corporate ict strategy 2019 london borough of harrow · ref action description delivery method and...

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Corporate ICT Strategy 2014-2019 London Borough of Harrow

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Contents

1 Executive Summary ............................................................................................................... 3

Overview ..................................................................................................................................................... 3

Key Drivers ................................................................................................................................................. 3

Strategic Principles ..................................................................................................................................... 3

Key Actions ................................................................................................................................................. 4

Sources of Information ............................................................................................................................... 8

2 Business Context .................................................................................................................. 9

3 Current ICT ........................................................................................................................... 11

Background to the current ICT provision .................................................................................................. 11

Capita Services ........................................................................................................................................ 11

Applications .............................................................................................................................................. 12

Printers ..................................................................................................................................................... 13

Challenges ................................................................................................................................................ 13

4 External Trends ................................................................................................................... 14

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 14

The IT Market ........................................................................................................................................... 14

Government Policy and Regulation .......................................................................................................... 16

What other Local Authorities are doing .................................................................................................... 17

5 Future Strategy .................................................................................................................... 18

Strategic Theme 1: Core IT will be cost effective and reliable. ................................................................ 18

Strategic Theme 2: Users will find IT to be secure, flexible and accessible ............................................ 23

Strategic Theme 3: Information will be joined-up and transparent ........................................................... 26

Strategic Theme 4: Applications will promote change and improve channel shift ................................... 27

6 Implementation .................................................................................................................... 29

Outline Roadmap ...................................................................................................................................... 29

Risks ......................................................................................................................................................... 37

7 Appendix A – Strategic Principles for the Council’s ICT .................................................. 38

8 Appendix B – Market Trends: The Cloud ........................................................................... 42

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1 Executive Summary

Overview

The purpose of this ICT Strategy is to set out a framework for the London Borough of Harrow 1.1

(the Council) for the use of technology to improve customer and community services and

improve business efficiency over the next five years to 2019. The strategy is presented in a

format which looks at the changing business context, our current position with IT, a review of

how other authorities are responding to the challenges, a strategic framework for the next five

years and actions in the short term to start delivering the strategy.

Key Drivers

The following key drivers have informed the development of this strategy: 1.2

The financial situation across local government has changed significantly during the

period of the previous ICT strategy, with budgets being significantly reduced requiring

difficult decisions about service delivery. The Council need to save 50% of controllable

spend, equating to £75m out of a budget of £188m between 2014 and 2019.

At the same time the ICT services have had to cope with increased demand for flexible

and responsive services from both service providers (officers) and service users

(residents). Technology enabled change remains an important means for facilitating

savings within front-line services.

New technologies and supply models are becoming available at an ever increasing rate,

with many elements of the traditional business technology stack now available as

commoditised and consumerised services. Key vendors are proposing that these

alternate supply models will be the only way to commission their services within the next

few years.

The existing ICT strategy was developed in April 2009, presenting an ideal opportunity to

reflect on these changes in a refreshed strategy.

The contract for key corporate applications outsourced to Capita in 2005 and the ICT

infrastructure services added to that contract in 2010 expire at the end of 2015.

Strategic Principles

The vision for the strategy is based on a set of principles which have been co-produced with the 1.3

Corporate Directors and their management teams.

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These principles have been summarised into four strategic themes as follows:

Key Actions

A set of key actions has been developed for each of these four themes, as follows: 1.4

Action Ref

Action Description Delivery Method and Timescale

1. The central IT function will take a coordinating role for architecture, commercial governance and licencing across all of the Council’s ICT while services remain responsible for their business applications

Work to be undertaken by the client team in accordance with the E&Y report agreed by CSB 2014

2. In re-procuring the ICT services the Council will seek a supplier that can deliver a commercial structure and technical solution that meets the Council strategic objectives including value for money, reliability and flexibility.

Delivered through re-procurement 2015

3. An Access Gateway architecture that integrates multiple services will be adopted, allowing authorised users to securely access them from any location, at any time and from any authorised device. All new developments will be assessed against this architecture in order to move to it over time.

Client team to develop architecture 2014 Delivered throughout the life of the re-procured service

4. To enable the use of innovative, flexible and Delivered through re-procurement

1. Core IT will be cost

effective and reliable

3.Information will be joined

up and transparent

4.Applications will support channel shift and service

improvement

2. Users will find IT secure flexible and accessible

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Action Ref


cost saving solutions available through emerging and alternate technologies (eg. Cloud services), the future ICT supplier will be required to disaggregate systems over time in readiness for deployment to these technologies.

2015

5. Use of emerging and alternate technologies (eg Cloud) will be enabled by developing policy and guidance that ensures systems are commissioned with the appropriate security, data governance and commercial controls.

Client team to develop 2014

6. Disaster Recovery will be reviewed in the re-procurement to ensure that optimum provision is provided across all of the councils ICT services; reducing the committed provision where new technologies offer alternate solutions for replacing systems and, obtaining a balance between provision and cost.


7. Following deployment and stabilisation of follow-me printing, the remaining standalone printers will be decommissioned

Client Team 2014

8. Performance measurement tools that focus on user experience will be evaluated and implemented.

Client Team/Capita 2014/15

9. Performance metrics that focus on user experience will be incorporated into the future ICT contract


10. Recharging mechanisms for ICT services that are fair and transparent allowing the Directorates to better control their spend will developed in parallel with the re-procurement of ICT services

Client Team/Finance 2015

11. Recycled PCs being used as thin clients will be removed from the estate as the number of devices required reduces. If this does not eliminate them all, they will be replaced with thin clients during ongoing refresh.

Client Team /Capita/new supplier Ongoing 2014-2017

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Action Ref


12. PCs deployed to support legacy applications will be kept under review. Opportunities to migrate, upgrade or replace those applications will be sought so that the users can migrate over to using the virtual desktop

Client Team Ongoing

13. When end user devices are refreshed, new browser or app based devices will be deployed where they fit with the mobility needs of users and are conformant with the relevant information security requirements.

Client Team/ Delivered through re-procurement 2015 and ongoing

14. Citrix will continue to be used where necessary to deliver applications to virtual desktops, but new applications should be browser based. This could potentially enable us to decommission Citrix over time.


15. Potential suppliers will be asked to consider standardised desktop offerings from London Councils and other public bodies when designing their solutions.


16. The delivery of a unified communications service will be requested as an early transformation project in the re-procurement

Delivered through an early project following the re-procurement 2016

17. Wi-Fi will be installed in the Civic Centre Client Team/Capita 2014/15

18. Potential suppliers will be asked to review the choice of middleware and consider alternatives, including cloud based solutions.


19. Where there are new requirements for extracting and analysing data, data-mining tools will be considered as an alternative to traditional integrations

Client Team As and when requirements arise

20. A policy will be developed that data is accessible by default within the Council. Technical controls will remain in place but officers will be encourage to share information, particularly through SharePoint, when there is no need to keep that

Client Team 2014

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Action Ref


information confidential

21. In collaboration with Legal Services, data sharing policies will continue to be developed so that data can be made available to other service areas and agencies that need it.


22. Opportunities to exploit the full functionality of SharePoint as the Council’s corporate collaboration tool will be considered once the initial roll out is complete.


23. A single road map will be developed for core infrastructure and key applications across the Council and the upgrade and development of these applications will be managed according to that road map.

Client Team /Capita/new supplier 2014 – Develop Management - ongoing

24. A means to bring in a mix of specialist vendors to deliver innovative, tailored solutions and agile development techniques to provide benefits quickly to services will be sought in the re-procurement.


25. To support channel shift web, telephony and back office systems providing critical live feeds will be categorised as high availability systems in the re-procurement.


26. Where applications cannot support live feeds to customer facing systems, upgrades to these systems will be considered in the application road map


27. Investigate entering into a shared service that would include a shared instance of SAP

Delivered in parallel to re-procurement 2015

28. An alternative and cheaper solution to the SAP CRM module will be investigated and a solution sought through the re-procurement.


