Local Governmentcloud adoption in 2018

eduserv.org.uk

Research, insight and case

studies to inspire

The whole idea behind moving to

the cloud is that you size it for what

you need and then buy additional

capacity when you need it. You can’t

do that without looking at your

existing IT estate and identifying

what you can get rid of and what you

don’t want to move to the cloud.

Stephen Vercella, Head of ICT at Wiltshire Council

ForewordThe role of IT in local councils is evolving. Where once it was seen as support system, now it is at the forefront of transforming how services are delivered.

To adapt, councils have been changing their IT models: moving to one that enables IT to support transformation of the council, to help it meet lowering budgets and the heightened service expectations of citizens.

One avenue many councils have considered to give them greater flexibility and access to tools to help deliver modern services is cloud computing. With the Government’s Cloud First Policy coming up to its 5th anniversary, and the recent stipulation that the public sector should choose public cloud over any other model, it is clear that this is the route that Whitehall sees as the future for public sector IT.

This evolution in thinking about cloud has been mirrored in the conversations we’ve had with some of our forward-thinking public sector clients. These organisations now see public cloud as the core technology infrastructure which will support their current and future business needs – sometimes augmented by private cloud, sometimes not.

There are good reasons for this shift in favour of public cloud. Most are down to the investment that the hyper-scale public cloud providers have made in ensuring their services truly match what organisations in the public sector need. They have also taken actions to remove the main perceived barriers to adoption.

Despite this, in most councils, cloud technology has yet to displace traditional ways of buying and deploying IT in local government.

So what are the models that councils are using? What factors are holding councils back from cloud adoption? To what extent are councils deploying cloud today? When can we expect the rate of cloud adoption to change? Eduserv have worked with Socitm, surveying 373 of the 418 UK councils and interviewing a range of technology leaders in local government, to answer these questions and provide a comprehensive snapshot of the different forces driving IT investment.

The standout finding from this research is that councils are in no-way averse to cloud technology. While not the dominant IT model, a growing majority are using cloud in some way and more plan to do so. However, for things to move faster, it is clear that council CIOs need to acknowledge and overcome barriers caused by culture, skills and the way that councils budget for IT.

As well as presenting the findings of the research, this report provides case studies and practical insight, showcasing the ways leading councils are overcoming these barriers. We hope you find it useful in supporting your own organisation as you move forward.

Andy Powell Chief Technical Officer at Eduserv

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Research highlightsHow many councils have policy guidance in place for the use of cloud IT?

■ 38% of councils have a policy governing the deployment of Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud infrastructure

■ 43% have guidance or a strategy for the use of SaaS

■ 44% have guidance or a strategy for cloud infrastructure

Our previous research in 2016 found that 39% of councils had a cloud IT policy.

It is nearly five years since the Cabinet Office issued its ‘cloud first’ policy for the public sector. Despite this, our 2018 research into local government IT shows that the majority of councils have yet to formalise the way they will use cloud in their organisations.

Taken at face value it would appear that ‘cloud first’ thinking has yet to gain any real traction in local government. However, when you look at the number of councils who are using cloud – which is now a significant majority (see p7) – and talking to our panel of IT leaders from local government for this research, the reality is quite different. It is clear that across UK councils, cloud options are actively considered in any IT planning. This is driven by a real interest in harnessing the benefits that cloud IT can offer businesses.

Cloud deployment is opportunisticCouncils are clearly ‘cloud aware’, and while there may not be a formal strategy for the whole organisation, they are making decisions on a case-by-case basis and being opportunistic about where cloud IT can play a role.

The absence of an organisation-wide cloud strategy may seem strange but to some extent, it can be explained by a shift away from a past habit of imposing council-wide edicts around the deployment of IT. The clear sentiment taken from our panel of IT leaders was that policy takes a long time to formulate and agree. It also runs counter to the models of rapid IT deployment councils want to use today.

“In the past, councils have focused on delivering big IT infrastructure projects, often across the council and normally in partnership with the big IT suppliers. In doing this, we have ended up with the equivalent of a slow-moving oil tanker where changing direction takes time and is far more complicated than it needs to be” says Roy Grant, Head of ICT at York City Council.

“The way we are approaching our IT is to focus on our users and bring in agile ways of working which can deliver change at a faster pace. That means working at different speeds with different parts of the business. It also means identifying and deploying applications and

We have ended up with the

equivalent of a slow-moving

oil tanker where changing

direction takes time and is

far more complicated than

it needs to be...Roy Grant, Head of ICT at York City Council.

