Waltham Forest Council is saving £2m a year after completing a
three-year project to overhaul its IT and replace legacy systems
with
SAP software.
The project has helped the council improve from having no stars
under the Audit
Commission's Comprehensive Performance Assessment to a
three-star rating in the space of three years.
"The challenge was to migrate the entire council from federated
infrastructure and local desktops to a single standard network,
desktop and operating system," said David Wilde CIO and head of
information and customer services at the council.
Waltham Forest saved £1m by replacing 21 systems, including
customer relationship management and human resources software and
local databases.
It is now using business information systems, including SAP
Business Information Warehouse and Experian's Mosaic, to prioritise
spending and collect demographic data.
Further savings of £250,000 were made by replacing a mixed
portfolio of desktops with standard machines supplied by Dell.
Before the changes, Waltham Forest Council ran a bespoke finance
system, a mainframe-based HR system and a Teleware call centre
system.
Building on the IT overhaul, Wilde is considering
virtualisation and an electronic document management system. He
is also deciding whether to stay with a Novell operating system, or
move to either Microsoft or open source.
"Changing operating system is incredibly difficult. Open source
seems a lot cheaper because you do not have to buy licences, but
you do have to invest in a lot of experts and pay people to put it
in. You do not have the support network that you would with either
Microsoft or Novell," said Wilde.
Waltham Forest Council's IT savings
e_SBlt• Replacement of CRM, HR and local database systems with
SAP saved £1m
•• Switching procurement of desktop computers from online
catalogue to managed service from Dell saved £250,000
e_SBlt• Dell managed service reduced 1,000 printers to 300,
saving £200,000
e_SBlt• 23 Staff redundancies, including 12 from the IT
department, saved £300,000
e_SBlt• IP telephony using Nortel's Succession and Symposium
suite saved £100,000
e_SBlt• Number of servers cut from 350 to 240, saving
£250,000.