating
the need to print and file documents
● Classroom 2000 has provided 350,000 school children with
e-mail accounts, and they can use a central storage repository for
homework.
other projects in northern ireland's IT programme