Agenda item

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 Members’ queries:-

 

·         the lead in time to appoint the Supplier Manager was because of a number of factors including the resolution of a Human Resources matter and the first successful applicant having previously accepted the position then turning it down, Strata felt it important to take time to recruit the right person into the role given the key nature of the role and the need to find somebody whom would fit with the culture that Strata is building;

·         to mitigate against the overall failure of Global Comms greater flexibility in the use of alternative and diverse systems was being built in, which enabled calls to be routed over the internet to diverse locations rather than to one specific location. BT were also moving away from traditional ISDN based telephony over to IP telephony by 2025 so the migration was essential; and

·         results from the recently introduced East Devon green bin system were to be discussed with the teams at Teignbridge.  

 

Also highlighted were the following key pressures:-

 

·         Business System Finance - supporting the demands of the finance teams across the threeauthorities;

·         ensuring Strata is supporting the GDPR requirements of the three authorities;

·         service desk to keep pace with the service and support demands and also to support the needs of Councillors where there is a high demand for Strata support;

·         develop business intelligence capability to gain better insight and value from data; and

·         need for more IT training.

 

Goals for the next six months were:-

 

·         improve the BCR and projects process;

·         better financial monitoring for 2018/19;

·         successful transition to the Honiton office with a December 2018 opening;

·         Global Comms. roll-out in Exeter which was a significant challenge;

·         GDPR support to the three authorities; and

·         Improve Strata’s public image through attendance at Job fairs, talks to businesses etc.

 

Individual managers presented their respective areas as set out below:-

 

Infrastructure Projects - Adrian Smith

 

The Head of Infrastructure and Support detailed the infrastructure investment programme, highlighted the following:-

 

·         new faster storage,AppVolumes live and working in Exeter and East Devon, with Teignbridge District Council in the final stages oftesting and faster desktops rolled out to staff;

·         Vmware software environment upgraded and delivering further product enhancements;

·         following feedback from Strata users after each stage of the improvement programme, a review of the UEM software would occur with view to upgrade;

·         the last stage of the East Devon Server move to Exeter was near completion in advance of the move to the new Honiton Office;

·         Global Desk Top Rolled Out successfully to 300 East Devon District Council staff with 100 staff remaining to migrate to the new telephony platform;

·         progress had been made with Virgin Media Business (VMB) on the Teignbridge SIP Migration project now awaiting a confirmed migration date in order for testing with Skype for Business. Exeter's migration was more complex;

·         report to be prepared on options for core network infrastructure for Exeter; and

·         upgrade on secondary data centre location being examined as the current location on the Marsh Barton estate is not ideal, options being examined including private company to host, share with another body such as the RD&E or identify a new location.

 

Business Systems Team - David Sercombe

 

The Head of Strata Business Systems detailed the end to end review of the Business Change Requests (BCR) and Project process undertaken to align it more to the needs of the three authorities with a focus on delivering the value BCR’s and Projects identified by each authority. To date, Strata had been inundated with work, with little knowledge of the overall benefit to each authority. A much clearer process was now being implemented to enable more accurate mapping of Strata work and allow councils to see the business benefits of each request and enable each piece of work to be added to a Strata work plan.

 

There would be close working with the client leads of the three authorities and workshops had been held at East Devon and Teignbridge to classify requests with a further workshop to be held at Exeter. Once all workshops were completed, the Priority BCRs would then be added to a work plan and shared with Client Leads via the Internal Review Board for review as well as the Joint IT Steering Group.

 

The Head of Business Systems also commented on the BCR Performance indicators, new BCR demand by month, the total number of BCR’s and total number of closed BCR’s during the month. Also reported were the performance indicators of projects including:-

 

·         Firmstep in Exeter - several updates had been made;

·         Firmstep in Teignbridge - progressing well;

·         New HR and Payroll system continued in Teignbridge and Exeter; and

·         planning, building control and land charges systems.

 

The Head of Business Systems also updated Members on progress with the review of the existing convergence programme which mapped progress with regard to the requirements of the three authorities.

 

It was also noted that the Street Naming and Numbering and GIS team has been rebranded as the Business Intelligence Unitto better reflect the work the team provide and to develop a capability much more in line with the three authorities need to make decisions based on data.

 

Compliance and Security - Robin Barlow

 

The report of the Head of Compliance and Security highlighted that there had been no evidence that the Salisbury nerve agent incident had impacted on recent security events and that a weekly update was being provided from the Cabinet office about how secure email will now be delivered after an announcement that their accreditation scheme had been cancelled. It was noted that the preparation for PSNO Coco was underway with pre-emptive scanning by the Security team andcompletion of actions from the previous CoCo.

 

Document Centres - Martin Millmow

 

The report of the Manager Document Processing highlighted the move of the existing Copy Centre in the Civic Centre to be closer to the main Strata office and, resulting from a general push by departments and the raised awareness of GDPR, there had been an increased officer focus on the handling and storage of both physical and digital documents.

 

Strata Joint Scrutiny Committee noted the report and thanked the Strata staff for their hard work and the significant progress made.