“Fast broadband is absolutely vital to our economic growth, to delivering public services effectively, and to conducting our everyday lives.”

“But some areas of the UK are missing out, with many rural and hardto-reach communities suffering painfully slow internet connections or no coverage at all. We are not prepared to let some parts of our country get left behind in the digital age.”

Does your ICT service deliver value for money? Does it enable and support change in the organisation? Is it efficiently run? Is it pro-active in seeking out the most appropriate technical solutions to meet business needs? And how can you tell?

Many IT services have undergone major cuts and restructuring in recent months, often resulting in the loss of some of the best people, and of the source of much of the detailed knowledge that helps to make the ICT service perform.

We have the skills and the tools to help you achieve a website that delivers for your council - that is a website that gives real value in terms of the services it delivers to your customers and the savings it makes for the council. We cover all that is needed, summarised below:

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?

Listed below are papers we have published recently.

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.