Microsoft UK Public Sector - Efficiency - Pioneering citizen services: Northamptonshire CC is ready to deliver!

Northamptonshire County Council was struggling with decentralised IT and a mishmash of hardware and software. It decided to standardise on Microsoft software and, two years on, finds itself in a strong position to implement improved citizen services and transformational government. Michael Juer, Northamptonshire’s programme management & development manager, talked to Kim Thomas about what has been achieved.

Three years ago, a review from the National Computer Centre found that Northamptonshire County Council needed to invest many millions over the next five years to improve its creaking IT infrastructure. The IT function had been devolved for 20 years, with the result that there was little control over the IT estate: two terabytes of data were held across 70 servers in over 40 locations, and no-one really knew how many applications the council was running. Modernisation was clearly going to be a major task.

The multi-million pound programme to overhaul the infrastructure began in 2006, and will be completed in 2010. The first job was to centralise the IT function. Michael Juer, Programme Management & Development Manager at the council, says this was a cultural challenge as well as a technical one: “There was a fundamental change getting people to understand that they no longer ran their own IT and that budgets were centralised.”

After centralisation came the decision to upgrade to a new platform. “We knew that the platform we had simply couldn’t support the business in the future,” says Juer. The council made several new IT appointments, including a new head of Services and an IT Strategy manager. This new team understood the importance of moving towards a more flexible infrastructure based on services-oriented architecture (SOA) that would allow them to support multiple delivery channels, improve information management and deliver better citizen services – before the council started to demand that transformation itself.

Key to putting those changes in place was the decision to standardise on Microsoft technology: “We felt that the Microsoft stack offered some very good solutions for supporting organisations, and we decided that there was no point in playing around with a bit of Microsoft here, and a bit of Microsoft there – we either had to make a commitment or not.”

Work began on a programme of introducing new technology that would eventually allow employees to work remotely or on the move, to collaborate more effectively and to share information across departments.

The programme began with a migration of email software to Microsoft Outlook. In year one, IT delivered the migration and carried out “all the planning and preparation work around the upgrade to a completely different delivery platform.”

The second phase has just been completed. As well as delivering a new intranet in June 2008, the team deployed a more flexible, “any time, anywhere” infrastructure that will enable users to access the council’s systems wherever they are. This was achieved by adopting SQL Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) technology, in conjunction with a thin client model to deliver data and applications.

Before some of this new infrastructure can be switched on, however, work still needs to be carried out in changing the organisational mindset, says Juer: “In terms of workforce performance management, the organisation is not in a place where it could adopt flexible or home working. It has to undergo a substantial cultural transformation to exploit that technology. ”

SharePoint will be a central part of the new model of working in Northamptonshire. “We’ve got a community portal that went live over a year ago and a new intranet going live at the end of January; both of which are SharePoint developments; and we’ll be scoping out plans around building a SharePoint extranet in the coming year. Collaborative working and the shared services agenda is very big at the moment, so our whole information management infrastructure will be based on MOSS 2007,” says Juer.

To introduce that new model of working, the IT team has to convince the council’s departments of the need to move away from Windows Explorer and shared drives to SharePoint-based workspaces ¬ – “Team Sites” and “My Sites”. This will eventually introduce better document version control, and will improve collaborative working: “If you look at our organisation now, it’s a lot of functional silos, working on shared drives with poor data. We’re starting to work with the business around the concept of ‘information for a person’ becoming ‘information for a team’, which eventually becomes potentially of value to the organisation.” It’s a major change to the way the business works: “Moving the organisation to using Team Sites, and that whole collaborative model, is the biggest challenge we have over the next 12 to 18 months.”

Another part of the transformation will be to implement improved workflow and systems integration. The council has deployed BizTalk to integrate its shared services with Cambridgeshire County Council (despite Cambridgeshire operating on a different platform), and will use it further to enable greater data sharing and collaboration between different services.

Citizen relationship management will also be used to drive improvements in citizen services. Microsoft CRM has been deployed in a new state-of-the-art 100-seat call centre, says Juer: “This is all about moving customer-facing services from the functional silos – health and social services, children and young people – into the call centre, deploying Microsoft CRM, and then tying everything together with systems integration, BizTalk, and workflow.”

So how has the business responded to the changes? Shortly after the programme began, the leadership team at the council changed. The new management, keen to implement central Government’s transformational government strategy, has focused efforts on offering a better service to citizens – at the same time that the IT function was already putting in place the changes that would enable that to happen.

Even so, the council is yet to see most of the benefits: “The business probably views us at the moment pretty poorly; we’ve spent the last two years upsetting them. It’s been impossible to deliver the infrastructure upgrade without pain to the business.”

This quarter, however, all that will change. The business is starting to exploit some of the technologies deployed over the past year says Juer, enabling them to move towards collaborative, citizen-focused methods of working: “It’s a very exciting time, because the next two years here will allow us to support the business transformation, and I think IT’s role within the organisation will be substantially shifted in people’s minds.”

• SharePoint Server 2007
• Web-based collaboration with SharePoint Services
• Connect services with BizTalk

Kim Thomas is a freelance journalist, who specialises in writing about technology, business and education. Her clients include the Financial Times, the Economist Intelligence Unit and The Guardian as well as a number of B2B publications.