Service performance in terms of desktop availability and delivery of basic service requests continues to exceed service level agreements.

The availability of the Council website remains of concern and new support arrangements have been put in place with Hyperwave, the company who provide software for the website platform. A business case for a replacement website was due to be agreed shortly.

Overall customer satisfaction had improved over the period and improvements to the non-standard change process has seen the backlog of work older than three months reduce from 24% to 16%.

A review of the Council's arrangements for information handling and security was carried out by the External Auditor and presented to the Audit Committee on 2 April 2009. The report concluded that the Council has a strong data handling environment and excellent leadership.

Key projects were completed in the period including the launch of myJobScotland and self service training administration. The first phase of the upgrade of the SWIFT system had gone live and a free public wireless network would be launched in three city libraries in the next few months. In addition, a mobile working solution for Edinburgh Building Services would be deployed later in the summer.

A new internet filtering system was currently being piloted with a view to being rolled out across Council Departments within the next six months. Early indications suggested that the new system would be more flexible, easier to manager and easier to monitor.

The three libraries selected for the free public wireless pilot were Central Library, Stockbridge Library and McDonald Road Library.

The one significant department system outage that occurred during the period was when the system supporting Revenues and Benefits was unavailable for three days. Significant investigations were undertaken with the third party software supplier and the infrastructure had been upgraded.

There were still some issues with the use of Oracle in schools, and work was ongoing to improve and refine the system. However, evidence suggested that there were a large number of areas where schools could make significant savings.

An invitation had been accepted from the Scottish Government to join the National User Licence Agreement (ULA) for Oracle software. The Scottish Government had given a commitment that Councils who signed up would not lose out financially but precise savings had not yet been identified.

The Sounding Board had previously endorsed an ICT Development Programme based on ten cross cutting themes and significant progress had been made in delivering these objectives.

A review had recently been undertaken of individual Departmental ICT work programmes with the aim of developing a consolidated Council-wide programme detailing all major ICT initiatives. The exercise involved extensive consultation with Departments and 85 ICT projects had been identified, of which 38 were in active delivery.

A consolidated work programme has been developed covering the next three years and was detailed in Appendix 1 to the Director's report.

The ICT Partnership with BT provided within the core budget a pre-paid labour resource pool equivalent to 52 FTE staff. This resource pool had over the last five years been used heavily to support major strategic programmes and investments such as e-HR and SWIFT.

With the completion of these major programmes it was proposed that the allocation of these resources be realigned. Departments had traditionally paid in cash for BT labour associated with one-off minor changes or departmental projects. Spend by Departments in 2008/9 was approximately £1 million for this work. Arrangements were being put in place to ensure that this work was now funded from the pre-paid labour resource pool. Controls would require to be established to ensure that the demand from Departments to utilise this resource was controlled. It had been agreed that only “business critical” changes or projects would be supported.

The Smart City Steering Group would control the allocation of funds to projects based on business cases being presented to the Group on a monthly basis.

The e-Government Unit, in conjunction with the Finance Department, would monitor the impact of efficiency savings on departmental budgets.

The Council and BT had benefited from a culture of continuous improvement in ICT services.

Detailed consultation had been undertaken with Departments and users to identify improvements over the next three years to the Council's partnership with BT.

One key issue identified was the need to upgrade the core network and data centre to manage obsolescence of ICT equipment. The Council also needed to plan for the next desktop refresh to ensure value of investments were maximised.

Significant unbudgeted investment would required to be addressed by the Council to manage obsolescence of ICT equipment in schools.

A list of activities proposed over the next three years was appended to the Director's report. Formal plans and specific measurable targets for these improvements would now be defined and reported as part of the regular six monthly performance reports.

An improved strategy and planning process would allow the Council to ensure that it was working on projects that would add the most benefit and would also allow BT to ensure they had the right resources in place when required.

Simplifying and standardising systems may allow the Council to reduce its ICT costs in the longer term.

In December 2008, the Council endorsed the objectives and principles of a Council wide Customer Services Strategy.

A proposed programme had now been developed based on an incremental approach rather than a single large scale project.

The proposed programme did not include proposals for a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. It should be noted that an incremental strategy without CRM had been adopted by a number of other Councils such as Liverpool and Fife.

The opportunity had been taken to subscribe to a UK wide bench marking service which enabled Councils to measure and bench mark their performance on customer satisfaction and value for money across the three main customer access channels of web, phone and face-to-face.

Given the need to deliver measurable results as quickly as possible and the limited resources available it was proposed that a rolling programme of functional reviews be adopted.

It was proposed that the initial review was targeted at the Revenues and Benefits service which was one of the highest volume areas of customer contact and would therefore have maximum impact.

In June 2008, the Finance and Resources Committee agreed to award a contract to BT to migrate all Council telephone lines to a single contract and noted that £750,000 of efficiency savings were expected to be achieved over the three year term of the contract. The savings would be ring fenced for further investment in telecoms to improve customer services across the Council.

Analysis had indicated that the new contract was now anticipated to deliver efficiency savings of £1.256 million over the three year contract.

In order to maximise the delivery of efficiency savings the Council would seek to migrate sites to the new telephone contract as quickly as possible.

e-Government and BT were currently preparing a telecommunications strategy for the Council which would provide a clearer roadmap for development of the service over the next five years.

It was proposed to re-invest part of the efficiency savings for a contact centre management system.

In April 2008, the Finance and Resources Committee approved a Council wide review of document production and print management, including proposals to reduce print volumes through the increased use of multi-function devices (combined printers, photocopiers and faxes).

The report set out the Business Case and plans for networking the multi-function devices (MFDs) and outlined the financial savings and environmental benefits that would be realised from these actions.

The Council currently had 678 MFDs and approximately 1,400 network printers and 2,500 stand alone printers. In 2007/08, 120 million sheets of A4 were printed or copied within the Council at an estimated cost of approximately £1.6 million per annum. Of this, 62 million sheets went through MFDs and a further 50 million were printed on local or network printers.

The Waverley Court Model of MFDs would be rolled out across the Council, which would then allow for the removal of other printers and faxes.

The rollout of MFDs was to be carried out in three phases with main corporate network sites first (e.g. the City Chambers, Chesser House etc.) followed by smaller corporate network sites and learning and teaching network sites. It was anticipated that the rollout would be completed at all sites by the end of the financial year 2009/10.

A reduction of at least 15% of overall print and colour volumes would be set and these targets would be monitored by appropriate software.

In order to realise the benefits and make progress towards sustainability targets, long-term changes in attitude and behaviour would be required.

There was a significant incentive to budget holders to strive to meet print reduction targets as they could directly benefit from the efficiency savings made.