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 6 October 2005.

p. Councillor R. Baulk

(Chairman)

Councillors:

p A.P. Collett

p K. Evans

S. James

p A Weeks

The Chairman welcomed Jos Creese, Head of IT Services and several members of his Management Team, and thanked them for the comprehensive replies they had formulated to the questions previously posed by the Panel.

There then followed detailed questions and answers on the following topics:

· Emergency Planning and Business Continuity

· Hampshire Public Service Network (HPSN)

· Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

· Customer Relationship Management and Call Centres

· SAP

· Desk Top Support

· Benchmarking

· Mobile Working

There was not time to do justice to the following topics:-

· Forward plan for IT projects

· Staff recruitment/retention

· Structure of ICT in the organisation.

It was therefore agreed to invite Jos Creese back for another short question and answer session on a date to be agreed. (Possibly the morning of 31 October).

As they had not completed their investigations, Members did not come to any conclusions on the topics they had considered. However, they identified their main area of concern as the need for a separately located disaster recovery facility on a site remote from the computer centre, in the interests of business continuity. They felt that the County Council was the subject of very substantial risk in this area in the event of a long term system breakdown. It was agreed to hold over any further study of this issue and any other topics which might emerge, until after the final session with Jos Creese when the Panel would decide what recommendations they wished to put forward to the Policy and Resources Scrutiny and Select Committee.

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