Suffolk Councils join up IT to save costs

Suffolk County Council and Mid Suffolk District Council have merged IT departments in a wider initiative to share back-end business processes.

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The cost benefit has been a saving of £1.8m over the last four years in IT management. However, the councils have also achieved better co-working practices through sharing services, enabling all parties to deliver better service to citizens.

The county council is responsible for social services, children's services and adult community services, such as libraries, residential and home care for the elderly and people with disabilities, education, major highways, some planning, waste disposal, fire and trading standards.

The district councils in the county are responsible for environmental health, leisure, housing, waste collection, pest control and crematoria. Mid Suffolk has a responsibility for about 88,000 citizens out of a county population of around 650,000.

In terms of budget, Suffolk County is about £1bn per year and Mid Suffolk is around £10m per year.

Clearly there are areas where the two organisations' services overlap, making the decision to merge some of the back-office functions a logical step.

In 2004, the councils decided to take advantage of funding from BT to set up a joint venture (JV) that would manage IT, supporting processes within both organisations, called Customer Service Direct (CSD).

CSD CEO Bridget Taylor said: "Effectively, we have two levels of government delivering services to the customer, who doesn't really care or understand which council delivers what. When they want to access a particular service it was important to make it accessible and take out any duplication of cost."

The two organisations had set up their own infrastructures essentially to maintain similar services. The driver was to set up a front-end that made that invisible to the public.

Taylor said: "These things should be running themselves. People have more than enough to do trying to improve the lives of the public to worry about how the IT or the HR works too. We were looking for a private sector partner to effectively deal with those two parts of the business."

The joint venture with BT was set up in 2004, bringing 750 staff across from the councils. This included personnel from IT, HR and finance. Taylor admitted some of the savings here came from a reduction in headcount of 70 full-time-equivalent IT roles.

The venture also set up a contact centre, online access and a face-to-face centre in Mid Suffolk, where the public was more used to dealing with public sector staff on that level. Taylor recalls this was the first time the councils had employed a dedicated customer-care staff.

BT's role in the deal was to invest £52m into the councils' infrastructures, paying for replacement network and server infrastructures and implement a business continuity strategy. The councils pay BT a service charge for the technology, set at the time the JV was set up. BT owns about 85 per cent of the venture, taking most of the financial risk and promising to deliver a set of 24 service improvement programmes across all of the services it provides for the councils.

The one Taylor is most proud of is the public-facing services which have achieved a 95 per cent satisfaction rating with the public, even though the venture was contracted to deliver an 85 per cent score.

Cost savings overall are in the region of 18 per cent with Taylor looking at a saving of 24 per cent in the services the venture has taken on in the long term.