ICT SERVICE PLAN
2010 - 2013
Version 1.1 – Shared Services Joint Committee – 3December 2009
CONTENTS
1 / Key Purpose of the Service
1.1 / Scope of the Service / 1
1.2 / Contribution to Shared Services Objectives / 2
1.3 / Contribution to the Councils’ Strategic Objectives / 3
1.4 / The Future of the Service / 6
2 / Inputs
2.1 / People / 7
2.2 / Workforce Planning / 8
2.3 / Partnerships & Contracts / 11
2.4 / Assets and Technology / 12
2.5 / Current Budgets / 14
2.6 / Revenue Growth, Service Reductions and Cashable Efficiency Gains / 16
2.7 / Capital Investment / 18
3 / Outputs and Outcomes
3.1 / Customer Insight and Consultation / 19
3.2 / Service Level Agreements / 24
3.3 / Performance Indicators / 25
3.4 / Benchmarking information / 30
3.5 / Outstanding Recommendations of External Inspections / 32
3.6 / Projects / 33
3.7 / Equalities / 35
3.8 / Risk Management / 37
Version Control / 51
SECTION 1:KEY PURPOSE OF THE SERVICE
1.1 / Scope of the ServiceThe staff working in the ICT service are be based at Three Rivers House, although an on-site presence remains at Watford to deal with any local issues.
There are no statutory services directly responsible to ICT, although the section does support many other service areas in achieving their own statutory targets.
Both of the individual ICT teams at Watford and Three Rivers has achieved a number of successes over the past three years. These include:
Shared
- Implementing a shared ICT service across both Councils
- Rollout of Thin client at Three Rivers
- Rollout of Active directory and Exchange migration at both Councils
- Restructure of 2 departments into a single Shared ICT Service
- Achievement of the Charter Mark standard at Three Rivers
- Consistently high levels of customer satisfaction identified in customer satisfaction surveys
- Successful transfer of Housing function to Thrive Homes
- Successful transfer of Leisure function to Hertsmere Leisure
- Improved processes to manage information security
- Upgrade of the corporate network operating environment
- Implementing Total Land Chargessystem and major upgrade of Uniform system
- Deployment of Thin client to all 90% of our seats
- Implementation of new ‘look and feel’ for Watford Website
- In house development ofIntranet directory with job description, photograph and peer related information
- Successful transfer of Housing function to Watford Community Housing Trust
- Successful transfer to Leisure to SLM
- Implementation of wireless link to Radius House
- Relocation of staff throughout campus to facilitate refurbishment of Town Hall after the flooding
- Development of anBS7999/ISO27001 compliant information security policy
- Implementation of document management system for revs and bens
- Successful transfer of server room and hardware to Apsley data centre
1.2 / Contribution to Shared Services Objectives
Savings / The end of the Steria contract will immediately bring £395806 of savings. This slightly higher than the savings identified in the business case due to the uplift applied to the Steria contract for 09\10. This additional saving will be invested in staff training and development to enable them to effectively support both councils infrastructure and keep up to date with latest technology.
Resilience / By bringing the services fro the two Councils together, there will be a greater number of staff within the team. It is the expressed aim of the service that, wherever possible, staff members will cross train each other to remove any single points of failure within the team. To this end, the Application Analyst team will be much more generic and will be able to assist services on a number of different systems, not just the one that they have traditionally been a specialist in. From the point of bringing the two IT teams together, resilience will be guaranteed for the shared services in scope systems. For full resilience to be provided across all supported applications there will be training requirements and it should be recognised that this will not be achieved instantly. Prioritisation of systems and key tasks will be required.
Both Authorities have been connected on a triangulated network to ensure availability and resilience indata traffic.
Network connectivity also allows either of the two Council locations to be used for front line staff in the case of a disaster.
The shared ICT service will benefit from accumulated learning and experience from previous projects, applications and infrastructure from the two Authorities.
Continued alignment and harmonisation of systems and processes will bring further benefits and resilience to both Councils
Improved Services / The ICT Shared Service will strive to achieve the performance of the best performing Council, or the SOCITM upper quartile figure, whichever is the best.
Annual benchmarking will be conducted to compare the ICT Shared Service with other councils.In addition to this, in-house staff surveys will be conducted to assess service delivery and customer satisfaction.