“

Cloud strategy in local government:

How cloud-ready are UK councils?1

4

infrastructure which allows us to meet the priorities of the business as they emerge. Moving away from ‘big IT’ has allowed us to quickly deliver projects which in the past have taken a long time to go nowhere.”

Councils think ‘cloud first’In other councils, such as Middlesbrough, where recent investment has been made in on-premise IT, the merits of cloud have been explored and there is an expectation that the use of cloud will grow as they deliver on their new digital strategy.

“Our new digital strategy will allow me to revise the ICT strategy to accommodate what the business needs for the future,” says Andy Evans, Head of ICT at Middlesbrough Council.

“Although we are heavily weighted towards on-premise IT, when we consider a new application we always consider cloud first. Because we have around 10% of our estate in the cloud, ours is not strictly an on-premise approach to IT. What we have is a hybrid model and I expect more applications will be hosted in the cloud in the next two or three years.”

Cloud supporting business prioritiesThis approach is echoed by a significant number of councils in our quantitative research where we found that although there might not be a cloud strategy, one was under development or cloud IT will form part of a wider business transformation plan.

“The way we have approached cloud IT for our applications is by creating a hierarchy of procurement. This has meant very simply that we want to procure where possible, cloud native programmes. We have also specified within that we want open APIs and a clear data architecture. So slowly as licencing has come up we have been through a series of migrations to get out of old legacy systems into, where possible cloud native systems,” says Simon Hughes Chief Digital Officer at Mid Sussex District Council

“The important caveat is that we aren’t rushing into it so if there isn’t a good market in terms of supplier choice, we aren’t moving. At the same time we are also moving

other areas of our IT estate towards infrastructure as a service so we have less to worry about in terms of maintenance, updates and patching.”

“By divesting ourselves of this work we are able to add value by putting in place flexible systems, improving workflows for our staff and focusing more on better use of our data.”

“I’ve seen a number of organisations publicising that they have moved their ICT to the cloud, but I don’t think that, setting an objective of being fully on cloud infrastructure is important in and of itself. I think we need to be clear about how cloud services are helping us to deliver better and more cost effective services for our residents and businesses,” says Rob Miller, Director of ICT at Hackney Council.

‘Omid Shiraji is another IT leader who echoes the need for councils to focus on what the business needs rather than a specific IT model.

“For us success in IT would be when nobody is having a conversation about cloud. When the dialogue in your organisation shifts to asking ‘is our portfolio the right portfolio? Are we designing services around citizens and exploiting the tools that are out there in the market place to do that? Is the data flowing through the organisation in a way that is consistent and enables us to get new insight to automate?’ When you are having those kind of conversations and you are not talking about cloud, it is just a delivery mechanism, that is what I think success looks like.”

In summary ■ Although there is an absence of formal

cloud strategy many councils have adopted ‘cloud first’ thinking in their approach to IT.

■ Council IT teams are happy to adopt cloud IT to support operational areas which will see immediate benefits.

■ The need for greater resilience or security are a greater priority than having a cloud strategy.

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In recent years, Aylesbury Vale District Council has won recognition for its use of technology in transforming the way it works and how it delivers council services.

According to IT Strategy Manager, Maryvonne Hassall, a ‘cloud first’ IT strategy has played a key part in enabling the changes it wanted to make.

“The ‘cloud first’ strategy we put in place seven years ago meant that every time we looked at a new system or that an old IT system came up for renewal, we would look first at finding a suitable cloud version. This has led to the migration of the bulk of our services into the cloud. Email and line-of-business applications were prioritised first and the services and applications which were left over were moved into Amazon Web Services.

We’ve been quite aggressive in the way we have done this, compromising on some systems which were not perfect for our needs but which allowed us to move to the cloud.

This has left us in a good place technically and, as a small organisation, the resilience we get from the likes of Amazon is vastly superior to what we could deliver in-house without more staff.

Our next priority is to make the data usable. Because it sits on a number of different systems, we are currently working on connecting the data together so we can create a single point of view for our customers and gather information to improve the way we deal with them. Our goal is to identify customer behaviour and get on the front foot in predicting what the customer wants and anticipate other services they might need.

Our attitude to IT is that unlike in the past, you can’t simply invest and then maintain what you have got, it

requires an ongoing focus and you can’t stand still. You need an eye on the future, assessing what is and isn’t working today as well as actively finding the areas of your IT infrastructure you can switch off.

