One of the easiest ways to save money is to pay less for your IT products and services. That is what 10 local councils in Staffordshire found when they reduced their combined IT spend by £1.5m in 2005 by buying a shared Oracle customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Staffordshire Connects is a procurement partnership between the local councils, who have joined together to form one large organisation that shares the procurement and running of IT systems.
As well as the capital savings on the Oracle software, the councils are able to generate annual savings of £400,000 through shared maintenance and development. Then there are annual efficiency savings of around £750,000 based on the ability of the CRM system to handle 80 per cent of incoming queries on the first call.
The partnership came about when council executives realised they had no chance of meeting egovernment targets on their own. ‘There was no way we could do things like get a single view of the customer because we did not have the economies of scale to make it possible,’ says Mike Loveless, programme and technical manager with Staffordshire Connects.
But generating these savings has not been without problems – although the most difficult aspects of the project have been political rather than technical. ‘One of the thorniest issues was brand development – what to call the service. Councils had spent a lot of money developing their own brands and web sites, so we only use the Staffordshire Connects brand internally or with stakeholders,’ says Loveless.
Nine of the 10 councils have now gone live with the software, and Staffordshire Connects is already looking at its next projects. ‘We are already rolling out an e-payments system and a joined-up directory, which allows people to look up contacts across the county,’ says Loveless.
This might not sound like a big deal, but the directory will allow people to instantly find contacts in other departments or boroughs, and ensure that customers’ queries are dealt with more effectively.
The group is also in the process of procuring a shared voice over IP telephony system that will allow staff in one council to take out-of-hours calls on behalf of other members of the partnership. ‘It will be like having a virtual call centre,’ says Loveless.
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