Leo Hanna, UK Executive Vice President at global Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider TechnologyOne, discusses how councils can mitigate challenges as they pursue their technology investments
Finding efficiencies and revenue enablement opportunities are at the top of every UK council’s list. Still, with ever-shrinking budgets and rising service costs, there is no room for error regarding council technology investment decisions.
According to the Local Government Association, nearly one in five councils. are likely to file for bankruptcy within the next year. Compounding the problems arising from a lack of government funding and demands on day-to-day spending is the fact that many councils don’t have modern IT solutions that enable informed budgeting decisions.
When deployed correctly, integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions can aid authorities in streamlining processes, reducing administrative overhead, increasing efficiencies, and improving resident experience. But all investments come with risk. How can we ensure council technology investments will be a budgetary asset rather than a drain on resources?
The costs of technical debt
Technical debt is the cost of generations of small investments into improving or upgrading legacy IT infrastructure. Often, these investments are made because they seem like the fastest solution to getting a new function or service in place. Other times, they are driven by the sheer weight of significant investments in a certain vendor or software – even if they aren’t providing the modern solutions they claim to offer.
Technical debt doesn’t just impact actual systems. The ongoing consultancy fees and operating costs associated with continuing the established ways of doing things drain budgets and stop community leaders from identifying opportunities to stretch budgets and direct funding to where it’s needed most.
As the debt grows larger and larger, legacy IT infrastructure also becomes weaker against cyber attacks.
Local authority risk management is crucial as councils are ideal targets for hackers, with their systems hosting a wealth of resident, employee and supplier records.
UK councils are facing an understandable conundrum. Most local governments recognise that they cannot afford the cost of a breach, but leaders still feel there are more pressing demands for limited budgets than spending on new IT systems.
In the year to August 2022, UK councils were hit by 10,000 cyber attacks every day – a 14% increase on the previous year. With this number only expected to rise, the question is not if your council will be targeted but when.
Mitigating risk in digital transformation
Last year, the UK’s biggest council, Birmingham, issued a section 114 notice; there were numerous contributing factors, including the £100m implementation of a new IT system. As the council’s first significant IT upgrade since 1999, the project was hugely costly, and its new capabilities failed to assess the full scale of its situation in time to remedy its financial shortfalls.
The traditional model of implementing IT sees software vendors provide the software, another party implements it, and a third maintains and supports that software. The digital transformation process is often managed by massive consulting businesses that benefit financially from making the process complicated and slow. This model creates an ever-growing technical debt for the council and fails to provide the much-needed insight and analysis that leads to better business decisions.
It’s clear from Birmingham Council’s experience that digital transformations are difficult projects to roll out, so the onus for their success shouldn’t be placed on local authorities, who should be focused on better serving their communities.
As a global Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider, TechnologyOne takes complete responsibility for marketing, selling, implementing, supporting, and running our solutions for our customers rather than palming the work off to a systems integrator, which helps reduce time, cost, and risk.
Blackpool Council’s experience
From operating several companies, including transport operators and waste services, to delivering more than 200 services to the community, Blackpool Council is a large multi-entity organisation supporting an estimated population of 147,663 residents and 20 million annual visitors.
In 2019, Blackpool Council recognised the need to replace its financial system. The system was hosted on-premise across five or six servers and in an external data centre, as well as multiple additional reporting platforms with no integration into the finance system.
This meant the council, which turns over £500m annually, could not access real-time planning data. The varied nature of the organisation, which spans from delivering children’s social care placements to running a water park, made managing finances hugely challenging.
In early 2023, Blackpool Council implemented TechnologyOne’s SaaS Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution, OneCouncil, consolidating the council’s technology stack into one comprehensive platform. By connecting financial data, contracts, corporate performance management, and supply chain information, the team were empowered with data to make informed decisions and forecast and prepare for various scenarios.
As part of the project, TechnologyOne offered an accelerated implementation where the risk and resources sat with the vendor to ensure the successful delivery of the Blackpool OneCouncil project. This first-to-market, cost-effective approach to implementation kept the risk and timeline to a minimum, allowing Blackpool Council to overcome budget constraints and do more with less.
TechnologyOne is a global Software as a Service (SaaS) company. Founded in Australia, we have offices across six countries. Our enterprise SaaS solution transforms business and makes life simple for our community by providing powerful, deeply integrated enterprise software that is incredibly easy to use. Our software powered over 1,300 leading corporations, government departments and statutory authorities globally.
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