This is reflected in three project streams we are running across the council. The first is an innovation stream where we are pushing the boundaries with new things like artificial intelligence. The second is about transformation where we’re looking at which applications and processes we need for our business to make sure they are working for us. The last one is about legacy decommissioning, looking at the things which are holding us back and preventing progress.

We are making good progress as a council and that is down to a number of factors.

It is certainly helpful that it hasn’t been a case of the IT department saying what should be done and then getting people to do it.

The changes we are making have support from the senior leadership team and the Members: it is a council-wide initiative.

Linked to that is the investment we have made in bringing people with us, in culture change, to support what we want to do as a council. Together that has created a platform for change which would not otherwise have been there.

The important point is that even after seven years of what you might call a ‘cloud first’ approach to IT, we definitely haven’t finished and we still have a lot more work we need to do.”

Aylesbury Vale District Council

‘Cloud first’ approach underpins

council’s transformation

Case Study

6

Despite a lack of formal cloud strategy among the majority of councils, our research shows that more local authorities are using cloud IT today than two years ago.

Rather than displacing existing IT infrastructure entirely, councils are choosing to run cloud alongside on-premise systems. The result is that a hybrid model for IT is now most prevalent in local government, with nearly two thirds of councils deploying IT in this way.

Looking at the rate of growth of cloud, it is clear that the rate of cloud adoption in the past two years is steady, rather than rapid.

Legacy IT prevents more cloud adoptionAccording to our panel of local government IT leaders, the demands of working with legacy IT are applying a brake to the pace at which organisations can adopt cloud IT.

One major problem comes from a combination of lock-in to existing contracts and the need to maximise the value from past investment in applications and infrastructure.

“We are looking to adopt a cloud-based model as far as possible but we have a lot of legacy applications and a lot of long-term contracts which we can’t really seek to re-procure with something already in place,” says Marion Sinclair, Head of Strategy and Enterprise Architecture at Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which shares services with Westminster Council. “The approach has to be one of seeing out these contracts and then when the time to invest comes around again, you can leverage that opportunity to move forward. It’s a case of having a long-term vision which we move closer to each time we make a change.”

Research highlightsHow do you store and manage data?

■ 62% of councils store data in the cloud, up from 52% in 2016

■ 81% use one or more on-premise datacentre(s)

■ 42% use a third-party data centre

■ 64% of councils use both on-premise and cloud hosting

It’s a case of having a

long-term vision which

we move closer to each

time we make a change.

Marion Sinclair, Head of Strategy and Enterprise

Architecture at Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

“

Cloud and council IT infrastructure –

what role is cloud playing?2

eduserv.org.uk 7

IT rationalisation is a priorityA second challenge comes from the recognition that there is no commercial sense in moving to the cloud without first rationalising existing IT estate and then prioritising cloud migration to deliver on what is most important in each council.

“The whole idea behind moving to the cloud is that you size it for what you need and then buy additional capacity when you need it. You can’t do that without looking at your existing IT estate and identifying what you can get rid of and what you don’t want to move to the cloud,” says Stephen Vercella, Head of ICT at Wiltshire Council.

“I have looked at the option of a ‘lift and shift’ of our IT estate to the cloud and the cost of it is very expensive, largely because it will be full of things I don’t want or don’t need. The challenge for us – and this will be the case for other councils – is we identify what we can get rid of, what we don’t want to move and get it to the right size.”

A final common barrier to wider cloud adoption comes from the need to stabilise and secure existing IT infrastructure, ensuring it is resilient and can provide the business continuity and disaster recovery that their organisation needs. This was a priority for each member of panel of IT leaders that we interviewed for this report.

Each of these factors mean that for the foreseeable future, the demands of legacy IT will continue to consume resources which might otherwise be directed at delivering a more rapid move to cloud.

In summary ■ A hybrid of cloud and on-premise

IT is now the dominant model of IT infrastructure in local government.

■ Legacy IT and ongoing contractual commitments are preventing councils from adopting cloud in the way that they want.

■ For many organisations, greater cloud use is being held up by the need to first bring stability and then rationalise existing IT infrastructure.

■

The challenge for us is

we identify what we

can get rid of, what we

don’t want to move and

get it to the right size.Stephen Vercella, Head of ICT at Wiltshire Council

8

Having taken the management of IT services back in-house in 2016 after an outsourced arrangement, the priority for Gareth Pawlett, Chief Information Officer at Cheshire East Borough Council has been to ensure that IT infrastructure can meet the business needs of the two councils he oversees – Cheshire East and West.

