Council consolidates IT deals into £5m support contract

Local authority seeks multi-skilled technicians to help solve problems more quickly

North Lanarkshire Council has signed a £5m, four-year IT support and infrastructure management contract with services provider Steria to improve efficiency and cut costs.

Steria will take responsibility for providing hardware support for all of North Lanarkshire’s 5,500 staff and 200 offices when the deal commences in 2006.

Mike Gilmour, the council’s head of IT, says that until now the council has run its hardware support through a series of individual contracts covering single systems.

‘These contracts, with a number of different companies, have built up over the past four years. We have contracts for desktop, telecoms networks, Unix enterprise computers and a number of other areas,’ he said.

‘But we have always had in mind a strategy of bringing that together into a partnership, and for the past year or so we have been working to take all those contracts into one single deal.’

Under the present arrangement, Gilmour says the council’s IT managers spend an ‘inordinate’ amount of time managing deals with individual suppliers.

And because each contract covers only a single element of the council’s IT needs, should a problem arise involving more than one area, it is not easy to co-ordinate having different specialists in the same place at the same time.

‘We are missing out on the opportunity to have multi-skilled staff, resources that can be obtained that have more than one skill, and there will be a big efficiency saving there for us,’ said Gilmour.

The council is focused on achieving greater efficiency from the single partner arrangements, but also expects substantial six-figure cost savings from the contract.

The council will also look to extend its partnership with Steria, adds Gilmour.

‘We will build business cases together for further investment, for which we hope Steria will be able to bring a lot of expertise and past experience,’ he said.