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Sources of Information

The Council have commissioned a number of reviews on its ICT infrastructure and services. All 1.5

of the information has been analysed and collated to develop this strategy document. Sources

of information include:

Harrow Council High Level ICT Review/Sourcing Options, Actica Consulting Ltd;

Harrow Council Review and Development of Security Compliance, Hytec;

Report to CSB IT Strategy High Level Principles, Carol Cutler, Director of Business

Transformation and Customer Services;

Review of Devolved Applications, Phase 2 Report, Ernst and Young.

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2 Business Context

In common with other local authorities the Council is facing significant financial challenges over 2.1

the next five years with a 50% target reduction in controllable spend equating to £75m from a

total budget of £188m

The 2015 General Election presents some uncertainty with regard to the scope of the Council’s 2.2

responsibilities for the next five years. There are also obvious challenges for the Council which

can be identified now:

an increasingly mobile and flexible workforce working extended hours;

the requirement to cope with unknown growth or shrinkage, with some services aiming to

outsource their activities, whilst others are taking on work from other authorities;

increased demand for Council services as a result of changing demographic and

economic circumstances such as benefit changes, increasing personal debt and

immigration

Discussions with the Corporate Strategy Board (CSB) and Directorate Management Teams 2.3

have determined the following aspirations for service development that the ICT services will

need to support:

better customer service

sharing of information across functions and with other agencies

consolidated views of our residents, households, families

increasing dependence on ICT to deliver efficient front line services

transparency

service improvement

residents to do things for themselves

personalisation for both customers and staff

integration with partners

commercialisation by helping services to be competitive

commercialisation through creating sellable applications

creation and utilisation of shared services

Based on these service needs CSB agreed the following strategic principles for ICT: 2.4

ICT must offer value for money;

ICT must be reliable;

ICT must be flexible;

ICT must be accessible;

ICT must be secure and compliant;

ICT must be joined up across the Council;

ICT must support service improvement;

ICT must provide for excellent customer service and promote channel shift;

ICT must be transparent.

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The full detail of these principles is presented at Appendix A

From these principles four strategic themes were derived. These themes form the basis of this 2.5

strategy.




up and transparent


improvement


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3 Current ICT

Background to the current ICT provision

In 2008 a new ICT Strategy for the Council set out a two pronged approach – core infrastructure 3.1

service, corporate applications and end-to-end service management for all ICT would be

delivered by an outsourced service provider, while service departments would continue to

manage their own line of business applications.

Capita, who had already delivered significant cost reductions through technology enabled 3.2

change under the Business Transformation Programme (BTP), were appointed as the

Outsourced ICT service provider in 2010. Recent investment in the ICT infrastructure has

moved us towards a more stable and flexible platform for the future; however, this has been a

slow and difficult process. The contract will end at the end of 2015 and market consultation has

indicated alternative arrangements have to be in place at least six months before that date.

Capita Services

Since 2005 Capita have been responsible for providing the Finance system (SAP ERP), contact 3.3

centre (Customer Relationship Management system, telephony and line of business application

integration), and electronic document and workflow management (Civica EDMRS).

Under this Business Transformation Partnership Capita implemented other systems in support 3.4

of business efficiency savings including: route planning for special needs transport; route

planning and collection recording for domestic and business waste; electronic tasking and

management of Enterprise and Environment workers; and, the automation of libraries.

In 2010 Capita took responsibility for the IT infrastructure including: 3.5

End user computing to about 2000 users

Network services connecting approximately fifty sites including the Council’s libraries,

Children’s Centres and other public areas.

Telephony services providing IP telephony services across the Council.

Hosting services for around 400 servers supporting around 250 applications

In taking on the legacy ICT services Capita were responsible for transforming those services 3.6

including:

Upgrading Wide Area Network (WAN), Local Area Network (LAN)

Upgrading Cisco telephony including “Follow-Me” and CRM integration;

Email migration from Novell GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange/Outlook 2010;

Replacing Novell for file and print, internet proxy, and FTP;

Introducing Blackberry Enterprise Server for smartphones;

“Follow-Me” desktop – upgrading and extending the existing Citrix deployment to all

users and all applications. Includes the deployment of Office 2010;

End user device refresh – providing nearly 1000 laptops to frontline staff while moving

from desktops to thin client for office based staff

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Extensive server virtualisation.

At this point the follow-me desktop and end user device refresh transformation projects remain

to be completed and there are elements of other deliverables still outstanding.

In a change to the original proposal, migration of the Council’s servers to Capita’s datacentre 3.7

has been stopped and services have been retained at the Civic Centre. This has realised a

capital saving on the migration cost as well as an on-going reduction in service charges.

Capita is also undertaking a Mobile and Flexible Working Project which will introduce 3.8

collaborative working and productivity solutions to supplement the flexible technology being

implemented by the ICT Transformation Programme. The solutions that will be delivered

include:

SharePoint document management (linked to the existing Civica document and workflow

management system);

Mobile productivity tools including presence and messaging;

Deployment of Wi-Fi in the Civic Centre.

This builds on the IT Outsourcing refresh which is delivering follow-me telephony, follow-me

printing, a virtual follow-me desktop and greatly increased number of laptops and other portable

devices so that staff can work from wherever they need to.

Applications

Although Capita provide most of the hosting, with the exception of corporate applications, most 3.9

applications are supported by the applications vendors working directly to the services. Some

key applications include:

Corporate

Asidua CCPH (Customer Care Platform Harrow)

Civica EDRMS and workflow;

SAP (Enterprise Portal, ERP Central Console, Supplier Relationship Management,

Customer Relationship Management, Business Warehouse)

Service owned

Civica Parking;

Frameworki (Social Care)

Iken (Legal case work)

Modern Gov (Committee management)

Northgate IWorld (Revenues and Benefits);

Northgate MVM M3 (Planning)

Northgate OHMS (Housing);

Increasingly and in line with market trends applications are being procured as Software as a 3.10

Service (SaaS) from external service providers, including:

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Bartec (Environmental Services)

Capita Payments

Gandlake MyHarrow Account (Citizen portal)

Verto (Project management system)

Health and Safety reporting

Printers

The Council has a master service and procurement contract with Xerox, for the provision of 3.11

black and white, colour and multi-function printers. Capita work with this organisation to provide

a set of complementary services that comprise:

connectivity of printers to the network;

management of email accounts associated with shared document scanning services;

logging of incidents and Service Change Requests through the service desk;

assistance with the testing, acceptance and implementation of relevant printer drivers on

the standard desktop image.

Challenges

Delays in delivering the new infrastructure have constrained the ability to move other services 3.12

forward. In particular, the versions of Microsoft operating system and productivity software and

delays and reliability issues with the Citrix deployment are holding back upgrades of line of

business applications that are now being built to operate with later versions.

There is growing use of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions which, being commissioned 3.13

outside of the corporate IT governance, may lack the commercial and security controls

appropriate to key business systems.

There is growing demand for third parties to have access to Council systems, particularly in 3.14

support of partnership working. This makes the traditional perimeter security measures no

longer effective at protecting all of the data movements and access routes.

Increasingly rigorous security requirements from central government and other bodies that the 3.15

Council works with have been increasing the cost of service delivery and constraining plans for

flexible and partnership working.

The Council has developed complex integrations between systems particularly with the ERP 3.16

system through the JCAPS middleware to give an integrated view of costs and performance

across the organisation and through the Contact Centre system to enable rapid presentation of

customer information, either through the contact centre or online. Unpicking these integrations

is likely to be complex, but necessary in order to take advantage of cheaper hosting options and

because of the difficulties of supporting the current middleware.