“Our ambition is eventually to move to a full cloud model for IT, or as far as is practical.

However, as is the case in many councils, the large number of legacy applications we manage and aging IT infrastructure creates quite a lot of complexity when it comes to planning how you can move forward.

For me, there is also the added challenge of running a shared IT service for two organisations and the fact that it was only brought in-house relatively recently after being run by an arms-length private provider for a number of years.

Having looked at our IT estate, it was clear that we are a very long way from being in a position where we could move significant areas of what we do into the cloud.

On one hand, we have a datacentre which we cannot leave for a number of years. That requires a lot of investment to ensure it delivers on the council’s business needs. On the other hand, we have substantial technical debt in our application estate which we have to address as a matter of urgency.

So, although we want to move to cloud, my business case has had to focus on getting us an IT estate which is resilient, where we have disaster recovery capability in place, and where we can be sure that we are compliant with key policy areas like data protection and GDPR which are critical given the data we handle.

To achieve that, we are building a hyper-converged environment within our own datacentre, replacing the most at-risk and underinvested parts of our infrastructure.

This is effectively a hybrid model of IT which we can use to buy time so we can better plan our cloud consumption. It may not be a full cloud model but we are already seeing it can change the way we deliver services to match what we might get from the cloud.

There is also a lot of work to do with our people. The reason we have a highly complex estate,

To move forward effectively, we need to get both councils aligned in understanding where we need to go with our IT and what needs to change.

There is a job of education in the art of the possible and how we can help them with transformation and what the digital offering might and should be. We can’t move to the cloud without doing that.”

Cheshire East Borough Council

Rationalising legacy IT

provides a platform for change

Case Study

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Over the past two years, one of the most significant changes in public sector IT has been the growing role played by hyperscale public cloud providers such as AWS, Azure or Google. Following guidance from the Cabinet Office last year that organisations should consider public cloud first, more organisations, including NHS Digital, are looking to these providers.

Our research shows that among councils, hyperscale public cloud is now the most commonly used cloud platform, with over one third of respondents saying they used the services of AWS, Azure or Google.

Public cloud: an enabler of innovationFor Gareth Pawlett, CIO at Cheshire East Borough Council, an important reason to move to public cloud is the ability to access an environment which can support the development of new services.

“It’s clear to me that what we have now can’t support the future direction of the council where we need to work at different speeds with different parts of the organisation.

It’s not just about hosting, it’s about having an innovation platform that works and that gives us a stable base from which we can explore and develop new services. That’s why we see a role for public cloud in the future.”

An environment for collaborationAnother driver for the use of public cloud is the opportunity to work more closely with other local authorities in the development and delivery of public services.

Research highlightsWhat cloud services are councils using?

■ 36% use hyper-scale public cloud (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform)

■ 27% have private cloud

■ 6% use another public cloud provider

It’s clear to me that what we have now can’t support the future direction of the council...Gareth Pawlett, CIO at Cheshire East Borough Council

“

Improving public services –

cloud as an enabler3

10

“I think no local authority can hold up their hand and say they have done everything they need to do. Some organisations are strong in certain areas and it makes sense to share what works,” says Roy Grant, Head of ICT at City of York Council.

“Where we are, there is a great opportunity to work jointly with Harrogate and do something which is focused on North Yorkshire by sharing services and platforms which deliver the kind of services which we know our users need across our immediate region. The pre-requisite for that is having connectivity and ability to access what you need from wherever you need to use it.”

More than data storageAlthough a number of councils still state a preference for private cloud due to reasons of autonomy and fit with their existing operations, it is clear from our panel of IT leaders that as organisations move forward, public cloud is no longer seen as a like-for-like replacement for data storage but the place which can offer the flexible infrastructure which is necessary for delivering digital government.

“When I have conversations with senior leaders in the three councils which Strata provide IT Services to, they are interested in bringing diverse data feeds together in order to inform strategy” says Laurence Whitlock, IT Director at Strata, who provide IT services to East Devon District Council, Exeter City Council and Teignbridge District Council.

“Although our current IT infrastructure is robust and doing the job we need it to, it was designed four years ago and when it comes to using large quantities of data to inform strategy and as we look to develop new and innovative services, such as collaboration and AI, we need to continually review the IT environment to ensure that it keeps pace with the ever increasing demands which are being made on it. Failure to invest in the underlying environment will lead to IT becoming inefficient and ineffective.”’

