Westminster City Council will be infrastructure-free by 2015,
after completing the outsourcing of all its IT services.
CIO
David Wilde said the council plans to transfer all its
IT services to suppliers, who will also be responsible for
day-to-day IT management. The council IT department will be left
with a need for more project management skills and a "strong
strategic arm".
Wilde said that cost cutting is not the main reason for the
strategy. "It's not just about reducing costs, it's about getting
more value for the same money," he said. "It's very easy to run an
aggressive procurement exercise and go for the lowest cost - it
doesn't mean that you then get the best service."
He said infrastructure-free environments are the future for many
of the public sector organisations.
"A lot of local authorities have gone part-way down this road,
but I'm not aware of any that have gone completely
infrastructure-free. Even those with big 10-year deals are still
hybrid, and manage some IT internally."
The move means different, "broader" skills will be required in
the council IT department, according to Wilde. He said it is too
early to know if there will be job losses. Staff will need to
retain some technical expertise, and have commissioning and project
management skills as well.
"It means quite a big skills change for IT staff. They'll need
to know how contracts work and how supplier management works. We
need to retain some technical expertise so we can be an intelligent
customer. Staff will need to be extremely well-informed."
The aim of the Westminister project is to increase efficiency,
transfer risk, get better quality of service and increase
flexibility.
Wilde said, "Major legislative changes are having a massive
impact on the technology we use to deliver services. Moving to an
infrastructure free environment should mean the supply side should
be much more agile and can deal with these changes more
quickly."
One example, he said, is the
Integrated Children's Service, which required local authorities
to overhaul the way social services manage individual cases.