Agenda item

(To receive a report from John Wickens, Assistant Director, IMT and Enterprise Architecture, which invites the Board to consider a report on the Options for the Future Delivery of IMT Services, which is due to be considered by the Executive on 4 May 2022. The views of the Board will be reported to the Executive as part of its consideration of this item)

Consideration was given to a report by the Assistant Director – IMT and Enterprise Architecture, which invited the Board to consider a report on the options for future delivery of IMT services prior to its consideration by the Executive on the 4 May 2022.

The Board received a presentation which provided details of the future delivery options and recommended model for procurement; the drivers for a change in the delivery of services; the approach to procurement; market engagement; information on trends in IMT design and sourcing strategies; details of the Service Integration and Management (SlaM); costs; risks and mitigation and an indicative outline plan for the future of IMT services.

The Board supported the recommendations to the Executive and as part of its consideration of the report, the following points were noted:

·       Good governance was important to ensure effective use of money and avoid duplicating the purchase of cloud services by different departments, to manage data under GDPR and other mandatory requirements that come with a gov.uk namespace, and for working in a technical environment. The Board acknowledged a potential risk in individual departments purchasing their own cloud services, which created wider IMT issues and therefore the Council aimed to centralise the service.   The Board requested that a report be brought back to a future meeting on this issue before SIaM service was fully developed.

·       A full options appraisal for the non IMT services currently being delivered by Serco, namely HR Admin, Payroll, Exchequer, Adult Social Care Finance and the Customer Service Centre, would be considered by the Board at its meeting on 26 May prior to consideration by the Executive on 7 June. The IMT options appraisal had been started before the other areas as it had been anticipated that this would involve more complex procurement

·       Cloud services were the only way forward for the Council to ensure it received the best security for its services and had so far proven to be resilient to cyber attacks. The large investments by bigger organisations in state of the art security meant that they would be quicker responses to any cyber attacks and the ability to detect and react to any problems more quickly than any individual organisation.

·       The MDM programme would see device management move to cloud services. A later phase of the MDM programme would see a would enable monitoring of the actions undertaken by each device and assess the risk, whilst reporting in real time to a security operations centre.

·       Market analysis had shown multiple examples of organisations who could deliver more than one specialism which combined into the needs for device management, support desk and device security, or build subcontracts into the big technical vendors. There was a homogenisation of the market into key technical organisations such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

·       The Council had now moved all its services into Microsoft Azure hosting, and these host environments were identical for millions of subscribers due to being global scale systems. The only uniqueness to these environments was where the Council was operating separate bits of software and doing precise pieces of configuration.

·       The procurement exercise would be designed to enable the Council to create a range of options and procure specialisms independently if that would be in the best interest for the Council.

·       It was anticipated that there would be around three or four providers of IMT Services in the future. Having more providers would involve more management around governance and assuring their performance which would allow more capacity to analyse data from cloud services and further expand on current service level agreements.

·       Assurance was provided that the SIaM process was a well established method of practice which was successful in other organisaions.

·       It was expected that there would be significant changes to the IMT Service over the coming years, with the potential for a focus on configuration programming and building business solutions rather than physical engineering as part of the SlaM process.

·       Members were reassured that recruitment challenges were not likely to pose significant risk to the IMT service as the service was becoming less reliant on technical engineers. There were a number of methods which could be used to attract people to work within the Council, which included the offer short term payments, company cars and relocation packages and the promotion of the benefits of living and working in Lincolnshire, such as home working and lower housing costs. Contractors were able to recruit staff based on their own pay and conditions and were therefore not subject to local government pay restrictions.

·       New senior management capability would be created within the IMT team to oversee the inhouse SIaM service with the potential to recruit existing staff members with the relevant skillset.

RESOLVED:

1. That the recommendations to the Executive, as set out in the report, be approved;
2. That a summary of the comments made be passed on to the Executive as part of its consideration of this item.