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4 External Trends

Introduction

Before formulating a strategy to develop the Council’s IT in response to the changing business 4.1

needs outlined earlier, we also reviewed important external factors: how the IT market had

changed and the new opportunities that are now available; how central government policy and

the broader regulatory environment has changed and how that affects what the Council is

required and permitted to do; and, what other authorities are doing in this context.

The IT Market

Since the last strategy and the outsourcing of the Council’s IT, the market has changed 4.2

dramatically with an increasing standardisation, commoditisation and consumerisation of IT.

The market is fragmenting and services are increasingly being procured from specialists in end

user computing, networks, hosting and applications.

The latest and emerging trends in technology bring new opportunities to realise efficiencies and 4.3

improve effectiveness, leading to wider corporate acceptance of the “Cloud” (services over the

internet), mobile, collaboration and “Big Data” (business intelligence) solutions. These trends

are echoed in the Government ICT Strategy which addresses some of the historical issues with

public sector IT and positions it to “delivering better public services for less cost”. This is to be

achieved by standardising on a common ICT infrastructure that uses these new market

offerings and reducing the risk of project failure by having small, targeted developments,

strengthening governance and directing ICT investment towards delivering business change.

These trends are briefly reviewed here and the Cloud is reviewed more fully in Appendix B.

Commoditisation Core ICT services such as storage, hosting, operating systems and software 4.4

are available online, at low prices, on a pay-as-you use basis. The market is fragmenting and

services are being procured from specialists in end user computing, networks, hosting and

applications. The old model of a single supplier delivering all aspects of ICT delivery is rarely

found to be cost effective or agile enough in today’s market and in the near future may not be

possible as software vendors move to an online centric service model. New Service Integrators

and brokers are emerging to manage individual providers; however, this model is currently little

tested and only marginally cost effective for smaller customers (under 2000 users) so many

organisations are choosing to take this service management and integration in-house or

developing hybrid models where a single supplier remains accountable for the service, but there

is more diversity and flexibility in the subcontractors delivering the services.

The Government Procurement Service has been establishing vehicles for procuring and 4.5

delivering commoditised services. G-Gloud is a procurement framework for Cloud services with

pre-agreed public sector prices while PSN is another framework built upon a common network

to deliver connectivity and interoperability.

Consumerisation Consumer IT has over taken corporate IT in sophistication. Anyone can buy 4.6

a sophisticated device with an intuitive interface and start using it immediately with little if any

training. Business managers can procure an IT system off the internet that will allow them to

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work better and reap tangible business benefit, often for small monthly fees that will not even

register with procurement. Staff are expecting their corporate IT to behave like and integrate

with technology they use outside their work, and will dictate the devices and applications they

want to use. The complication is that such services may not have the security, resilience or

commercial liabilities appropriate to a service that the Council might depend upon.

Cloud Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services 4.7

over the Internet or a private Government secure wide area network. Cloud computing is a

model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable

computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be

rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider

interaction. Services can be scaled up or down as required, even on demand, providing

additional services when they are needed to support peaks and taking away costs when there

are troughs. In the very near future, the major service providers are only going to be delivering

through this route. For example, Microsoft’s current pricing policy strongly encourages the use

of their online solution and the next releases of their products may only be available online.

Whilst this is all beneficial, there are additional and hidden costs that are not yet fully

understood in the immature market.

Mobile With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets over the past few years, users expect 4.8

their information to travel with them and be available wherever they are. This technology offers

organisations the opportunity to support front line workers with real time information as well as

potentially reducing the costs of office space and the unproductive time of staff travelling

between clients. One challenge is scaling up solutions that might work for individual users to

secure corporate solutions.

Collaboration Social Media has demonstrated the benefits and ease of online collaboration 4.9

and this is translating into corporate solutions helping people work together more effectively.

Culturally this is creating a generation of people who are much more comfortable with sharing

who they are and what they do in a very visible way. These sites also create expectations about

the accessibility and ease of use of IT: users can set up their own groups, choose who or what

they want to follow and be informed about, publishing and disseminating information can be

done by anyone. Collaboration products like Yammer, Huddle and SharePoint are incorporating

the ideas of social media aligned to the security and data requirements expected by the

corporate environment. Video conferencing and online meetings are other corporate solutions

taking ideas from consumer social media.

Big Data Getting meaningful business intelligence out of diverse systems has always been a 4.10

challenge: it has been costly and difficult to aggregate and analyse data, requiring complex

integrations and control over all of the data sources. With most data now stored in standard

(SQL or Oracle) databases, with so much data in the public domain, and with cheap processing

power, a different approach is emerging that enables data to be relatively easily extracted and

analysed. This offers the potential for smaller organisations to generate useful business

intelligence at a relatively low cost.

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Government Policy and Regulation

Local authorities work with a wide range of other organisations and for some time technology 4.11

has been used to facilitate data sharing between them. Some organisations that the Council

works with, notably central government and the financial industry, have been imposing

increasingly rigorous security standards on authorities which are requiring the Council to invest

in increased security measures and inhibiting connections to other agencies who do not meet

those same security standards.

Public Services Network (PSN) The PSN was promoted as being “at the heart of one 4.12

objective of the Government ICT Strategy. PSN provides an assured network over which

government can safely share services, including many G-Cloud services, to collaborate in new

ways, more effectively and efficiently than ever before.” It promised “The Public Services

Network (PSN) will substantially reduce the cost of communication services across UK

government and enable new, joined-up and shared public services for the benefit of citizens.

PSN is creating one logical network, based on industry standards, and a more open and

competitive ICT marketplace at the heart of the UK public sector.”

Central government is increasingly mandating that local authorities access services from 4.13

government departments over this network – directly impacting benefits calculations, electoral

registration and fraud amongst other services.

In order to connect to these services local authorities have been required to implement rigorous 4.14

security measures to protect information owned by these central government departments – to

the extent of limiting access to Council systems to Council owned and managed devices. This

has halted plans for enabling staff to work more flexibly using their own devices and is forcing

the Council to scale back integration of partnership working with other agencies not on the PSN,

such as third sector, health care and education. Strictly speaking these controls need only be

applied to systems containing sensitive data derived from the PSN; however, with several

corporate wide systems already affected and more likely to come in scope as more services are

routed through the PSN, the Council is proceeding on the premise that all systems need to be

compliant.

The PSN Authority has indicated a willingness to review these controls in the future as the 4.15

technology evolves; however, they are likely to remain a significant inhibitor to the Councils’

aspirations for flexible and collaborative working for some time.

NHS N3 Network The N3 network allows connectivity to NHS systems. The Council has 4.16

achieved compliance with the NHS Information Governance toolkit and is in the process of

getting a connection to N3. Initially this will be for Public Health, but there is an aspiration to use

data from NHS in other areas, particularly social care, and this will require the governance

regime to be extended to those services and systems as well. N3 is provided over the PSN so

there are no additional technical compliance requirements.

PCI DSS The Payment Card Industry DSS standard sets out data protection and security 4.17

standards for payment card processing. These require a high level of security across all

systems which have a potential connection to any card processing. This was highly onerous for

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the Council, for which only a small proportion of the ICT was associated with payment

processing but all was in scope as it shared the same infrastructure. The Council consequently

outsourced payment card processing in 2013 to a managed service; and implemented controls

on the Contact Centre telephony system to enable card payment data to bypass call agents.

There is a small segregated environment remaining that falls under the PCI DSS compliance

regulations, that diverts the card payment data from the agents.

What other Local Authorities are doing

The Council commissioned a review of how other Councils are responding to these new 4.18

opportunities and challenges – detail of which is contained in the Supporting Papers to this

Strategy document.

Other Councils are recognising and responding to similar trends and themes: customer centric, 4.19

agility and innovation, open and transparent data.

