Edinburgh council targets £25m savings through ICT revamp

The City of Edinburgh Council is to overhaul its Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions in a bid to increase efficiency and cut costs by £25 million over just four years.

Part of the revamp will see the council consolidating its servers and creating a single director of users for all city employees. Up until now a mixture of operating systems had encompassed over 200 servers and 26 directories.

Council employees were also using over 4,500 different desktop applications - a figure which has now been scaled back to just 400.

Andrew Unsworth, head of e-government at the City of Edinburgh Council, explained to Computer Weekly how it had approached the task of revamping so many separate IT systems.

"We audited each service area in the council and appointed a coordinator who worked with BT to determine which applications were really needed," he said.

Once standardisation work has been completed the council will also implement a range of ICT upgrades geared towards cutting costs and increasing employee efficiency. These are expected to include VoIP hardware distribution and electronic document management.

The transformation project is part of the council's Smart City Vision Programme, which aims to make Edinburgh the most successful city region in northern Europe by 2015.




Posted on: 2007-09-04, in: Telephony technology

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