I think no local

authority can hold

up their hand and

say they have done

everything they

need to do.Roy Grant, Head of ICT at City of York Council

“

In summary ■ Public cloud is now the most

commonly used form of cloud computing among councils.

■ IT leaders are using public cloud to provide a platform for developing new services and deploying new technologies such as AI or machine learning to help councils plan new services.

■ The flexibility of a cloud environment allows councils to deliver change at a faster pace.

eduserv.org.uk 11

Enfield CouncilPublic cloud provides a platform

for future transformation

Case Study

Faced with the need to move out of its third-party data centre, Enfield Council chose public cloud as the main platform for its IT infrastructure. This decision has transformed how IT enables and supports the business, according to Rob Musekiwa, Senior IT Consultant at the council.

“We considered a range of options before we chose public cloud. Having looked at private, public cloud and other data centres, we decided it gave us the best value and greater flexibility.

Although the other options appeared to offer pay-as-you-go pricing, once you factored in usage requirements and other things, we didn’t have the flexibility we knew we could get.

Another important consideration was that going down the public cloud route gave us access to the major players like Azure and AWS, which offer much more than a place to put your data.

For us that means an environment which allows us to experiment with, test and scale new services. If you compare that to our previous arrangement where it used to take us weeks, if not months, to provision servers, that is a huge benefit because it improves the pace at which the council can deliver change.

Another goal was to reduce costs through the pay-as-you-go environment we get with cloud. We are now able to switch off servers that we don’t need 24/7. There are also the reduced costs of not having to look after physical servers and, of course, there is the resilience that public cloud offers.

I think it is important, however, to understand that moving to the cloud isn’t just about saving money, there is a much bigger picture and greater aspirations.

For us, the impact on the business, partners and its customers is there is now an agile IT resource which is an enabler, focused on supporting future services or growth areas such as the use of data analytics or starting to think about how to harness the technology advances such as the internet of things.

We are certainly more agile now and that makes us more aligned to the way the council needs to operate in the future. That really was our vision, our entire strategy was linked directly to enabling the business needed to meet its objectives.

We currently have around 85% of our workload in the Azure cloud and the rest is either on-premise or co-located with a partner – and there is still work to be done in getting to an optimised model which meets all of our needs in terms of digital government, however in the near term we are unlikely to go 100% to the cloud.

That is the nature of IT in councils: at the same time as you are moving forward, you have to look back and continue to evaluate what you need to change so that you give the business what it needs.

The main thing is to maintain flexibility in your infrastructure and your thinking, always being ready to adapt to meet changing business requirements.”

12

Research highlightsHow are councils running their IT?

■ 85% said IT was run and managed in-house

■ 13% outsourced the management of their IT to non-council owned commercial businesses

■ 2% outsource IT to a group of councils, a private company owned by another council, or single local authority partner.

Although much has been made in the past of the potential for local authorities to outsource IT management to third parties, our research shows that councils are, in the main, averse to handing over control of their IT. The preferred model in local government remains resolutely one of keeping IT knowledge and skills in house.

Understanding the role for ITBut as councils increase their cloud adoption and change the way they deliver on the IT needs of their organisations, every IT team now faces the need to undergo a transformation of their own. They must ensure their skills, knowledge and ways of working meet the evolving needs of the council.

An important starting point is for council IT teams to build an accurate understanding of the implications of cloud adoption for the IT function. Here the need is to overcome any misplaced assumptions or scepticism which might slow up the pace of change and ensure that thinking about the future shape of the team is grounded in the reality of what lies ahead.

“A challenge we have come up against is the perception that if we consume a service from another service provider through the cloud then it replaces our jobs,” says Gareth Pawlett, Chief Information Officer at Cheshire East Borough Council.

“It’s true that a move to the cloud means that we won’t need to do everything that goes with managing our own data centres in-house and, yes, part of our business plan is to release expensive contractors.

However, we will still need people to manage, plan and deploy IT. Any capacity that we can free up is resource we need to take the organisation forward so we can act as business partners as we undergo further change.

The role of in-house IT teams –

transformation is an imperative4

A challenge we have come

up against is the perception

that if we consume a

service from another service

provider through the cloud

then it replaces our jobs.

Gareth Pawlett, Chief Information Officer

at Cheshire East Borough Council

“

eduserv.org.uk 13

That is a really important part of where we are heading so we have made sure we have helped our staff understand that so we they can support us as far as possible as we move forward.”