Adoption of these new technologies and commercial models is still in the early stages: for 4.20

example Hillingdon obtain their office productivity systems as Software as a Service from

Google; the Tri-Borough partnership has just let several services on a multi-vendor “tower”

model and Barking and Dagenham is about to launch a deployment of cheap Google Chrome

devices. The benefits and effectiveness of these solutions remains to be proven but will be

closely monitored.

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5 Future Strategy

Introduction

A series of strategic themes are proposed to inform recommendations for the development of 5.1

the Council’s future ICT service delivery. Four strategic themes have been identified as follows:

Strategic Theme 1: Core IT will be cost effective and reliable;

Strategic Theme 2: User will find IT secure, flexible and accessible;

Strategic Theme 3: Information will be joined-up and transparent;

Strategic Theme 4: Applications will support channel shift and service improvement

These themes are discussed in further detail in the following sections, and a series of key 5.2

recommendations that together will deliver the objectives of the future vision diagram at Figure

6.1.

These themes and recommendations will form the basis of the strategy action plan for the 5.3

Council, which is summarised in Section 6.

Strategic Theme 1: Core IT will be cost effective and reliable.

Overview

This theme incorporates the principles “ICT must offer value for money” and “ICT must be more 5.4

reliable”

Consistent Governance

In the first half of 2013 Ernst and Young were commissioned to undertake a review of ICT 5.5

governance across the Council. They concluded that the two-pronged approach established in

the 2008 strategy with core infrastructure and corporate systems managed centrally and line of

business applications managed by the services was broadly appropriate for the Council. They

made a series of recommendations to enhance collaboration and coordination and to potentially

reduce duplication and realise efficiencies across the Council. These principles were agreed by

the Corporate Strategy Board (CSB) and form part of this strategy.

Retain the overall ‘hybrid’ operating model currently in place at the Council

Establish central ICT governance and accountability across all of the Council

Create and embed a corporately owned and led strategy

Implement a category management approach to spend

Re-align resources to new operating model principles and operational options

Centralise responsibility for ICT strategy and Enterprise Architecture

Strengthen current approach to licence & system administration

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Implement a devolved support model for non-managed applications, and formalise the

role of super-users within the triage process

Retained ICT function to lead on commercial & vendor management for the Council

Fair and transparent charging

The Capita contract is based on a unitary charge. There is some built in variation based on 5.6

numbers of users and devices; however, most additions and decreases are based on the

outcome of a commercial negotiation. This results in a lengthy period of time to commission

new services and in negligible reductions when services are decommissioned.

The unitary charge is recharged to the services through Service Support Charges (SSCs) 5.7

according to headcount. This creates some disparities where new services are added and the

incremental costs have to be charged separately to the service or where services have different

resource requirements that are not directly related to user numbers.

Some services, like printing, are charged on a direct usage basis and this model is likely to 5.8

increase as the market presents services more as consumable commodities. While variable

pricing presents the opportunity to only pay for what is needed, if not managed, and without the

charges being obviously attributed to services, there is no incentive to reduce consumption and

a risk that the Council’s costs will increase.

A balance needs to be found between simplicity of accounting – not creating a massively 5.9

complex recharging system that requires significant resource to administer – and fairly

allocating costs in a way that gives the services control over their spend. Any recharging will

need to be aligned with the commercial arrangements with future suppliers.

Multi-vendor delivery model

The Capita contract has two main elements – the Business Transformation Programme started 5.10

in 2005 and the Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) started in 2010. Both come to an

end towards the end of 2015. The Council has decided it will not extend the current contract

The Government ICT Strategy promotes the adoption of a “Tower Model” for ICT moving away 5.11

from the historic trend of large, long term, vertically integrated prime contracts, towards an

architecture where contracts and service management processes are structured around

providing commoditised services and architectural coherence. Pioneered by the Department for

Work and Pensions (DWP), Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Ministry of Justice (MoJ), local

authorities are now implementing or planning to implement this approach. The “Tower Model”

defined by the Government Procurement Service (GPS), is illustrated in Figure 5 1 below.

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Figure 5 1: Tower Model for Government ICT

However the infrastructure may be delivered, it is likely that more and more line of business 5.12

applications will migrate to standardised hosted Cloud solutions within the life of this strategy as

suppliers offer attractive pricing to incentivise that and to avoid the expensive upgrade and

development costs of a bespoke configured solution that is on-premises. The future contract

must address the management of this increasing mix of suppliers as well as the associated

reduction in infrastructure services as these are taken over by the software suppliers.

The emerging solution to managing such a mix of suppliers is a Service Integration and 5.13

Management (SIAM) function that will align services to business demand, manage the suppliers

of service components and deliver defined end-to-end services to agreed standards.

The approach pioneered in large government departments has been to appoint an independent 5.14

supplier, not directly involved in any of the service delivery, to manage this function. The viability

of this in smaller public sector organisations such as local authorities remains unproven and

some authorities are choosing to develop this capability in-house. Others are a looking at a

hybrid model where the SIAM vendor is also responsible for delivering a large proportion of the

services but there is some diversity and flexibility in some elements of service.

Acknowledging the immaturity of the SIAM model, the complexity of the Council’s IT systems 5.15

and the limited timeline to the end of the Capita contract, the Council is considering a hybrid

approach where a single supplier will take responsibility for delivering the services in 2015 and

then undertake the technical and commercial disaggregation that will enable the services to be

let as towers in the future. Services that are already separate (such as printing) or could easily

be separated early in the contract (such as telephony) will be incorporated into the service

management arrangements.

Suppliers will be invited to propose commercial structures and technical solutions that meet the 5.16

Council objectives of value for money, reliability and flexibility. This must include the reduction in

hosting services anticipated as applications move to Software as a Service, simplification of

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desktop support as end user devices become simpler and more commoditised, as well as the

ability to bring in new innovative solutions where they would be of benefit to the Council’s

operations.

Reliability

Reliability of ICT becomes more and more essential as the services increasingly depend on ICT 5.17

to deliver front line services and as the customers are encouraged to interact with the Council

online rather than more costly face-to-face or telephone contact.

The transition from the current Capita contract to a new service provider has been designed to 5.18

be low risk. By having one supplier take responsibility for all of the existing services as they are

the risk of conflicts between suppliers, delivering from new platforms is minimised.

The future technical solution will be carefully evaluated and discussed during dialogue, taking 5.19

the advice of independent experts to ensure that the solution is viable, although the

responsibility for the solution will remain with the supplier and be managed through outcome

measures.

The core infrastructure will be built on tried and tested technology. Where possible this will be 5.20

open standard.

Performance measures have tended to be based on individual systems which does not give a 5.21

full view of the user experience. Tools to measure the end-to-end user experience will be

evaluated and future performance indicators will incorporate measures based on these.

Printing

The Council has implemented a follow-me printing capability through a contract with Xerox and 5.22

printers have been deployed to all offices. This provides printing services that follow users as

they work in different locations while also protecting the security of data by requiring users to log

onto the printers in order to print their documents. There is a large number of legacy printers

remaining with leases extending to 2015 and these will be decommissioned to ensure the

security benefits of follow-me printing and the cheaper per-page charges under the Xerox

contract are realised.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

ICT Disaster Recovery is a contracted service in support of the Directorates’ Business 5.23

Continuity plans providing resilience and recovery capability for specified ICT systems. The

services contracted are based on an assessment of the criticality of those systems and the

ability of the service to operate under Business Continuity. Current DR arrangements are based

on needs that were established 5 years ago.

The Emergency Planning and Business Continuity team are undertaking a full review of 5.24

Business Continuity plans and this may present different requirements. The cost of meeting

these needs will have to be assessed against the risks.

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The market for DR is changing. The “Cloud” provides the means to get a business up and 5.25

running quickly without the pre-requisite for duplicate infrastructure in place with a supplier.

