The project issues
The ICT Service is performing well within the Council - apart from a few minor areas where effort could be used more effectively. The key issue to emerge, however, was that the Council lacked an overall strategy for e-government and for the role of ICT in its corporate agenda.

The project issues
The objective was the delivery of a strategy document for the Council’s IT Services. The need for the new strategy was not driven by any fundamental new Council strategy or policy change. It was primarily driven by a number of factors which, taken together, demonstrated a clear need for a fresh look at the IT strategy including:

The project issues
North Ayrshire faced immediate practical problems of record management, in particular storing and managing paper records with inadequate archiving facilities.

Additionally North Ayrshire required an Information Management Strategy which would determine the way forward for managing all types of information and a way of sharing intellectual capital.

The issues here were:

The project issues
Following a review of its in-house ICT service by PWC, the Authority proposed to invite tenders for outsourcing the requirement, which was split into four lots, and also to consider an in-house option as a baseline.  As the in-house team had no experience of bidding they agreed to engage consultants to support them.

Socitm Consulting submitted a proposal for this work which was selected in preference to others including PWC.