1.3 / Contribution to the Councils’ Strategic Objectives
Three Rivers District Council
Safer Communities / Supporting\enabling other services to meet this objective
Sustainable Communities / 2.1.2 Improve access to benefits
The Three Rivers website contains information on the Benefits service provided by the Council. The site also contains a direct link to a benefits calculator service.
Towards Excellence / 3.1.1 We will develop, publish and monitor service standards for all services
The ICT service has a formal service level agreement in place with Steria which commits them to achieving acceptable performance standards. A document reporting performance against these standards is published on a monthly basis
3.1.2 We will respond to complaints by learning and improving our services
The ICT service follows the Council’s corporate complaints procedure. To date, the service has received no formal complaints.
3.1.3 We will improve customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction surveys are completed annually to assess the current levels of satisfaction with the IT service and ask specific service related questions to help identify areas of improvement in the service. The results of the customer satisfaction survey are submitted to SOCITM for inclusion in a national benchmarking exercise.
3.2.1 We will ensure our service provide value for money
All procurements follow relevant guidelines to ensure that value for money is being achieved. This will be either by seeking multiple quotations for low value items or by following a formal tender process for higher value items. In April 2008, the service was the subject of a Value for Money study presented to the Resources Policy Panel.
3.3.1 We will manage and reduce risk
Service risks are included in the ICT service plan and monitored on a regular basis. The risk management section of this plan includes a categorisation of the risk and an action plan for its management Any project initiation documents completed by the service will include a risk register for the project.
3.3.2 We will ensure internal processes produce accurate outputs
The service standards within the Steria SLA determine the times customers can expect to wait for problems to be resolved. Performance against these targets is reported on a monthly basis.
3.3.4 We will continue to improve the Council’s performance
The ICT service participates in the annual SOCITM benchmarking study to help identify areas of under performance in areas of either cost or quality. The IT service has also achieved Charter Mark status and has annual health checks to ensure the quality of service is being maintained and that areas of non-compliance are improved.
3.4.1 We will ensure employees are properly trained, developed and motivated’
The ICT service has included a provision of 50 IT training days within the Steria contract to ensure that all staff have to opportunity to be trained on the software packages used by the Council. These days can also be used to provide more specialist training to the ICT staff within the Shared Service.
Watford Borough Council
An Efficient, Effective, Value for Money Council / Putting our customers at the heart of the Council
- Embedding Equalities Level 3 / Equalities Action Plan
- CSC development
- Develop more interactive / transactional website
- Enable and support implementation of extension of scope of shared services
- Operate and develop Shared Services
- Develop and implement programme to strengthen and modernise infrastructure
- Information management
- Email and data archiving
- Data warehousing / G drive
- Develop customer relations
- Setting and communicating priorities
- Residual Leisure & Housing
- Outpost (Museum, etc)
- Reverse SLA with WCHT
- Review all ICT policies
- Support delivery of Customer Access Strategy
A Town with a High Quality Environment / Supporting\enabling other services to meet this objective
A Safer Town / Supporting\enabling other services to meet this objective
A Healthy Town / Supporting\enabling other services to meet this objective
A GoodTown for Business, Skills & Learning / Supporting\enabling other services to meet this objective
A Well-informed Community where everyone can contribute / Supporting\enabling other services to meet this objective
A Town to be Proud of / Supporting\enabling other services to meet this objective
1.4 / The Future of the Service
Three are a number of potential opportunities facing the shared ICT service over the coming years. These will be considered as the first stage of shared services implementation is completed. These developments could include:
- Consider the business case and where necessary implement new technologies such as, further server virtualisation and IP based telephony, electronic faxes, mobile working – smarter use of handheld devices
- Harmonise all ICT contracts to ensure maximum efficiency
- Plan for the harmonisation of software used within the out of scope services to help achieve greater savings for the partner Councils
- Work towards achieving Service Excellence standards for the ICT Shared Service and potentially help the Shared Service in general achieve the standard
- Market and subsequently expand the ICT shared service to other Authorities
- Consider innovative ways to ensure maximum benefit of shared services for emergency planning (disaster recovery and business continuity)
- Look at other areas within both councils that ICT could add value and\or introduce efficiency, for example centralising all systems analysts functions
SECTION 2:INPUTS
2.1 / PeopleShared Services Organisation Chart
Job Title / Grade / No. / FTEsHead of ICT / CO3 / 1 / 1
Business Manager / 9 / 1 / 1
Infrastructure / Contract Manager / 9 / 1 / 1
Infrastructure Analyst / 7 / 6 / 6
Application Analyst / 7 / 8 / 8
Web Development Analyst / 7 / 2 / 2
Business Analyst / 7 / 3 / 3
2.2 / Workforce Planning
Overview
The ICT Shared Service will be providing a service which will meet the demands of the service departments and will strive to maintain and improve upon existing service levels. It is recognised however that the developments within the service departments will have a significant demand on the ICT team, particularly when the work is unplanned of scheduled at short notice. In order to alleviate this problem, it is expected that the ICT team should be involved in the service planning process at each council in order to fully understand the requirements of the services and to be able to plan the required resources. Despite having added resilience form the larger team, resources are still likely to be stretched. This will be more of a concern when the Steria contract ends.
