Edinburgh City Council
Download: Edinburgh City Council
INDUSTRY
Public Sector
SIZE
Edinburgh’s 480,000 citizens benefited from improved services from the transformation of existing internal Council services, ensur- ing that the 20,000 CEC staff were more motivated, focused and better prepared to deliver against the Council’s strategic vision.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
As a forward thinking Council, the Edinburgh City has the following aspirations and objectives to be in realised for 2015. Make Edinburgh the most successful and sustainable city in northern Europe. Sustain the highest quality of life of any UK city. Keep and attract the people needed to drive its talent and knowledge economy. Provide every citizen with the best personal opportunities for work, education, and development. Ensure the city is safe, creative, and connected.
SOLUTION
To address the above objectives, the Council in conjunction with BT, produced and published in June 2003, “Smart City Vision”. This publication is a long term strat- egy for the City majoring on service improvement vision that recognises the critical role of technology-based solutions in providing cost-effective services. It acknowledges that Ed- inburgh is of immense importance to the social, cultural, and economic life of Scotland.
RESULTS
- Transformation costs of £7.8M.
- ROI achieved within 14 months.
- Transformation net benefits of £5M achieved in 2yrs.
- Stretch target of £20M in efficiencies by 2008 achieved.
- 6,500 desktops within project scope.
INTEREST AREAS
- Public Service Transformation
- Managed Service deployment.
KEY SERVICES
Capito Technical Consultancy & Managed Service Delivery.
CORE TECHNOLOGIES
- Zero Touch
- Active Directory & Exchange Server 2003
"Capito played a key role in the successful delivery of this project. We have since continued our successful relationship with Capito into other joint venture/ partnerships work with them closely to drive up levels of service and reduce total cost of ownership"
Hayden J Edwards, Project Director Infrastructure Optimisation, BT Local Government
Customer overview
The City of Edinburgh Council provides a range of services from more than 70 principal locations to 480,000 citizens, businesses, and organisa- tions in Edinburgh and Lothian. Founded in 1996 from a regional and district council, the City of Edinburgh Council has 20,000 employees and an annual budget of £772 million. In 2001, the City of Edinburgh Council entered into a 10-year outsourcing partnership with BT. At times in the initial stages this rela- tionship was deemed as “challenging”, with a perception from the client that the service needed to be more responsive and focused on outcomes. In 2005, BT created a transforma- tion programme involving partners such as Microsoft, Capito, and HP to deliver a programme of work that would improve the quality of service delivery.
Business need
At the outset of this transformation programme, the Council did not know how many computers were in its desktop estate, let alone how to manage them. The existing ICT department BT encountered was formed from two separate departments—one regional and one district—with two different architectures. There was an ageing estate, software and hardware obsolescence, and major security challenges, including back ups, logins, and physical security issues. The mainframes in particular were a concern with critical Council services, such as core revenues, benefits, payroll, and housing systems, not well supported. Furthermore, support for information workers was poorly scoped, with service desk agents only dealing with 8% of requests at first point of contact, and when a desktop broke with the previous system, it could take up to 5 days to be fixed. In short, Edinburgh City was not meeting the “Efficient Government” targets set by the Scottish Execu- tive, never mind the ambitious and stretch goals of its strategic vision.
How Capito Helped
From the outset it was noted that to improve the quality of service, the Council needed to equip its employees with new tools to encourage more collaborative working and improve productivity. However for this to be realised a need to stabilise and rationalise its existing ICT hardware and infra- structure was paramount. From this starting point then, the partnership produced & started a service-led technology programme to improve services and provide the Council starting with a stable, flexible platform to support its plans. This undertaking was led by Capito working with hardware architects from HP and software specialists from Microsoft and BT. The objec- tives being to:
- Standardise hardware on HP for both computers and servers.
- Consolidate on Microsoft solutions for the desktops and e-mail messaging, including Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003, Microsoft Opera tions Manager 2005, and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000.
- Rationalise applications from 4,500 to 400 while at the same time saving significant costs in application licensing.
- Engage in a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement for for low-cost volume licensing for the Council. With such an agreement ensuring max flexibility in the product choice and help mitigate against future software obsolescence.
Having stabilised the environment the transformation programme could begin. This programme in- volved changing business processes and supporting new ways of work- ing. Therefore to enhance the user experience as required, Capito un- dertook delpoyment of their sucess- ful Zero Touch (ZT) philosophy. This concept focussed upon the following aspects to complement the standardised and rationalised infrastructure:
- Strive to create a clean and simple environment, which is easy to change and has fewer problems and incidents.
- Use Group Policy and Microsoft management tools to provide a tightly managed desktop environment to ensure lower costs and risks for the Council.
- Reduce the number of builds to two desktop and two laptop builds.
- Introduce software delivery, application bundling, remote management, and patch management based on Systems Management Server 2003.
Having success fully deployed this strategy the client immediately realised benefits that it had strived for at the outtset. One such metric was the reversal of the 5 day fix for ICT equipment down to a 4 hr resolution!
Results
Having undertaken this transforma- tion project the council has not only seen total savings to date of £6.5M, and over £40M of capital receipts received from a consolidation pro- gramme, but
- They are now meeting the “Efficient Government” targets set by the Scottish Executive.
- The Initial 10 year outsourcing deal with BT has been extended by a further 5 years until 2016.
- And most importantly from a Council perspective, the City are now well on track to meet their Smart City vision and associated Goals.