Highland Council £66m IT upgrade beset by problems

Councillors up in arms about slow progress of Fujitsu-run upgrade programme

A £66m IT improvement programme at the Highland Council run by IT services giant Fujitsu has been beset by glitches, leaving many users with unworkable IT systems.

The project is supposed to deliver new desktops and laptops to schools and council workers by the end of November 2011, along with a new telephone system and an updated datacentre.

However, scores of school workers, returning after the summer break, have reported problems logging in, accessing printers and obtaining data.

"It beggars belief that we now have the start of the school term and schools are not set up with all their kit," councillor Drew Hendry told the council's resource committee meeting this week, according to the Inverness Courier.

One council official described that meeting as "a bun-fight", as councillors were up in arms about the slow progress.

Fujitsu was supposed to migrate the council's servers to its own datacentres along with provision for a full disaster recovery service by the end of July. But this part of the project has not yet been completed.

In a status report from 10 August, Fujitsu stated it had migrated all the council's Unix servers, but one in four of its Wintel servers had not been migrated.

Fujitsu declined to comment.