Workload – Trends & Changes / Staffing Implications – Impact on Service & Individuals / Options & Preferred Solutions / Outcome – Financial Implications, Resilience Implications & Implications for Improving the Service
Service software implementations within Shared Services are likely to draw upon the staff resources within ICT. The requirements could be based upon technical input, project management or business analysis expertise. / All staff within the Shared Services structure could potentially be affected by the other service implementations. External assistance could potentially be required if resourcing if several projects are required at the same time. / Careful planning of the other system implementations is required to ensure that necessary resources from ICT are available to assist. An alternative option would be to rely more heavily on external expertise being brought in on a project by project basis, although this would mean skills would be not be retained following the completion of the project and the Councils could therefore be in a more vulnerable position. / It may prove difficult to maintain service standards in the event of there being a particularly high demand on the skills of the ICT team during major implementations.
Interface development is being conducted in house by the Finance Service. Once they are complete, they will be handed over to ICT to support along with documentation and a structured handover. / There is currently no resource identified within the ICT structure to conduct in-house development of software. This was in order to move away from bespoke systems and therefore increase the resilience of the teams. / An amendment to the ICT structure to reduce the application analyst headcount by 2 and replace with 1 system developer and 1 junior.
An alternative could be to bundle these up and approach an external supplier to provide maintenance and updates of all in-house interfaces on a yearly basis. / This would require a certain amount of cross training so that a small amount of resilience is maintained. It is anticipated that this would be cost neutral in terms of salary. However there would be a reduction in resilience and possibly service delivery standards due to the reduction in Application Analysts.
This would result in a revenue growth, however resilience would be maintained and risk would be minimised.
The Watforddoes not include a dedicated call logging function. Customer feedback tells us that this is not working and as a result a call logging function has been re-introduced.
The helpdesk function that Steria provides is structured in 2 tiers. The 1st tier provides call logging whilst the second provides 1st to 3rd line support. The customer satisfaction score at TRDC are consistently high and this demonstrated the viability of a 2 tier model. / All staff within the both councils will be affected by this structure change. It is a priority for the ICT service to improve quality of service for both councils and this will only be achieved by a change in structure. / An amendment to the ICT structure to reduce the Infrastructure Analyst headcount by 1 and replace with 2 call loggers.
An alternative could be to have all calls coming to the ICT department taken by the CSC. The CSC is not currently in the scope of Shared Service but could provide this function in the same way that Steria currently does. / This would enhance the customer experience, ensure that all calls and emails are logged, monitored and responded to in a timely manner. It would also enable the Infrastructure Analysts to concentrate on technical work and call resolution. This would possible incur a small growth in the salary budget but could be balanced by savings in other areas of the service.
This would provide the same benefits as the solution above but would impact on the CSC in terms of training, knowledge required and volume of calls. It is of course without question that the primary function of the CSC is our external customers and it must be noted that if they were to take on ICT support call logging, external callers would be queuing alongside internal staff calling the CSC. The peripheral tasks that call loggers could provide such as account creation etc would not be possible for the CSC to provide due to security reasons.
Training of Infrastructure staff will be critical in successfully bringing the ICT service in-house.
