Agenda item

Strata IT Directors Report - Overview of Strata Performance - covering period October until December 2018

To consider the report of the Strata IT Director.

 

Minutes:

The Strata IT Director presented the report on the last five months of activity the aim being to provide background to the core areas of specialisation within Strata and identifying key activities, successes and areas for improvement. The report covered Financial Management, Business Change Requests (BCR’s) and Projects, Service Desk, Global Desktop Environmentand main ongoing corporate projects. Key performance indicators were also provided covering incidents, service requirements, security, problems, maintenance and business change requests.

 

2018 had been a year of consolidation and stabilisation of the core services, a review of key processes and a restructuring of the management of the Strata organisation. The core objectives of Reduced Cost, Reduced Risk and Delivering the Capability and Capacity for Change had been delivered against the business needs of the three authorities and the savings delivered back to each authority

 

He highlighted the following key areas:-

 

·         the original 2018 budget figure had been exceeded and savings in excess of £382,000 would be delivered, overachieving against the target by approximately £110,000;

·         Strata had nearly completed the City Council’s Global Communications roll out, the East Devon roll out had been completed and the project team would be moving onto Teignbridge in March 2019 to commence the roll out there;

·         East Devon new office fit out was on-target with the official opening set for 11 February 2019. The primary challenge faced during the build up to handover had been the delivery of the required connectivity by VirginMedia and Openreach but this had now been addressed;

·         OneTeignbridge project was progressing well with Teignbridge delivering a single sign-on solution making it easier for the publicto engage online with the authority;

·         protecting the three authorities from the dangers from cyberattacks was a high priority;

·         the Public Services Network accreditation had been achieved for the next 12 months across all three authorities;

·         Keith Watson, the new Data Analyst, had started focusing initially on working with the three authorities to deliver corporate dashboards;

·         Strata had applied for Investors in People accreditation and staff interviews were currently being held;

·         Strata was supporting the EX1 project through Environmental Health at Exeter;

·         ModernGov was being rolled out to East Devon and Teignbridge Councillors and discussions were underway as to how best the application was delivered and accessed via Councillors whether via iPads or via existing Councillor owned devices; and

·         Annual Strata Conference had been held at the RAMM on 7 December 2018.

 

The Strata IT Director and Business Systems Team Lead updated Members on progress with real time reporting on BCR, project status and reporting of incidents and problems. The decline in BCRs had continued into December and the three IT Requirements Boards were working well prioritising and scheduling BCR’s. The transformation projects across all three authorities were predominantly delivering large projects such as OneTeignbridge which was delivering efficiencies and benefits to customers.

 

It was noted that there was a divergence of views at Teignbridge regarding the preferred way forward for rolling out new IT equipment for Members which reflected the different level of support required. Teignbridge was also the first of the three Councils to move off GCSx and the Strata Outlook secure email ‘plugin’ had been released to support secure email sending.

 

Strata Joint Scrutiny Committee noted the report.

 

Supporting documents: