Agenda item

(Director of Resources) To consider the attached report.

The Assistant Director ICT and Facilities Management, Mr Newton introduced the report updating the Panel on the ongoing works and projects of the ICT strategy. Overall the projects are on track and progressing well.

The Panel noted that:

·         ICT now incorporates the GIS and the Gazetteer team. The opportunity was taken to merge the helpdesk, switchboard and desktop support to create a more proactive desk service team;

·         The new telephone system was now fully live. Auto attendants (menu assisted calls) have been created to help direct calls, workgroups have been created to ensure quicker answering and less abandoned calls and calling line identification (CLI) is now displayed on all outgoing calls;

·         New core and edge switches have now been installed resulting in network availability for January 2015 averaging 99.97%. It was essential to keep this up to date for reliability;

·         The ‘GOOD’ and ‘Mod.Gov’ applications has now been installed on various devices to enable members and officers to access files and emails whilst not in the office. Feedback on ease of use and reliability had been excellent. If members wanted this system IT would need to set them up with an EFDC email address. Also 50 branch routers have been distributed to enhance home working;

·         The whole council was now covered by wireless connectivity, which was working well. By the end of the month this would also include satellite offices;

·         Host servers have been replaced by ‘Fujitsu’ and are now in place and undergoing testing;

·         ICT now have out of hours call-out arrangements to enable them to resolve any problems before core working time begins. This has proved very successful to date with a number of potentially serious issues resolved outside of normal working hours; and

·         We have now developed our own online booking system for leisure services and this will eventually link in with the Finance system.

Councillor Watson asked if the disposal of the old equipment was secure. She was assured that it was, very.

Councillor Watson then asked if officers could somehow market our in-house developed booking system to other authorities. Mr Newton said that they had looked into this; it appeared that other authorities wanted many variations to our basic system and made it confusing. He was, however, talking to the Essex on line partnership about this.

Councillor Mohindra asked how secure we were against a cyber attack. Mr Newton replied that we had a good security officer and system in place. So, much so that Essex County Council had a virus before Christmas and our system was good enough to block it.

Councillor Lion said that as our core switches were 99.97% effective, could this become a KPI. He was told that it was something officers could easily monitor.

Councillor Lion noted that now Mod.Gov was available on a tablet which could also provide the Council Bulletin and agendas, he encouraged members to use it as they were looking to save paper and printing costs. Mr Newton added that, at a future meeting, he could show the Panel the statistics on website use and could also demonstrate how Mod.Gov worked. The Panel thought this was good idea.

RESOLVED:

The Panel noted the progress on the ICT projects for 2014/15.