Council saves by streamlining PC procurement

Northumberland County Council (NCC) has slashed its PC maintenance bill by streamlining and outsourcing its procurement.

The council serves a population of 310,000 people between the borders of Newcastle and Scotland. The area is predominantly rural and the council's agencies are decentralised, and this has had an impact on the council's technology procurement and maintenance strategies.

In 2003, the council held around 7,500 PCs, with 3,000 for office workers and the rest situated in its schools. There were a further 200-300 installed in libraries around the authority.

NCC IT director Peter Gallon said: "Like a lot of other local authorities, we had an ageing and varied PC estate. Much of our hardware had been funded by one-off grants or through ad hoc spend. There was no clear procurement management process. ICT was split into departments with little co-ordination in procurement."

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During 2003 the authority underwent a change programme and centralised its IT function - and it was then the council realised the high cost of its PC maintenance budget, which was running at about £300,000 a year.

Being a rural area, the cost of maintaining an ageing network of PCs was not the only consideration - so was the large size of the maintenance team, which had to travel to maintain the hardware on-site.

Gallon said: "We decided a total cost of ownership approach was a better way to manage the estate. We had just switched our server architecture to a leasing model and we were sure that we could make savings here too."

The strategy was in line with the authority's strategy of centralising all of its IT systems. Alongside the refreshed server architecture, the authority was also implementing a CRM system and ERP, supplied by Oracle.

NCC chose to adopt a three-year procurement programme, run by Computacenter Services. Gallon established that having hardware under warranty would reduce that maintenance budget down to £86,000 a year.

The authority extended the procurement programme - based around a three-tier standard build of desktop, laptop and tablet PC hardware supplied by Fujitsu Siemens Computers - to a fully outsourced service provided by Computacenter Services.

With the management of the PC estate now taken care of, Gallon and his team can devote their time and energy to other areas. He intends to take the same approach with the printer estate next year. More strategically, he also intends to set up a fibre backbone throughout the authority, working with BT, allowing the county's schools and Primary Care Trust to adopt broadband connectivity.