The Cabinet Member for Financial Management, Transformation & IT, introduced the report.

Members were informed that in September 2016 the council carried out an external review of the ICT service to assess issues and highlighted areas of potential weakness.  The report identified that investment was required to deliver pace and innovation, remove customer dissatisfaction and enable transformed customer operations. A report was subsequently presented to Havering Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and it was agreed that ICT should develop a Business Case for short/medium and long term resources to:

•           “Catch up and keep pace” with ICT investment to avoid further risks of unsupported infrastructure.

•           Invest in new “modern working”.

•           Invest in resources to support the service delivery in delivering the council’s digital ambitions.

Further investigations into ICT budgets in November 2016 by officers confirmed that there was insufficient funding specifically to support the council’s key priority systems, including the council’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Data Ware House (DWH) systems. 

The report identified investment required of £1.055m in 2017/18 and £0.930m in 2018/19 to support and improve key priority ICT systems and projects.

Cabinet:

1.         Agreed to increase the 2017/18 ICT budget by a total of £1.055m; the increase to be funded from oneSource Reserve.

2.         Noted the underlying budget pressure of £0.930m that exists in the ICT budget and that an increase in the base budget from 2018/19 will be put forward in the 2018/19 budget process to be considered for approval by Council in February2018.

Reasons for the decision:

The Council’s ICT service is currently struggling with its ability to support the council’s critical systems and projects including secure infrastructure without significant revenue investment in its resources. 

Until now, the funding for development of DWH and CRM has been found in capital budgets, which is unsustainable and unacceptable for ongoing support.

It is also cost effective for the council to invest in fixed term posts rather than cover these roles through contracted resources.

Other options considered:

1.         Do nothing – The CRM and DWH are in need of support and no funding is available for further development.  Therefore, do nothing is not an option.  For the security projects, the resources are critical to ensure we maintain the infrastructure security.  In light of recent cyber security incidents, this is not an option.  Keeping the as-is status this would prevent Havering from achieving it ambitious digital vision due to the lack of core infrastructure to build the Havering council of the future.

2.         Build a business case and deploy resources – to avoid security related risks and better use of resources for the support of the critical systems, it is essential that resources are made available.

3.         Use Capital funding – The CRM and DWH systems are in ‘business as usual’ (BAU) phase; therefore, the use of capital funding is no longer appropriate.  The security and other projects also need ongoing support therefore allocation of capital funding is not an option.