Recent financial failures of suppliers which left various organisations without any services is

also forcing businesses to rethink their DR provision and consider acquiring these services from

a different supplier to the main service provider.

The re-procurement will be used as an opportunity to review the Council’s DR provision to 5.26

ensure it still meets the priorities of the business and that it makes best use of the options now

available in the market place.

Cost saving options

Given the Council’s budget pressures it is important that the procurement delivers the best 5.27

possible combination of cost and quality. The organisation has expressed the wish that the

procurement results in a service no worse than the service procured from our current provider.

Soft market testing has indicated savings in the range of 20-30% on a like for like basis, due to 5.28

changes in the market since our last procurement. Even at the most optimistic end of the range

this figure is short of the 50% target savings percentage needed to balance the budget.

Through dialogue we will be able to understand the areas in which our current requirements are 5.29

driving up our current cost. For example:-

an additional 1% on our KPI for availability could be adding disproportionately to the

costs

more modern technology could allow us to review our approach to DR

a rationalisation of the number of applications we currently support could reduce our

costs .

Data centre

The Council’s property strategy envisages a move from the current Civic Centre site in the short 5.30

to medium term. Initially the contract with Capita required the data centre to be moved out to a

Capita data centre. This requirement was removed in order to deliver a short term budget

saving.

The re-procurement needs to reintroduce the requirement to relocate the data centre in order to

avoid the expense of rebuilding the data centre in the new location.

SAP

SAP is the Council’s ERP system and was implemented in 2006. Much work has been 5.31

undertaken to make it more user friendly and to increase take up of both the manager and

employee self-service functions. Despite this there is uncertainty regarding the value for money

of this enterprise system. A cost benefit analysis regarding a move to a cheaper system has

shown that the cost of change makes the benefit marginal in the short to medium term.

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As part of a wider review of support service, consideration is being given to entering into a 5.32

shared service that would include a shared instance of SAP. If this doesn’t come about then the

future of SAP will have to be kept under review. The contract for the re-procured service will

need to account for both possibilities.

The CRM module of SAP is of particular concern since it doesn’t fit well with the council’s 5.33

channel migration strategy and is an area where very little of the functionality is currently used.

Given that the shared service option doesn’t include customer services an early migration for

SAP CRM is required and alternative and cheaper solutions sought. This will be reviewed and

a decision made prior to the re-procurement.

Strategic Theme 2: Users will find IT to be secure, flexible and accessible

Overview

The Council requires a more agile and flexible ICT service from its partners and suppliers, 5.34

ensuring data security is maintained whilst facilitating the delivery of customer focussed

services.

The Council’s ICT Service will need to become modern, innovative and ambitious to deliver 5.35

flexible, secure and accessible services to users and residents. The Council could have a single

corporate platform that makes access to systems and data available to all users, whoever and

wherever they are. This would provide a means to integrate all services, wherever they are

provided from.

This theme incorporates the principles “ICT must be more flexible” and “ICT must be more 5.36

accessible”.

Access Gateway

The current “fortress” design with a secure perimeter worked well when nearly all of the users 5.37

and systems were within the Council offices. However, it starts to break down when staff work

remotely, other agencies require connection to the Council’s systems and applications are being

delivered from the “Cloud”. The role of the ICT service provider has to shift from being a

provider of services to being an aggregator that ensures users from diverse locations are

connected securely to applications which will also be in multiple locations.

In order to meet PCI compliance, the requirements of the NHS N3 and PSN codes of 5.38

connection, the Council has already had to impose restrictions on connectivity:

physically separating the People’s Network and similar public systems from the

Corporate network;

improving remote access controls so that different levels of access can be granted

according to where the user is and what type of device is being used and ensuring that

the appropriate level of software patching and anti-virus is installed;

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introducing more rigorous controls on the design, build and maintenance of their

infrastructure;

A security review undertaken by Hytec proposed that the Council works towards consolidating 5.39

the diverse access mechanisms into a single Access Gateway that integrates and controls

access between users on difference devices and access methods and applications provided

from different platforms. A high level architecture diagram of where Harrow wants to end up

during the period of this strategy is shown in the diagram below:

Figure 5 2: High Level Technical Architecture

These improvements will be an enabler for future agile working, shared services with other 5.40

Local Authorities and will enable wider use of secure Central Government and NHS systems via

the PSN/GCSX and N3. Taking this holistic approach to access control should also mean that it

will be cheaper, easier and faster to respond to future needs to share or access Partner

information.

The Council’s enterprise architecture will be developed around this Access Gateway model and 5.41

all future requirements and developments will be assessed against it. Over time existing

systems will be consolidated or replaced to create this gateway.

Cloud Hosting

The Cloud is the Government preferred means of delivering services and the market is shifting 5.42

so that some vendors will only be offering their services from the Cloud. However, many of the

legacy line of business applications used by local authorities are not readily available as a

Cloud offering, although that does not preclude them being hosted in the Cloud. Also, while they

offer the potential to reduce cost and increase agility, at this point in time, Cloud services can

work out to be more expensive than traditional on-premises solutions.

Encrypted Communications

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The ease of procuring Cloud services means that the necessary considerations around 5.43

integration, security, data protection, disaster recovery and commercial good practice may not

be addressed to a level that is appropriate for a service the Council will rely upon.

The Council will, as a preference, consider online options for any future hardware, system 5.44

software or application software procurement. A policy and guidance will be developed to

ensure that when procuring services from the Cloud issues of authentication, integration,

security, data protection, disaster recovery, and commercial good practice are followed.

End User Services

Although the Council has deployed a virtual desktop solution using Citrix and Wyse thin client 5.45

devices the Council has deployed PCs where there is a need for locally installed software or

where a recycled PC was suitable for use as a thin client. The recycled PCs being used as thin

clients will be removed as the user to desk ration increases as a result of the Civic Centre

accommodation consolidation works, supported by the Mobile and Flexible Working

programme. If there are any recycled PCs remaining they will be replaced with Wyse thin clients

as part of ongoing refresh. PCs being provided to support specific legacy applications will be

removed when those applications are replace.

Over the last two years there has been considerable investment by manufacturers in the area of 5.46

low cost mobile devices such as cut down laptops, tablets and portable mobile phones that

include basic applications covering word processing, spread sheets, presentations and email

and can access other services over the internet. The utilisation of these devices can reduce

cost in both hardware purchase and support as well as provide more flexible and agile working.

As internet provision becomes the norm many users will not need full specification laptops and

the Council will consider cheaper internet-only devices, such as Chromebooks, for such users.

These are not only cheaper to purchase, but cheaper to maintain as there is limited software to

install and maintain on the devices. The exception to this direction will be where the mobility of

users requires them to go into areas of poor network coverage and requires that they have a

more sophisticated device with locally installed software to be able to work offline.

Moving to thinner devices requires that applications are available over the internet in a device 5.47

and operating system agnostic form. Many new applications use an internet browser as their

default access and other legacy applications can be enabled for internet access using Citrix.

The Council will continue to use Citrix where necessary, while preferring new applications to be

delivered through device and operating system independent solutions such as an internet

browser. Sourcing applications from the Cloud supports this goal.

While all Public Sector bodies need to provide their staff with access to similar functions 5.48

historically each Public Sector organisation has separately specified, built and run its desktop

service – creating additional cost and complexity. There are various initiatives to develop a

standardised device configuration with a central library of packages for delivering applications to

the devices. In the re-procurement of services the Council will discuss with potential suppliers

the benefits of using these initiatives to reduce support and implementation costs.

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Unified Communications

The Council currently has separate contracts for the delivery of mobile and fixed telephony and 5.49

charges are incurred when communicating between them. If customer calls need to be diverted

to someone’s mobile this also incurs a cost for the Council. Conferencing services are obtained

from another service provider. As an early transformation project, the Council will require it’s

future service provider to deliver a unified communications solution. This should provide a single

number on which officers can be reached regardless of the device they happen to be using,

minimise costs of calls between different networks, and provide integrated conferencing

capabilities. This solution should exploit the features of whatever telephony platform is used and

integrate with the Council’s messaging tool (currently Lync).

Wi-Fi

To improve the experience of officers and members working flexibly with the Council offices Wi-5.50

Fi will be installed. This will be designed as an untrusted network. Guest access for both the

general public and for visitors and contractors is desirable if it can be delivered in a secure and

cost effective way.

Strategic Theme 3: Information will be joined-up and transparent

Overview

This theme incorporates the principles “ICT must be joined up across the Council”, and “ICT 5.51

must be transparent.“ acknowledging the Council’s requirement for data to be brought together

more effectively, to provide useable information that supports service delivery and management

of the organisation and meets the transparency objectives of government policy and legislation.

Historically integration and sharing of data has been achieved through expensive inter-system 5.52

integrations. The JCAPS middleware used primarily for SAP is no longer supported and the

Asidua CPH integration used to consolidate information from business systems for customer

contact agents is expensive to support. The move of applications to hosted Software asd a

Service or shared services also requires a review of integrations and how they are achieved in a

more disaggregated environment. The Council will ask potential suppliers to review the choice

of middleware and consider alternatives, including cloud based solutions.

New data-mining tools are emerging which mean that it is possible to extract and analyse data 5.53

from multiple systems without putting in complex integrations. Where new requirements emerge

for extracting and analysing data, these data mining tools will be considered as an alternative to

traditional integrations.

The Council has also found that policies and systems have often hindered the sharing of 5.54

information between service areas and with other agencies.

One reason for this is the belief that data protecting regulations prohibit the sharing of personal 5.55

data between functions. This is partially correct in that the act requires that data is only used for

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the purposes for which the data was collected. However, provided the users are informed when

they give their data what it will be used for and with the right policies in place for data sharing

there is no obstacle to sharing data. In fact, there are circumstances such as child protection, or

ensuring officers who visit service users are aware of any potential hazards, or particular

sensitivities, that it is essential. Data sharing policies will continue to be developed with the

services to enable effective, but appropriately controlled, sharing of data.

Another reason is that individuals have been protective over their own data and this has been 5.56

reinforced by the technical limitations of the infrastructure. Sensitive data should be controlled

but a lot of information could be shared more openly to the benefit of the organisation. The

Council’s SharePoint collaboration tool now makes this technically easy to do. Information in

SharePoint will be protected by default to ensure that sensitive data remains protected, but a

policy of data being accessible by default will be adopted and services will be encouraged to

share non-sensitive data to reduce unnecessary enquiries and data requests from other service

areas.

The initial scope of the SharePoint implementation is to replace or reduce the size of the 5.57

network shared drives making it easier to find and access data. Some capabilities have not

been enabled as part of the deployment and there are additional modules that have not yet

been purchased/ Potentially the system provides a platform to replace the intranet, internet and

may other data sharing and workflow systems. SharePoint is the Council’s preferred

collaboration tool and, once the initial roll out is complete, other opportunities to exploit its

further functionality will be explored.

Strategic Theme 4: Applications will promote change and improve channel shift

Overview

Investment in ICT must be used as an ‘enabler of change’ to drive cost effectiveness across the 5.58

Council’s services through the delivery of Transformational Programmes, which in turn, will

increase productivity and flexibility and deliver improved customer/client services.

This theme incorporates the principles “ICT must support service improvement” and “ICT must 5.59

promote channel shift”.

Application upgrades and consolidation

The Council’s strategy has been for business systems to be owned by the business and whilst it 5.60

is appropriate that the selection, procurement and even operation of systems might sit with the

business, the lack of integration with corporate plans has led to a number of issues:

there is a proliferation of systems with similar functionality creating unnecessary cost;

integration is costly to implement and maintain;

The Council is currently tied into expensive legacy applications;

infrastructure has to be maintained at the level of the lowest common denominator;

data sharing is prohibited by rigid security measures;

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data in the Cloud is not managed.

For future requirements the central ICT team should work closely with the business, using their 5.61

expert knowledge of the Council’s ICT architecture and the ICT market place to suggest and

recommend solutions. Where possible and practical, future requirements should be met through

the corporate systems. Where functionality is very specific to the service, or where there are

frequent changes to systems due to statutory changes, it is recognised that an off-the-shelf

product designed for local government will be more appropriate and the service will be best

placed to select this.

It is essential that the versions of the core infrastructure and key applications are aligned so that 5.62

there is compatibility between systems. A road map will be developed for key systems across

the Council and the maintenance, upgrade and replacement of systems will be managed

according to that road map. This will require the support of all the services to reach a

compromise that works both for those on established systems and those wanting to move to

new technology.

Business Transformation

IT is an essential component in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of customer facing 5.63

services, enabling services to be retained and potentially improved despite falling budgets.

Current product lifecycles are often shorter than three years, so a traditional two to three year 5.64

development project risks delivering assets that are out of date and close to redundant. Instead

of focusing on building big monolithic systems with 10 year lifecycles and similar pay-back

profiles, the Council should shift towards rapid, agile developments, making small changes that

deliver immediate benefits to the business. The approach of making smaller developments that

deliver quickly ensures the solution is current, realises benefits sooner and reduces the risk of

failure.

In re-procuring the business transformation services delivered under the current Capita 5.65partnership agreement we will seek a means to bring in a mix of specialist vendors to deliver fast agile developments that provide quick benefits to the services. Channel Shift

Residents will increasingly expect to be able to manage their interactions with the Council online 5.66

and this offers cost-saving opportunities for the Council, although there will remain a need for

the foreseeable future for traditional channels for certain groups of users.

Customer facing ICT including web, contact centre and the back office systems that provide live 5.67

feeds into them needs to be reliable and accessible being the primary means by which

customers interact with the Council

Back office systems that cannot deliver live feeds into the customer facing systems will be 5.68

identified and considered for upgrade in the applications road map.

The Gandlake contract for the provision of the Customer and Employee portals will novate to 5.69

the Council on termination of the Capita contract,

Note. Provision of customer facing ICT content is part of the devolved ICT service provision and therefore outside of the scope of this strategy

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6 Implementation

Outline Roadmap

The table in this section contains details of the responsibility and recommended timeline for implementing the actions identified in this Future Strategy 6.1

section, together with how they support each of the strategic objectives.

Action Ref Action Description

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1. The central IT function will take a coordinating role for architecture, commercial governance and licencing across all of the Council’s ICT while services remain responsible for their business applications

Work to be undertaken by the client team in accordance with the E&Y report agreed by CSB 2014

2. In re-procuring the ICT services the Council will seek a supplier that can deliver a commercial structure and technical solution that meets the Council strategic objectives including value for money, reliability and flexibility.


3. An Access Gateway architecture that integrates multiple services will be adopted, allowing

Client team to

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authorised users to securely access them from any location, at any time and from any authorised device. All new developments will be assessed against this architecture in order to move to it over time.

develop architecture 2014 Delivered throughout the life of the re-procured service

4. To enable the use of innovative, flexible and cost saving solutions available through emerging and alternate technologies (eg. Cloud services), the future ICT supplier will be required to disaggregate systems over time in readiness for deployment to these technologies.


5. Use of emerging and alternate technologies (eg Cloud) will be enabled by developing policy and guidance that ensures systems are commissioned with the appropriate security, data governance and commercial controls.

Client team to develop 2014

6. Disaster Recovery will be reviewed in the re-procurement to ensure that optimum provision is

Delivered through re-

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provided across all of the councils ICT services; reducing the committed provision where new technologies offer alternate solutions for replacing systems and, obtaining a balance between provision and cost.

procurement 2015

7. Following deployment and stabilisation of follow-me printing, remaining stand alone printers will be decommissioned

Client Team 2014

8. Performance measurement tools that focus on user experience will be evaluated and implemented.

Client Team/Capita 2014/15

9. Performance metrics that focus on user experience will be incorporated into the future ICT contract


10. Recharging mechanisms for ICT services that are fair and transparent allowing the Directorates to control their spend will developed in parallel with the re-procurement of ICT services

Client Team/Finance 2015

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11. Recycled PCs being used as thin clients will be removed from the estate as the number of devices required reduces. If this does not eliminate them all, they will be replaced with thin clients during ongoing refresh.

Client Team /Capita/new supplier Ongoing 2014-2017

12. PCs deployed to support legacy applications will be kept under review. Opportunities to migrate, upgrade or replace those applications will be sought so that the users can migrate over to using the virtual desktop

Client Team Ongoing

13. When end user devices are refreshed, new browser or app based devices will be deployed where they fit with the mobility needs of users and are conformant with the relevant information security requirements.


14. Citrix will continue to be used where necessary to deliver applications to virtual desktops, but new applications should be browser based. This could potentially enable us to decommission Citrix over time.

Client Team/ Delivered through re-procurement 2015 and

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ongoing

15. Potential suppliers will be asked to consider standardised desktop offerings from London Councils and other public bodies when designing their solutions.


16. The delivery of a unified communications service will be requested as an early transformation project in the re-procurement


17. Wi-Fi will be installed in the Civic Centre Client Team/Capita 2014/15

18. Potential suppliers will be asked to review the choice of middleware and consider alternatives, including cloud based solutions.

Delivered through an early project

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following the re-procurement 2016

19. Where there are new requirements for extracting and analysing data, data-mining tools will be considered as an alternative to traditional integrations


20. A policy will be developed that data is accessible by default within the Council. Technical controls will remain in place but officers will be encourage to share information, particularly through SharePoint, when there is no need to keep that information confidential

Client Team 2014

21. In collaboration with Legal Services, data sharing policies will continue to be developed so that data can be made available to other service areas and agencies that need it.


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22. Opportunities to exploit the full functionality of SharePoint as the Council’s corporate collaboration tool will be considered once the initial roll out is complete.


23. A single road map will be developed for core infrastructure and key applications across the Council and the upgrade and development of these applications will be managed according to that road map.

Client Team /Capita/new supplier 2014 – Develop Management - ongoing

24. A means to bring in a mix of specialist vendors to deliver innovative, tailored solutions and agile development techniques to provide benefits quickly to services will be sought in the re-procurement.


25. To support channel shift web, telephony and back office systems providing critical live feeds will be categorised as high availability systems in the re-procurement.

Delivered through re-procurement

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2015

26. Where applications cannot support live feeds to customer facing systems, upgrades to these systems will be considered in the application road map


27. Investigate entering into a shared service that would include a shared instance of SAP

Delivered in parallel to re-procurement 2015

28. An alternative and cheaper solution to the SAP CRM module will be investigated and a solution sought through the re-procurement.


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Risks

This section identifies the risks associated with non-implementation, and those associated with 6.2

implementation of the Strategy.

The risks associated with the Council not implementing the strategy include: 6.3

the Council may not be able to meet the demands and expectations of its Elected

Members, staff and the public;

the Council may not be able to deliver its adopted Corporate Plan or meet its long term

strategic objectives;

the ICT infrastructure will continue to be inflexible and unable to meet emerging or

desired service needs;

the desired ‘value for money’ aspect for ICT services will not be met;

the transformation of services will be hindered;

the Council will not benefit from new ICT developments;

the need for the Council to continually evolve to be an organisation fit for the future will be

hindered.

The risks associated with implementation of the recommended strategy include: 6.4

the cost of exiting the current ICT outsourcing contract is uncertain;

there will be additional cost, coupled with demands on officers time, to specify future

requirements and procure new service providers;

The Cost of implementation could increase if the requirements are not clearly specified;

lack of interest and/or bidders for the provision of new services;

business units/directorates do not support the corporate strategy and/or proposed

‘direction of travel’;

staff reluctance to make use of the new infrastructure and communications services

required to realise the anticipated benefits;

the possibility of service disruption during contract transition;

security concerns/issues prevent the adoption of flexible/mobile working and data

sharing;

there is a reluctance on the part of other authorities and/or agencies to enter into shared

services and/or data sharing arrangements with the Council;

‘line of business’ applications, required to support ‘mobile’ working, cannot be sourced

and/or developed, at an affordable cost;

further imposed external pressures to reduce expenditure.

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7 Appendix A – Strategic Principles for the Council’s ICT

Report to CSB – February 2013

Introduction

The Council’s IT strategy was last reviewed in 2008 and requires updating. This is necessary

because both technology and the market have moved on considerably since that time. Also the

Resources directorate is about to begin a piece of work to review the future of all back office services

including IT and we need to have an agreed strategy in place to enable this.

This report to CSB is the first step in developing the strategy. It looks at the high level principles from

which the more detailed work will flow.

Principles

From the client team’s knowledge of the market, discussions with directorates and the requests

beginning to emerge, the following principles have been drawn out. These are very much intended as

a starting point for discussion, not the final list.

Value for Money

Given budget pressures we need to reduce our IT costs and we should target a real terms reduction

of around 30%. This must, however, be seen in the context of:-

An ever increasing reliance on IT, meaning that business continuity relies on systems

being available;

More flexible working, meaning that we may need longer hours of support and

availability;

The potential for efficiency savings that good IT delivers meaning that we are increasing

the amount and complexity of systems.

When these issues are factored in it may be that we end up effectively paying the same but for more.

There are opportunities to procure IT in different ways which bring cost savings. For example ‘The

Cloud’ delivers hosted services to the desktop on a per user charge without us ever having to own

hardware and software. Also we could seek to join up with other authorities and use a single instance

of software which would reduce the support costs.

The trade-off of both of the above examples is, however, that we would need to be more flexible in

our requirements and reduce the amount of bespoke elements we demand.

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Reliable

The organisation is highly dependent on IT with a large investment over recent years in systems to

automate tasks, optimise workflows and enhance workforce management, reducing and refocusing

the human resources delivering services. Quite simply IT needs to work, it needs to work all of the

time and it needs to work wherever it is accessed from.

Provision for Disaster Recovery should be reviewed to ensure it still meets the priorities of the

business and makes best use of the options now available in the market.

Flexible

The organisation is in a period of significant change. Some service areas are growing to deal with

increased need or to deliver shared services as a way of mitigating their own costs while others

service areas are shrinking as they cut costs. The creative ways the organisation will respond over

the next few years to the challenge of balancing the budget need to be supported by flexible IT

services.

Price flexible - able to respond to changes in staff numbers, sites and systems used. Our

current contract has significant elements of this but we may be able to improve on this by

procuring in a different way.

Flexibility to respond quickly to changing needs – able to respond to market changes,

new technologies and changes to the way we need to operate much more effectively.

Accessible

As we move to a more flexible working model and place less emphasis on staff having to work from

this building, our staff must be able to access and use systems from any location. Also important is

the ability to move seamlessly between locations and to maintain the presence of data.

Users also need to access systems at any time – not just 9-5 if we are to support improved work life

balance. This has implications for the way our IT is supported.

We also need to be able to access systems from any device including the ability to ‘bring your own’

devices and applications.

The way partners access our systems is another key consideration. We need to be more open to

integration with and access from external agencies and partners. In addition, we will need to access

the systems used by other organisations. N3 is a good example of this.

Secure and Compliant

Accessibility needs to be delivered in the context of system and information security. Currently there

is often a tension between what we want and need to do and the risks created by that need.

We must also ensure that our systems meet the many requirements imposed by Government and

Industry such as PSN and PCI.

