London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham is set to insource specialised services, data networks and telephony from a joint venture it owns with supplier Agilisys – saving an estimated £1m next year.
The council’s cabinet will next week consider a proposal to bring the services back in house after 12 years under the Hammersmith & Fulham Bridge Partnership.
The council has already agreed that desktop, service desk and service management will be provided by third party suppliers following the expiration of the joint venture in October.
A report by officers said: “This report’s recommendations seek to assure continuity of service, balancing the mitigation of service risk with the need to achieve the substantial level of savings required.
“It proposes the specialised services transfer to the council. Thus the council is not legally required to procure the services externally which would likely be at a higher cost.”
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Specialised services include developing, designing and maintaining ICT strategy and enterprise architecture; strategic relationship management; information security; the delivery of programmes and projects; business analysis; infrastructure operations; procurement and contract management and applications support.
The move would see 57 staff brought back inside the joint ICT service the council runs with neighbouring councils in Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea under TUPE arrangements, with £431,000 earmarked for transition arrangements.
Moving the services back in house would save around £1,038,000 in 2017/18 toward the overall target of savings across all IT services of £4.7m.
However, it said that the original potential target of £900,000 could only be made in the longer term due to reluctance among departments to change.
The report said: “The issue here is that departments are not necessarily planning on convergence. “This tension is being managed through the Digital Technology Board. Nonetheless, while the target is shown in the table, the planned saving is unachievable until departments choose convergence.”
In 2013, the three councils in the joint ICT provision arrangements appointed Agilisys and BT to a £1.1bn, four-year framework to deliver distributed computing and data centre services to BT, and service desk and service management.
