A major transformation project has seen BT replace Edinburgh's dated infrastructure with Microsoft-based IT services

The City of Edinburgh Council has reported savings of £5m in direct IT costs and expects to save £6.4m over five years from a major transformation project

The project has involved BT replacing Edinburgh's dated infrastructure with Microsoft-based IT services, which should enable the council to deploy applications quicker and more cheaply. The council says it will also enable it to explore the potential for shared services with other local authorities and statutory partners, including the police and NHS Scotland.

In parallel with the direct savings, the council has renegotiated its main ICT services contract with BT, reducing the charges by £22.3m over the next 10 years. It has been able to release £12m of this over three years.

The council's head of e-government, Andrew Unsworth, told GC News on Friday: "This project is part of a bigger partnership between BT and the council. It's reduced the council's payments to BT for its ICT services by £4m, but this is only one part of the renegotiated deal. About half of the £4m reduction has gone to reduce council tax and the other half has gone into improving ICT resources to drive forward the council's efficiency programme on a wider scale."

The overhaul, which saw the council realise a return on investment in 14 months, has provided a technology platform that can support more mobile and collaborative working for staff.

It involved the standardisation of laptops and desktops across the council, moving services out of the office to a secure remote data centre, the consolidation of servers and the creation of a single directory of users across the city. Previously the council had used a mix of operating systems, including more than 200 servers, 26 directories and 4,500 business applications.

Alongside the project, the council moved 200 staff into a new building, in which they can now log into the network and access their desktop from any computer on the premises.

This has also helped the council make changes and move people around as all staff are working on a common platform, explained Unsworth. The common approach also allows staff to share calendars easily.

A pilot involving 250 users testing push emails, which provide instant access and can be delivered to mobiles, has been running during the summer, with plans to extend it to 600-700 users. Unsworth said there was a risk that push emails could reduce productivity by encouraging staff to respond immediately and interrupting their daily tasks, but insisted that in local government the point of diminishing returns "had not yet been reached".

He said it is early to judge the impact of the new ICT on improving public services, but that he believes the systems in place will allow the council to push forward with a number of other developments. Over the next four years it expects to make £25m in operational IT savings through e-procurement, electronic document management, self-serving human resources and VoIP applications.

The transformation project forms part of the council's Smart City Vision programme, which aims to make Edinburgh the most successful city region in Northern Europe by 2015.

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