Agenda item

BT/ICT CONTRACT MONITORING REPORT

Minutes:

Report CSD16105

 

The Chairman, having declared an interest, left the room prior to the start of this item.  Cllr Christopher Marlow, as Vice-Chairman, chaired the meeting during the Chairman’s absence.

 

The Committee received the fourth performance report of the British Telecom (BT) ICT contract utilising the Pan London Framework covering the period 1st July 2018 to 30th June 2019. Nick Adams and Andrew Gee from BT attended the meeting to respond to questions.

 

Noting that the report had highlighted that a general election would be a risk to the computer upgrade and noting that it was becoming increasingly likely that a general election would be called, the Vice-Chairman asked what the likely delay to the rollout of the upgrade would be and the cost implications of this delay.  The Head of ICT confirmed that if and when a general election was called implementation of the update would freeze and it was likely that there would be a two to three week delay.  There would be no cost attached to the delay and staff working on the upgrade would be diverted to support election processes.

 

In response to a question from the Vice-Chairman, the Head of ICT confirmed that the IT self-service portal had been introduced to support staff in resolving less complex tasks such as password issues.  This would help reduce the number of avoidable tasks dealt with by the Team.

 

Noting that the KPI for Asset Management consistently remained at 95%, the Vice-Chairman questioned the reasons for the static performance.  In response the Head of ICT explained that there were numerous devices within the Council’s current IT estate and these devices were not always allocated to specific individuals.  One of the key outcomes of the forthcoming IT upgrade would be that all equipment and devices would be allocated to specific users.  This would enable more tracking of equipment and should lead to the KPI moving to 99%-100%.

 

The Vice-Chairman recalled that there had been some issues following the June upgrade of the Microsoft patch and asked what lessons had been learnt.  Members were notified that the issue had been that the age of some of the Bromley kit had conflicted with the patch.  The patch had been previously tested on equipment from within the IT division which had been more up to date.  As such one of the key points of learning was to ensure that any upgrades were tested on all ages of equipment operating across the estate.

 

In response to questions raised concerning remote access for Members and Officers, the Head of ICT provided assurances that the IT upgrade would address many of the issues that had been cited such as remote access through Citrix.  The new devices would have facial recognition capability which would better facilitate remote access.  In addition it was anticipated that the introduction of Microsoft 365 would facilitate access to emails on 3rd Party devices.

 

The Committee acknowledged that BT’s performance report had been written on 2nd September 2019, and therefore represented a point in time.  Further progress had been made on the programme for the IT Transformation and BT were confident that the three risks to the transformation programme that had been identified in the report had now been mitigated and all KPIs had now moved to ‘Green’.

 

Members noted that the Council’s data centres were hosted in the UK and that over the previous six months the Council had suffered no losses due to phishing.

 

The Vice-Chairman thanked Nick Adams and Andrew Gee for attending the meeting.

 

RESOLVED: that the report be noted.

 

Following the conclusion of the Item Councillor Fawthrop, as Chairman of the Committee, resumed the Chair.

 

Supporting documents: