The Council of the Isles of Scilly engaged Socitm Consulting to help them through the Code of Connection approvals to enable access to the UK governments’ many agencies.

Our January briefing last year, Cloud computing on the horizon, stated ‘there is no doubt that that the cloud is here to stay’. Some may have doubted us. Now the cloud (G-Cloud) is the backbone of the government’s ICT strategy, being a ‘key enabler of £3.2 billion savings’. The strategy predicates another £500m of savings on the application store, G-AS. What are these facilities? How and when will they be available?

If - like everyone else in local government at the moment - you're looking for non-destructive cost savings, have you considered an expert analysis of your organisation's voice, data and mobile costs?

How can you source ever more complex voice, data and mobile services and at the same time deliver the cost savings demanded in a time of financial constraint? Tracking the various technologies and pricing tariffs on offer is virtually a full-time job. You may believe there are potential savings to be made but not have the bandwidth to pursue them.

Ultimately, every local authority’s ambition to be efficient, effective and responsible requires an underpinning of appropriate, secure and resilient technologies. Getting the infrastructure right is essential to delivering quality services to customers, making best use of people and property resources, serving the green agenda and supporting the local development of the knowledge economy.

This briefing looks at ‘the cloud’ — the use of web resources to provide facilities and services hosted elsewhere on the internet. When public services are under threatening clouds of financial pressure, is this a solution that will allow us to achieve more with less? 

Most councils claim to use flexible and mobile working, but few are achieving all the benefits. Of these, the potential for savings stands out right now, with up to 30% available from reduced accommodation costs alone. But there are other benefits too, including higher staff productivity and satisfaction (more savings), reduced CO2 emissions, and not least, the increased customer contact that mobile working brings. 

The project issues
The Working With Business National Project was one of the ODPM-funded national projects, aimed at setting up a Single Business Account (SBA) that would enable improved interactions between businesses and local authorities. The SBA setup was a challenging task due to the different architectures within local authorities. The technical requirements were complex and had to ensure a consistent model capable of encompassing the many different components of the project.

The project issues
The Government’s stated aim to achieve broadband connectivity into schools was facilitated through The Standards Fund part 601b. This provided funding for 2mbps symmetrical (broadband) links to schools and was a distinct funding stream separate, for example, from Funding for Schools Infrastructure (PCs, cabling, ISDN links, LAN etc).