By Tim Ferguson, 23 October 2006 17:30
NEWS
Birmingham City Council (BCC) has signed the largest ever local government software deal with SAP as part of the city's massive transformation project.
The deal is part of the Service Birmingham joint venture between the city council and UK outsourcing company Capita, which is aiming to save the city around £1bn over 10 years.
The partnership was created earlier this year to work towards improving the efficiency and delivery of public services for the city, which has the UK's largest local authority annual budget at £2.9bn.
The initial SAP provision will be implemented by autumn of next year and Service Birmingham hopes to make around £100m of savings per year through a 15 per cent increase in productivity within five years.
SAP will provide the software platform which will allow the council to streamline its business processes. At present the council operates 158 different software packages and the SAP rollout will dramatically reduce this.
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Brendan Arnold, director of corporate finance at Birmingham, told silicon.com the new software platform will reduce costs and allow council services to respond more quickly to customer demands.
He said the SAP deal will play a large part in "improving and changing the way services are delivered to the front line".
Deputy leader of BCC, Paul Tilsley, added the SAP deal will be "key to achieving the council's ambition of more efficient services which better meet the needs of the people we serve".
The deal puts almost all of the SAP systems at the fingertips of the council, including, the SAP Business Suite and integration platform, Netweaver.
The full value of the deal has not been disclosed.
Comments
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1. Kieran O'Driscoll, Micro Focus
The decision to replace any IT infrastructure is never taken lightly. When it is, it is usually against a backdrop of mandated efficiencies and an appetite for transformational service delivery. One thing is certain though - the show must go on!
Some applications cannot be replaced and therefore still require the legacy infrastructure to be maintained in order that the service continues. In such cases the financial and efficiency benefits provided by the package are negated by the need to maintain the existing systems or environment. Re-use of these assets on more contemporary and agile platforms can not only help organisations realise much greater cost savings, but also ease their way toward the further benefits of SOA.