Publictechnology.net caught up with David Wilde, chief information officer at Essex County Council about the savings being made through ICT.

How is Essex shifting services to online and mobile channels? 
We have had some success with some service areas. We now have 98 per cent of our schools admissions service online, which means not many people call the call centre. Our Family information service pointing users towards nearby childcare provision reduced calls by 40 per cent in the first month. We have saved the money of seven full time equivalent posts by online shift, and the plan is to have saved up to £6 million by 2015.

 

I have just taken the council on a two-year journey organisation programme for IT. A large part has been moving to new contracts – going back out to market. We awarded a long term contract last year for next generation networks. For unified communications you need a stable platform. If you have good benchmarking then you can sweat the asset and make savings.

In procurement – social care case management and corporate systems. We are in procurement at the moment for social care case management and corporate systems – we are looking at five year contracts with options to extend, which will give us scope to swap if we are not satisfied. People sometimes ask why don’t you go for software as a service solution, but in this area the market is not mature enough. We have gone for software  as a service for customer relations management (CRM) management, a contract awarded was awarded last year.

 

 

 

 

Do councils need a web presence? Yes. Do they need to procure separately? No. You would need a framework and agreement around technical standards. However, back office IT is more complicated. A unitary authority runs 380 services. DWP is the most complicated government department and it only has 40. The diversity of the architecture is massively more complex because of the range of services you need to provide. There aren’t really moves to think about it because the web bit is relatively cheap. We are more focused on the communications infrastructure and business systems – that is where we can take big costs out.