Issue - meetings

To consider the report of the Strata IT Director.

The Strata IT Director presented his report to update Members on the progress within Strata – presentation attached to minutes. Highlights included:-

·         Savings made by the three authorities;

·         The success of the global desktop during the winter snow storms;

·         Improvement in staff morale and Service desk;

·         The Audit Partnership showed Strata was operating to a good standard;

·         The introduction of the Business Intelligence Reporting for internal staff;

·         The progress of the convergence mapping remodelling.

In response to questions, the Strata IT Director and the Director responsible for Finance responded:-

·         The business intelligence reporting allowed users to create their own reports, easing the burden on Strata providing them;

·         A request for a data analyst to support Strata was being considered;

·         The cost of not transferring systems to the Global Desktop would be difficult to calculate;

·         Contracts could be looked at as part of the business plan amendments. The original business plan had been written in 2014 and had had been amended several times, the last time being in early 2017. Contracts would be addressed in the next amendment;

·         Accumulative savings would be available through the business intelligence reporting;

·         There were increasing costs of spending, to stay up to date with ever changing technology, such as new tablets and phones and investment needed in the Data Centre environment.

RESOLVED that the report be noted.

To consider the report of the Strata IT Director.

The Strata IT Director presented the report on the last five months of activity at Strata, 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, BCR’s and Projects, Service Desk,Global Desktop Environmentand Supplier Management to which changes had been made as Strata moved from the Adopt/Adapt phase into the Transformation phase. Key performance indicators were also provided covering incidents, service requirements, security, problems, maintenance and business change requests.

He highlighted the following key areas:-

·         better financial management had enabled Strata to deliver savings in excess of target. Savings of £575,000had been delivered back to the three authorities against a target of £262,000, representing 215%, achieved through more pro-active engagement between each of the Strata service lines and the City Council finance team. Staffing costs remained stable and costs associated with temporary contracts had reduced;

·         a new post of a Supplier Manager - Andrew Woodhouse - had been created to better negotiate renewal of contracts to ensure Strata delivered against the 2018/19 savings target and a Project Manager - Chris Cook - had also been recruited working under the Manager Business Systems;

·         the Global Desktop Improvement Programme (GDIP) had improvedthe overall performance of the Desktop environment and, during the period of adverse weather, had enabled the three authorities to continue to deliver services even with each HQ closed;

·         the Global Desktop environment investment programme enabled progress with the Business Continuity programmeand ensured that, in the event of a major incident, Strata could fail over the key/core applications required by the three authoritiesto the secondary Data Centre facility;

·         a Joint IT Steering Group had been created to help prioritise project and business change request work across all three authorities;

·         customer satisfaction remained high with all service incidents logged through a centralised service desk function in Exeter. In April, 432 responses had been received, comprising 430 positive responses, 11 neutral responses and 11 negative responses i.e. 94 % satisfaction. Neutral or negative replies had been followed up to identify areas of improvement;

·         introduction of the Out of Hoursservice had been very successful now formalised for a 12 month period;

·         high staff morale with Strata attracting and retaining high calibre staff;

·         a business intelligence unit had been established which would enable the development of a data analysis capability to support the trend in ‘Big Data’;

·         GDPR had increased and there was a high demandon Strata time to support the three authorities to ensure compliance;

·         three new apprentices joined in September and it was the intention to recruit three more from South Devon College; and

·         Strata continued to deliver a good level of serviceto the three authorities as identified by the Devon Audit Partnerhship and the level of savings delivered back to the three authorities was well in excess of that originally predicted with customer satisfaction scores high.

The following responses were given to  ...  view the full minutes text for item 6