Southend Borough Council is taking lessons from the private sector
The pandemic accelerated change at most organisations, but Southend Council was already used to moving fast
The pandemic has slowed business plans, forced redundancies, and in the worse cases wiped companies out entirely. It's also prompted the most widespread technology adoption in recent history, driving a pace of change that some organisations are hoping to hold onto into the future.
Southend-on-Sea Borough Council is no stranger to fast change; in 2007 it was named one of the worst financially-managed local authorities in England, but in 2012 it took the crown as Council of the Year.
Much of the IT leadership team at the Council has come from the private sector, including Head of Enterprise Architecture & Digital Innovation Steve Hemmings.
"Southend [Borough Council] invested in the restructure of its technology department going into 2019, and opted to go into the private sector and recruit from there to bring in the right mentality. Having delivered so quickly on that, I think, made people realise that we [in the technology team] could offer more. In turn, if we're going through large business change activity where you have to consider culture and behaviour, the [technology] leadership team that we now have here in Southend is able to offer vital experience and direction to the business, which is always helpful.
"And then when we're considering financial options, we know what opportunities are out there, that maybe within the public sector they didn't know were available to them, so they're also benefiting from that route as well."
That private sector background meant the Council's IT team had experience in dealing with complex estates - which turned out to be a good thing. While the organisation was largely a Microsoft house, it also followed a best-of-breed approach.
"We had experience in dealing with that type of estate; and, given the trajectory that we were working towards at the time, and certainly what we intended to be the strategic technical road map, we felt that we were able to cope with that without any major concerns."
Having private sector links was a boon for the Council when it began looking for a partner to guide it through its IT redesign, eventually settling on NTT. The organisations had worked together in the past, in a migration to Azure among other projects, and began to engage "strategically," as Hemmings calls it, in early 2020.
There's a lot of red tape within local authority
"When we went through the strategic transformation partner (STP) tender process, we made absolutely sure that whoever was going to be awarded that contract had vital experience in delivering services and capability into the public sector. That just gave us some comfort that this wasn't going to be their first gig, if you like.
"There's a lot of red tape within local authority and within the public sector, but for the right reasons. We are here, as a technology leadership team, to deliver value from the public purse, we're not just here to splurge, so in terms of procurement, financial controls, the governance around how we do business, etc., those are all mechanisms that we want our partners to understand. With NTT, they recognise that, they've got experience in that space, and they've been able to support us in the right approaches, and with that background and experience to deliver the right outcomes for us."
Following conversations with local residents, the Council devised Southend 2050: a plan for what the borough will look like over the next 30 years. It's working with NTT to "consider options to inform our own roadmaps, and specific technologies that will help achieve our ambitions and outcomes."
"[Southend] 2050 is as much about today as it is tomorrow and six months' time; it is that ever-improving programme of work that looks to improve services and what's offered to the local borough.
"With NTT, what we're looking to do is to say, ‘Okay, what do we anticipate to be those platforms that we're going to require?' From my office we were setting out the boundaries, which is smart cities and about the technologies that we are deploying; so, we're not just looking at IoT, we're not just looking at 5G or the development of our fibre network - we're going much broader than that."
Consider the climate
Data is a huge part of any future plans, especially the Council's Smart City project. Hemmings says collecting data, and using it to "be smart" through robust analytics, is crucial to the success of the 2050 programme. With that in mind, CRM and the analytics platform are technologies Southend anticipates can add value to the organisation and its ability to deliver services.
It's no longer just a case of choosing the most appropriate tool for the job, though; other considerations increasingly play a part in solution choice. For example, like other organisations, Southend Borough Council is thinking about the environment, and not just because climate change could wreak havoc on the coastal town.
"Within my responsibility as head of enterprise architecture, the considerations that we've built out in the design and consideration of these solutions includes ‘What does it mean from our climate position, green and sustainability?', and we ask those questions and pose those questions to ourselves, and to our business partners and to our business services.
"What we need to recognise is that there is a journey to go on. You can't just switch things overnight. I think everyone would want to, but there is a journey. What we are achieving here at Southend is that we're getting on with that transition quite well; our move to Azure, for example, is a huge step change for us. Our road map indicates that we will be closing our own data centres, or at least significantly reducing those, moving into Azure, which we all know has got a better sustainable model than anyone else can probably achieve. It's a huge step forward for us."
With its ESG initiatives and Southend 2050 plan, it's clear that the Council has an eye on the future, but as a local authority it also has to look after the daily challenges necessary to providing services for nearly 185,000 people.
"What I'd like people to recognise...is that we're balancing our deliverables, for delivering values for today and tomorrow - we're not just focusing on one or the other. What we're trying to do is spread the best use of the public purse across all of those factors.
"It is a juggling act, but we're doing a very good job of it at the moment."
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