Agenda item

BT/ICT CONTRACT MONITORING

Minutes:

Report CSD16105

 

The Chairman, having declared an interest, left the meeting 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 fifth performance report of the British Telecom (BT) ICT contract utilising the Pan London Framework covering the period 1st September 2019 to 31st August 2020. Ian Rodgers and Ian Withycombe

from BT attended the meeting to respond to questions.

 

The Chairman opened the discussion by thanking colleagues within BT and the Council ICT Team for their response to the challenges that Covid-19 had imposed on the operations of the Council.  The Committee recognised that the almost overnight move to in excess of 85% of staff working from home had required significant operational changes which had been delivered very smoothly with minimal impact on service delivery.

 

In respect of KPIs, the Assistant Director for IT reported that on 25th March 2020, the Westminster Pan Framework imposed a freeze on the KPIs and SLAs for the frameworks.  Discussions were taking place with the framework owners to agree when the freeze could be lifted, and Officers were anticipating that this would take place at the start of the New Year.

 

In response to a question surrounding the drop in performance in July and August, some months after the on-set of working from home, the Committee heard that beyond the onset of the Covid pandemic the Team had also been supporting the IT Transformation start up.  This had resulted in a number of calls to the IT Help Desk which mainly centred around training issues.  It was noted that now staff were working remotely some of the benefits of the sharing of knowledge that would occur in the office environment had been lost and as a result more calls were being made to the IT Help Desk.  In response to this more Help Desk staff had been recruited and an improvement in performance was anticipated.  The Assistant Director for IT confirmed that work had been undertaken with the Council’s Learning and Development Team to provide more training for staff.

 

The Committee noted that at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic BT had been asked to prioritise calls made by colleagues in Public Health and those providing the emergency response.  Staff had also been reassigned to support the setup of the Covid Response Team and this had inevitably had an impact on performance in relation to other service areas.  In addition to the challenges around the Covid response in May 2020, the Windows 10 Project had been restarted and this had further impacted on performance.

 

Members noted that limits on the size of email attachments had been imposed in order to protect the system from cyber-attack and the limits imposed could be reviewed.

 

Turing to the issue of Members’ IT, the Committee noted the proposals to start a project to review Member IT requirements in 2021 (in advance of the next Local Government elections).  The Vice-Chairman proposed an additional recommendation that any future plans for Member IT would need to be within the existing budget.  It was also suggested that a time limited Task and Finish Group should be established to contribute to the review of Member IT requirements.

 

RESOLVED: That

 

  1. The report be noted;

 

  1. Any future recommendations regarding the provision of Member IT will need to be within the existing budget; and

 

  1. A time limited Member IT Working Group be established.

 

Supporting documents: