Steve Bruce, Assistant
Director: ICT presented the meeting with an overview of the current
ICT Strategy explaining that in his first six months with the
Council he had concentrated on key activities such as creating a
workbook programme, gathering service metrics, embedding resource
management and planning, improving the governance model, delivering
a communications and engagement plan, developing a service
catalogue, and a first draft of performance metrics, Service Level
Expectations.
He explained that the use of
TOTO, the new online query request system, had increased from 40%
to 73% in it’s first few months. The migration to the
Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud solution was now 35% complete
but required a better internet connection to complete this.
Microsoft were providing free consultancy many of the solutions that the Council are planning to roll
out. Steve also talked about a 6 month ‘Proof of Value’
programme that will be looking at multiple business drivers and
their potential technology solutions,
In response to questions from
Members the following points were made:
- The
Assistant Director: ICT proposed to reframe the strategy to work to
a longer timeframe which would have less in focus the further away
the timescale was.
- Two
business partners were amongst staff leading an improved
communications agenda, IT newsletters were created each week and
proving popular and members of the team were sitting in
Departmental management team (DMT) meetings so that ICT was aware
of activities and could feed in ideas/support.
- It was
reported that central to delivery was seeing the issue from the
users point of view including Councillors and ICT engaged with
their concerns and resolved issues.
- The
Assistant Director: ICT identified that the majority of what the
Council used ICT for was within ‘normal’ activity
therefore 80% could be anticipated i.e. ICT could focus on common
solutions for common needs (without huge internal customer input)
and 20% should be focused on design/development of more bespoke and
BFC focussed needs/solutions.
- It was
discussed that the strategy should never be completed and it should
be rolled forward within its final three years on a perpetual
basis.
- It was
confirmed that many applications were housed in the basement (the
ICT data centre at Time Square). Although each supplier offered an
individual cloud-based solution it might not make sense to take up
each individual offering and not build a cohesive and
inter-connected cloud infrastructure. Consideration was being given
to using a private cloud as a solution part of the overall
solution.
- It was
confirmed that moving from capital to subscription based model
would have an impact on revenue costs but after an initial 12 month
pressure there would then be a 5 to 10% increase each year in the
move from a capital to revenue model. Further decisions would need
to be made on how to fund ICT long term.
- ICT Service
was moving from being a historical back office function to being a
transformation partner and potentially touching all areas of the
Council, for example, exploring the use of automation to replace
repetitive actions.
- Members
were reassured that work was ongoing to protect the Council from
cyber attacks and it was noted that all organisations with ICT on
their own premises were vulnerable. More sensitive data was being
transferred to a secure server/secure cloud services over coming
months and years.
- Although
multi-factor authentication (MFA) was possible for devices it was
acknowledged that organisations had to secure themselves against
user behaviour.
- Consideration was being given to how information was filed and
it was noted that the current structure relied upon knowledge of
meeting dates to retrieve information on previous
decisions.
- Action: Assistant Director: ICT to meet with Councillor
Peacey to discuss her concerns around
file structure and retrieving data.
- The Head of
Business Intelligence was working with the technical lead to
develop links into services so that key data sources were included
in the use of data dashboards. Information would be accessed before
it was out of date and methods of collecting data would need to be
co-ordinated across teams. It was noted that Members found not
being able to access ‘fresh’ data frustrating and would
like to participate in the development of the
dashboard.
- A
pilot group of 50 members of staff were trialling
bring your own device to work. It would be possible in the future
to use non-Council mobile phones and smart phones, but, the ICT
would continue to provide the current hardware as the main,
supported, technology.
- When there
were issues with applications on ‘bring your own
device’ ICT support would not be provided on the individual
device support but instructions for how to reinstall the relevant
application which was not working, in line with the now common
approach to ‘BYOD’ across industry.
The Chairman thanked Steve
Bruce, Assistant Director: ICT for his
presentation.