Staffordshire councils save millions by joining forces

Ten local government agencies in Staffordshire have teamed up to share their IT services in a bid to cut costs.

The councils, known as Staffordshire Connects (SC), estimate they saved a one-off total of £1.8m through joint procurement - £1.5m of which was through the use of CRM. A further £400,000 will be saved every year by the entire partnership through improving services, the councils predict.

Mike Loveless, programme assurance and technology manager for Staffordshire Connects, told silicon.com: "We started four years ago with 15 projects for e-government in Staffordshire. The most important of those was CRM.

We are beginning to run our services over the internet now. That means we can get a record of the services we're providing and this helps to improve services overall. We've saved million through this.

"These are the savings we can see. But we know there are more - we're talking millions. All the individual authorities would have paid much more if they'd done it individually."

Previously the councils took a blinkered approach to their delivery of services with no co-ordination between them despite the fact that eight of them were providing services in parallel. But it was soon recognised that this was not cost-effective.

Loveless said the group wanted to focus on using IT to improve service requests - for example, asking the council to empty a bin or remove a wasp's nest from a public area.

He said: "The object of doing this was getting these services online and using contact centres."

SC used a CRM system built by Oracle and specifically designed for the public sector. It then built a private network between the councils for it to run on.

Along with CRM, the councils have saved money by using the network to run voice over IP. And if call centre phone lines become overloaded, the network simply diverts calls to another call centre in the group.

Loveless said: "We are beginning to run our services over the internet now. That means we can get a record of the services we're providing and this helps to improve services overall. We've saved million through this.

He added: "Because we invested together it meant that we could afford to have disaster recovery. We have a place 17 miles away and we're even connected on a different power grid."

Although at first there were a few teething problems, Loveless said they were to be expected given the scale of the project and that overall it came in under budget, though "slightly late".