Microsoft UK Public Sector - Efficiency - Unitary authorities: planning for shared services

Stephen Pritchard finds that the integration technologies offered by products like BizTalk are ideal for solving the change management challenges of new unitary authorities – and presents a model for best-practice IT in other local authorities too.

In April, the latest round of local government reorganisation replaced 35 English councils with nine new unitary authorities. The move aims to save some £100m a year in costs. A further three county areas could also move to unitary status later this year.

Since the Government first announced the reorganisation process in 2006, plans have moved ahead rapidly.

The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) named the first five unitary areas – Cornwall, Durham, Northumberland, Shropshire and Wiltshire - in December 2007, and later added proposals for two unitary authorities each in Bedfordshire and Cheshire.

The pace of change has brought some real challenges for the councils involved. In some cases, the new unitary authorities had only a weekend – and sometimes just 24 hours – to switch on new services or open new offices.

In several areas, “legacy” district councils continued to run services until the last minute. In all cases, the teams involved in planning the new services had to roll out their new departments at the same time as keeping existing services running. IT systems, applications and communications infrastructures had to be integrated whilst leaving existing processes unaffected until after the new councils opened for business on April 1st.

Unsurprisingly, IT directors, council leaders and chief executives approached the switchover date with a degree of trepidation.

That the switchovers have largely gone according to plan is, in no small measure, down to the skill and dedication of council staff. But it is also a result of the way councils deployed the IT and other technology needed to bring the new authorities into being.

There is a perception in some quarters that local authorities are not extensive users of ICT. In many cases the reverse is true; councils were adopting computer systems to handle tasks such as payroll and benefits payments ahead of private businesses.

But the result is often a wide range of “legacy” systems that are not connected to a central point, and are increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain. According to Mike Haigh, Government Strategic Marketing Manager, Public Sector, at Microsoft, a typical council might have 60 to 80 databases and anywhere between 800 and 4,000 separate applications. “A lot of that has grown organically,” he says. “And if you combine three councils, you can multiply that three times.” Handling the seamless integration of legacy systems is a key challenge in any consolidation programme.

The issue is not just one of organic growth – systems have been managed and maintained separately, too. “Typically local authorities have procured or built autonomous applications that have been administered by dedicated departments,” explains Mark Usher, Business Accounts Director at Microsoft Partner, Solidsoft.

“Where applications need to communicate, dedicated functionality has been built in what we call a ‘tightly coupled’ way. Application A can talk with Application B and B to A, but no other.” Moreover, each application often has its own data store, and often eGovernment initiatives involve “gluing” a web front end to an existing application.

The result is a mishmash of applications and architectures which are difficult to maintain and operate, and even more difficult to integrate.

Forward-thinking authorities have therefore tackled the move to unitary status by first combining, or connecting, their own applications. Kennet District Council, for example, worked with Solidsoft to create a new IT architecture based on Microsoft BizTalk that offered an integrated way to deliver services electronically. It used a service oriented architecture (SOA) to connect a range of software systems, including CRM, email and calendars, environmental health, building control, housing, document management, GIS, leisure centre management and ePayments.

The financial advantages of an integration layer are clear. Few authorities have the luxury of the time and resources needed to completely overhaul or renew their IT systems. The most cost-effective and practical solution is to tie together existing systems and platforms through a central citizen record or, for internal management, a central dashboard or portal.

When it comes to merging authorities, bringing together legacy systems through a citizen record will at least build on existing integration work, even if it does not immediately tackle the issue of multiple – and possibly duplicated – systems.

“The reality of the situation within a local authority is that there are often hundreds of systems, all with different licensing agreements, often running on different technical platforms. To start again would be economically prohibitive,” explains Usher.

“Introducing an integration layer allows authorities to concentrate on managing cross-functional processes efficiently, rolling solutions out in an incremental and controlled manner. BizTalk can be used to facilitate Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and as the heart of a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA),” he says. Such an approach was used by Kent County Council, for example, and it has played a significant part in helping the council reach four-star status in the Comprehensive Performance Assessment.

It certainly helps to use a major change management process (like the creation of unitary councils) as the catalyst for new technology investment; but connected systems like those found at Kennet also serve to make local authorities more responsive. As Usher points out, Sir David Varney’s 2006 report on government transformation puts the onus on local authorities to simplify business processes and to do so in a way that puts the citizen’s convenience, rather than that of the local authority, at the centre of operations. That requires the consumer, not the department, to be at the centre of service design and delivery.

Authorities have generally been most successful in IT transformation, Microsoft’s Haigh believes, where they have set a goal of building their ICT systems around the citizen, rather than around existing business processes. Citizen Service Portals (CSP) are the technical results of such an approach.

A well-designed Citizen Service Portal allows individuals to deal with the council in their area simply and in a seamless manner, whilst allowing the authority to preserve the business logic, security and reliability of the underlying systems.

The CSP approach also gives authorities the choice of either implementing a council-wide system, or tackling specific tasks or functions. “You can start with a small number of people and processes and look at a particular problem area, or you can adopt the large-scale transformation approach,” says Haigh. “Whatever your legacy systems, you can progress at your own pace and budget towards a single view of the citizen.”

For councils faced with the daunting task of integrating many years’ investment in a patchwork of IT, whether because of local government reorganisation or simply a desire for greater efficiency, a thin connective layer using products like BizTalk offers a proven way to tackle the challenge.

Microsoft BizTalk Server

Solidsoft