Archived decisions

Note of a Meeting of the SCRUTINY PANEL 3 of the POLICY AND RESOURCES SCRUTINY AND SELECT COMMITTEE to consider ICT held on 12 September 2005.

PRESENT:

Councillors R. Baulk (Chairman); A.P. Collett; K. Evans

The Panel considered the annual IT Performance Report 2004/05 (as referred to the July 2005 Policy and Resources Scrutiny and Select Committee); together with the outcome of the seminar on ICT for elected Members, which they had found informative and comprehensive. They began by identifying what they considered the main ICT issues for Hampshire County Council to be.

· Emergency service availability and business continuity - What arrangements are in place? (Governance Committee has looked at the question of secondary power supplies to the main computer centre. They suggested that a business case for a possible standby generator should be prepared and should come to a future meeting of the Committee when proposals for the reconfiguration of the compute centre came forward)

· Hampshire Public Service Network (HPSN). What are the expected benefits? Are they being realised? If not, why not? What are the charging arrangements for HPSN? What about the new SOHO system?

· Geographic Information systems (GIS). What were the expected benefits? Are they being fully realised? If not, why not?

· Customer relationships management and call centres - where are we with this? What do we want to achieve? What benefits do we expect? How are we deciding what system to adopt?

· SAP - to what extent should we invest further in making SAP more user-friendly? How do we decide what more to do? What is the focus and expenditure limit?

· Desk top support - how do we decide parameters? Is low cost per hour necessarily the best?

· Forward Plan for IT Projects - How will projects be prioritised and decided on? What was the forward plan 2 years ago and how much of it have we achieved?

· Staff retention - are we having problems retaining staff in technical areas?

· Structure of ICT in the organisation - what are the functions of ICT staff within departments and how do they relate to the central ICT department?

· Benchmarks and priorities - where do we get benchmarks for ICT Services? How do we decide what our priorities are? How do we measure success? Do we sometimes find that people say the systems do not deliver what was promised, but that the customer service statistics suggest that all is well?

· Mobile working - what benefits do we expect from it? What are the costs and are they proportionate? What are the possible risks? How about the use of wireless capabilities in schools?

· The SWIFT system in Social Services - is it working as expected? What are the problems and how could they be overcome? (Steve Love in Social Services to respond to this one?

The Panel considered that they would need more information on most of the above subjects before deciding what, if any, further investigation might be required. They therefore decided, for all but the last item set out above, to ask the Head of IT Services to identify the relevant expert on each theme and for that person to attend informal Panel meetings for a question and answer session. They indicated that they would not expect long reports to be prepared, but would have no objection to a very short, bullet point style presentation if that was felt to be appropriate. The final theme was one which would need to be pursued initially with Social Services as the main user of the SWIFT system.

The Panel set dates for future meetings as follows:

Friday, 30 September - 10 a.m. Basing Room

Wednesday, 5 October - 10 a.m. Former Grand Jury Room

Thursday, 6 October - 2 p.m. Wellington Room

Friday, 7 October - 2 p.m. Chute Room

To inform their discussions, the Panel also asked for details of any other reviews of IT currently being conducted, for example, by Internal Audit.

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