London Borough of Croydon has suffered major service outages following the transfer of its ICT services from supplier Capgemini to Capita Secure Information Solutions Limited early last week.
Following the move last Monday, staff were unable to access to emails for much of last week, leaving many relying on personal email addresses to conduct council business.
And site users are still without access to transactional online services through the MyAccount platform, which enables users to pay council tax, business rates and receive benefits.
A council spokesman told PublicTechnology.net: “As one of the largest councils in the country, we have a massive ICT estate.
“This is incredibly complex and as with any move of this size there will always be some residual issues. And while the majority of our systems are fully up and running, there is a small number which we are fixing at the moment.”
He said the council hopes the remaining offline services to be restored within the next couple of days.
Capita took over responsibility for ICT services last Monday after winning the £73.5 million contract in November.
The tender for the contract said the service delivery partner would have responsibility to “mobilise and execute the transition of ICT services from the existing ICT suppliers and internal ICT team to their solution”.
The contract covers service design, service transition, service operation, continual service development, service towers including end user devices, local area network, unified communications, security infrastructure, ICT infrastructure, infrastructure applications, commercial off-the-shelf applications, and line of business applications.
However, neither the council spokesperson nor Capita would be drawn on what technical issues were responsible for the problems surrounding the transition.
The council spokesman added: “The most important thing is that customers can still contact us.
“We have a fully operational phone service and our My Croydon mobile app is fully functional, which allows people to report issues such as fly-tips or potholes.”