This is not only with respect to the Steria contract - currently the Thin client implementation at WBC is supported by a third party, once rollout at TRDC is complete, we would either need to extend this contract or train in-house staff to support the system ourselves. / This will require planned training of all Infrastructure staff and appropriate management of the application of skills acquired. / Structured handover from the supplier with documented change control information and system setup information.
Staggered training coursed so that each member of staff can come back to the office and apply the skills they have acquired immediately in order to fully embed the learning. / This will provide resilience and reduce the need reliance on external suppliers. The cost of training would be balanced by the saving of the contract and subsequent savings would be made as year on year contract renewal would not be performed.
2.3 / Partnerships& Contracts
Partner / Partnership / Expected Outcomes
ICM Disaster Recovery / This contract provides disaster recovery (DR) facilities to Three Rivers District Council. The contract covers the DR arrangements for all critical IT applications and provides for 85 workstations at the DR recovery centre in Uxbridge.
Adam Disaster Recovery / This contract provides disaster recovery (DR) facilities to Watford Borough Council. The contract covers the DR arrangements for all critical IT applications.
Various software supply and maintenance contracts / Both IT services at the two Councils have contracts with software suppliers to provide software applications to the service departments. Over time, it is expected that contracts of this type will be harmonised wherever possible.
Hardware maintenance contracts / Maintenance contracts exist within both ICT teams to cover the breakdown of essential computer hardware which is no longer under manufacturer warranty. It is expected that these contracts could also be harmonised to bring potential savings.
2.4 / Assets & Technology
The ICT service will own all ICT assets used within the two Councils. They include:
- Networking equipment and servers
- Desktop PCs / terminals
- Handheld PDAs
- Notebook computers
- Data Projectors
- Desktop telephones
- Departmental printers
- Application and software licences
- ICT related Data
A full inventory of the equipment used with the Council buildings is available if required
Systems used within the Councils are as follows:
ICT Service
- Touchpaper (helpdesk system)
- Adobe Acrobat Pro, Dreamweaver, Fireworks & Flash
- MS Visual Studio, Visio
- Ebase Technology (e-forms)
- Hyena (network management)
- Acronis & Ghost (Imaging software)
- Telephony: Avaya Definity telephone switches
- Network & Servers
- T-Scale
- MS Terminal Servers
- Solarwinds
- PC Duo & VNC (Remote Control)
- Veritas Backup Exec & ArcServ (Backup Software)
- Treesize Professional (File Monitoring)
- Security
- Appgate & Netilla (VPN)
- Websense and Webtrends (website management software)
- Trend Neatsuite, NOD32 and Kaspersky(virus control)
- Surf Control and mail marshal (e-mail content filter)
- Website
- Aplaws (WBC)
- E-shopworks SiteBuilder (TRDC)
- Microsoft products e.g. Office Professional
- DM Information@work- Revs & Bens (WBC & TRDC)
- DM Information@work - Creditors, Building Control(TRDC)
- DM IDOX for Planning (WBC)
- Uniform - Planning, DC, BC, LLPG(TRDC & WBC)
- Uniform - EH, ES, Trees, Land Charges, Street Cleansing–(WBC)
- Northgate M3 – EH, –(TRDC)
- Northgate Systemware - ES, Street Cleansing, Complaints
- Confirm – Trees (TRDC)
- ESRI Geographical Information System [GIS] (TRDC & WBC)
- Finance System [PowerSolve & Aptos] [ICON Cash Receipting & ACR Cash Receipting and REMIT Income Distribution] [ALBACS IP Payments System & IPConnect]
- Lagan – CRM & Complaints (WBC)
- Pro Active – CRM (TRDC)
- Halarose - Electoral Services (WBC)
- Pickwick - Electoral Services (TRDC)
- Capita - Revenues & Benefits (TRDC & WBC)
- Academy - Housing (TRDC)
- Orchard - Housing (WBC)
- SOLCASE - Legal (TRDC)
- OMS Pericom – Legal (WBC)
- Northgate Resourcelink - Human Resources (TRDC & WBC)
2.5 / Current Budgets
There is some overspend in 2009/10 due to overtime and increased charges from suppliers as well as a large under spend due to an expected reduction in Steria costs due to Thrive Homes support no longer being required, this results in an overall under spend of £41,601.