Local government tech contract bonanza

This week has seen a blizzard of contract signing across local government, with deals involving HR, mobile working, CRM and remote teaching technologies.

The City of Edinburgh Council has signed a £10m contract with BT to streamline its HR systems. The new system is expected to save the council - one of the city's largest employers with more than 17,000 staff - up to £12m by 2016.

The main driver of the contract is to reduce the paper trail between work-group managers and HR by allowing staff to update their personal details, such as change of address. The system will also enable staff to book leave and training courses, check HR policy on benefits such as maternity leave and complete self-certification for sick-leave.

The council's head of e-government, Andrew Unsworth, said: "We are transforming our HR service and introducing new management practices on the back of the IT system. Savings will be realised because there will not be as many paper forms circulating between offices and less paper chasing."

Meanwhile down on the south coast Southampton City Council expects to save £20,000 in the first year of a project to migrate forms used by health carers to an electronic format.

The project uses an application from Business Web Software to allow real-time data collection from mobile health workers via laptops which synchronise with the council's healthcare systems.

Forms are uploaded at the office and are then completed with the patient offline. The data is then downloaded to central systems when laptops are physically synched in the office at the end of the shift. The council said 25 separate paper forms have been replaced with one electronic form in the process.

In other public sector contract news, Falkirk Council has awarded Graham Technology a contract to provide it with a CRM package, allowing the council to build up a record of how it deals with enquiries from the public.

And finally, Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council is using videoconferencing across its primary and secondary schools to enable virtual fieldtrips, teacher training and counselling sessions. The authority has installed videoconferencing systems across 120 schools, using technology from Codian and Lifesize.