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Joined Up

We hold a lot of data and need to bring it together more effectively to give us useable information that

supports delivering services and managing the organisation. Often policies and systems have

hindered sharing of information between service areas and with other agencies. We need the ability to

join up systems, share data and avoid duplication and the ability to share with partners and other

agencies.

Greater integration with Partners is the direction of travel for a number of areas and the IT needs to

support this.

The other area of growth is shared services and our IT will need to support this.

Following the Ernst and Young report we also need to consider if we wish to manage IT in a more

joined up way than currently, not just to minimise cost, but also to ensure that all of our systems work

together.

Supports Service Improvement

IT has a significant role in both enabling service improvements and proactively encouraging them.

We have an organisation that is highly dependent on IT with a large investment over recent years in

systems to automate tasks, optimise workflows and enhance workforce management. As a result

many service improvements require enhanced IT either in terms of new software or new hardware, for

example use of devices such as iPads.

This links to the issue of cost and the need to produce clear business cases that off-set the cost of

improved IT against the service improvements it delivers.

Provides Excellent Customer Service and Promotes Channel Shift

As budgets get tighter we need IT that enables us to improve customer service and that encourages

and enables citizens and service users to self-serve and do things for themselves, whether this be

reporting a pothole or managing their personal budget. We have made great strides with the

authenticated MyHarrow account but we need to continue to look across all services for opportunities

to expand this.

Part of the self-service agenda is about providing a more personalised service for the citizen, tailored

to their exact needs. In particular we need to look at how we can make this accessible to those who

traditionally don’t prefer the self-service option.

Our staff are also customers in this context and have the same need for personalisation and self-

service.

Transparency

It should also provide transparency wherever possible. Whether it is allowing citizens to access

information without the need for an FOI request, or enabling them to track the progress of application

forms.

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This will provide the necessary openness and reduce the effort needed to respond to individual

enquiries.

Summary

These principles can be grasped as below:




up and transparent


improvement


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8 Appendix B – Market Trends: The Cloud

B.1 Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over

the Internet or a private Government wide area secure network. Cloud computing is a model

for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable

computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be

rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider

interaction. Due to the potential savings that can be made through collaboration and sharing,

Cloud computing has generated a lot of interest in the UK Public Sector.

B.2 The Cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics:

On-demand self-service. A user can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as

server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human

interaction with each service’s provider.

Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through

standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms

(e.g., mobile phones, laptops, and PDAs).

Resource pooling. The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple

consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources

dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense

of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over

the exact location of the provided resources. Examples of resources include storage,

processing, memory, network bandwidth, and virtual machines.

Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be rapidly and elastically provisioned, in some cases

automatically, to quickly scale out and rapidly released to quickly scale in. To the

consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can

be purchased in any quantity at any time.

Measured Service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by

leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of

service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource

usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported providing transparency for both the

provider and consumer of the utilized service.

B.3 The provision of Cloud services are broadly divided into three categories: Software-as-a-

Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), each

of which are described in more detail below:

Software as a Service (SaaS): The capability provided to the user is to use the provider’s

applications running on a Cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from

various client devices through a thin client interface such as a web browser (e.g. web

based email). The user does not manage or control the underlying Cloud infrastructure

including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application

capabilities, with the possible exception of limited user-specific application configuration

settings.

Platform as a Service (PaaS): The capability provided to the user is to deploy onto the

Cloud infrastructure user-created or acquired applications created using programming

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languages and tools supported by the provider. The user does not manage or control the

underlying Cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage,

but has control over the deployed applications and possibly application hosting

environment configurations.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): The capability provided to the user is the provision of

processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the

user is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems

and applications. The user does not manage or control the underlying Cloud

infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, deployed applications, and

possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls).

B.4 A Cloud can be private or public. A public Cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet.

(Currently, Amazon Web Services is the largest public Cloud provider.) A private Cloud is a

proprietary network or a data centre that supplies hosted services to a limited number of

organisations/people. When a service provider uses public Cloud resources to create their

private Cloud, the result is called a virtual private Cloud. Private or public, the goal of Cloud

computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and ICT services.

B.5 To promote the use of Cloud Services the Government has established Government Cloud

(G-Cloud), the main aim of which is to provide Cloud based application hosting services,

delivered from the internet or government networks (e.g. GSi, CJSX, GCSX, N3, PSN etc.)

and accessed via a web browser. The development of the G-Cloud is one of the key

initiatives of the UK Government ICT Strategy. This service is available to all 400 Councils

and other Public Sector organisations in the UK.

B.6 This initiative will facilitate a programme of data centre rationalisation and consolidation that

will deliver large cross-government economies of scale, meet environmental and

sustainability targets, and provide secure, resilient services. Aligned with development of the

G-Cloud, this programme will reduce the number of data centres in use from the many

hundreds to provisionally between 10 and 12 highly resilient, secure data centres. Not only

will this reduce cooling and power consumption by up to 75% on current infrastructure, it is

estimated that it will also reduce ICT infrastructure costs by up to £300 million per year.

B.7 Many organisations such as Microsoft, Citrix, VMware and Gartner have identified Cloud

computing as a delivery mechanism that offers lower up-front costs compared with on-

premise products that ICT teams must buy and support themselves.

B.8 The G-Cloud is a key enabler of savings as it provides a single access point for ICT services,

applications and assets.

B.9 With a tendency among a vast number of Public Sector bodies to use similar applications –

for example payroll, human resources management and enterprise resource planning - the

potential savings from delivering such applications via the Cloud rather than building and

supporting hundreds of separate versions are clear.

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B.10 The vision is that the Government’s Cloud Store enables sharing and re-use of online

business applications, services and components across the Public Sector. Rather than

create bespoke solutions each time a requirement is identified, re-use will become the norm,

with anticipated savings of over £500 million per year.

B.11 The Cloud Store is a searchable database of over 1700 services split in to 4 areas –

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service

(SaaS) and other services. These are designed to enable an organisation to match their

requirements to the best-fit service from suppliers. The Cloud Store contains all the required

details of each supplier and their services.

B.12 By pursuing a service based culture i.e. Cloud based services, the Council will avoid the

need to purchase infrastructure or software. Cloud / SaaS applications, technology

infrastructure would eliminate the need for software purchases such as Client Access

Licenses, Windows Servers, Application and Database Servers, Middleware, SharePoint,

Citrix servers and VPN’s for remote access.

B.13 Also, Cloud/SaaS applications require no server hardware, network storage, backup

systems, disaster recovery systems, power or cooling systems, data centres, utility costs,

etc. All that is required for SaaS applications is internet access.

B.14 There would be a reduced need to purchase third party tools, modules and applications.

Many SaaS applications include built-in or bundled functionality that eliminates the need for

separate, add-on software tools, modules and applications.

B.15 Servers, storage and other hardware components wear out and need to be replaced,

typically on a three or four year schedule. This is much less applicable in the SaaS delivery

model.

B.16 Reduced and/or eliminated spending on IT operations. This is usually one of the top sources

of Return on Investment (ROI)/Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings in the Cloud/SaaS

world. The SaaS vendor takes on all of the costs associated with installing, running and

maintaining the applications, the underlying software infrastructure and the associated

hardware.

B.17 Reduced support costs. The cost to the customer organization, both in downtime and in

human costs of diagnosing and fixing problems is a major ongoing part of software TCO. A

major improvement in the SaaS/Cloud world is that through the power of the Internet both the

support staff at the vendor or value added reseller and the client can be logged into the

system and looking at the same screen at the same time. The user doesn't have to describe

the problem to the support staff and hence, problems can be resolved and remedied more

quickly, with both user and financial benefit.

With site based software, there is a need to re-implement and upgrade to new versions of

either the applications or the underlying infrastructure stack. This is unnecessary in the world

of Cloud/SaaS applications since the vendor can continuously keep the client on the most

recent versions.

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