Re-skilling and building new knowledge

At Enfield Council, which is further on in its adoption of cloud, giving IT staff the knowledge they need to manage the new public cloud infrastructure has enabled a new IT model to bed in successfully.

“We have certainly had to invest in developing our people. Two areas which have seen major changes are the jobs of our technical architects and for the colleagues who provided the business as usual support for servers. The people who were working on physical servers, have now been trained up to look after an Azure environment, something which has been a big change for them,” says Rob Musekiwa, Senior IT Consultant at Enfield Council.

“For the technical architects, they have to keep up with all the changes that Microsoft releases so we can find ways of improving. It’s not a case of simply saying you know everything because of the amount that they put out. Staying up-to-date and maintaining knowledge is a very demanding aspect to the job.”

According to Maryvonne Hassall of Aylesbury Vale District Council, apart from developing technical knowledge, IT teams also need to build commercial and business partnering skills to support their organisations.

“The need in our council now is to manage suppliers so we can ensure that what they have promised is delivered and getting value for money from those relationships,” says Hassell.

“Within the council there is also an ongoing need to understand the overall business direction and that when we make changes, they fit within that vision.”

In summary ■ A move away from on-premise server

and application maintenance is changing the nature of IT functions.

■ While roles will change, there will still be demand for new IT knowledge and skills in-house.

■ IT teams will need to re-skill and adapt to become trusted advisors and business partners who can effectively support the organisation with the most suitable infrastructure to support it’s needs.

The need in our council now

is to manage suppliers so we

can ensure that what they

have promised is delivered.

Maryvonne Hassell of Aylesbury Vale District Council

“

14

At Wiltshire Council, migration to cloud is changing the way the IT team supports the business and provides resources for change says Stephen Vercella, Head of ICT.

“We are in the early days of moving to cloud and the ultimate ambition is to move fully to cloud infrastructure, although that is not something we are likely to achieve in the short or medium term.

The team here is positive about the direction we are heading. I think this is partly because of the volume of the work they have to do. If you are snowed under, looking after 10 applications and one of them shifts to the cloud you are delighted because you have one less application to support.

After arriving at the council last year, it soon became apparent to me that one of the biggest challenges the organisation faces from an IT perspective, is finding the people resource we need to deliver change while at the same time maintaining the large number of legacy systems we have here.

Across my team I have 112 people. That might seem like a lot but with 700 systems to manage across two

organisations and a project list of 160, there isn’t the capacity to do what we need to do.

I don’t see us having any less people in the future, I see them working in different areas and using new skills.

Because the challenge is one of capacity and not skills, it means that in the future we will plan to resource IT in a different way.

What we had in the past was a traditional IT team which provided all the IT support the council needed, but with a fixed amount of resources.

Where we are heading now is to have a fixed set of resources to keep the lights on in our existing IT estate and then, for any new projects, it is a question of the business providing funding for that.

This will allow us to move to a more sustainable approach to IT where we can buy in the skills to match the capacity we need.”

Wiltshire CouncilCloud shift spurs transformation

in the IT team

Case Study

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Much has been made of G-Cloud as a fast and easy platform for procuring cloud services and our research shows that today, only a minority of councils say that they do not support procurement through this route to market.

According to our panel of IT leaders, engaging with different functions within the council and agreeing changes to the way they work with the IT function is a critical success factor in delivering change.

While our research shows clear evidence of procurement teams supporting IT in this way, there are other areas where systems, processes or a lack of knowledge about new models of IT provide a barrier to change.

Capex - Escaping the finance straitjacketThe most significant of these comes from the way councils budget and manage their investment in IT.

“Councils like ours who have on-premise IT will always have been funded by capital investment which is spent and then written off over a business cycle,” says Stephen Vercella, Head of ICT at Wiltshire Council.

“What you have when you move to cloud is a revenue intensive model. At a time when all our budget pressures are on revenue funding, we have a situation where it is virtually impossible to build a business case where you can move from on–premise to cloud.

The other problem is that if you want to accurately compare costs, nobody really knows the full cost of running IT in-house: I have never known a facilities team who can tell me how much our data centre costs to run, let alone are able to help with a calculation of what we might save if we moved out and sold the building. That’s a real challenge which stands in the way of change.”

Part of the solution to this challenge is for IT teams to work more closely with their finance teams so that when a business case is put forward it is based on a like-for-like cost basis.

Research highlightsTo what extent can councils procure through G-Cloud?

■ 72% of councils have a policy which supports use of G-Cloud a similar number to the 69% found in our 2016 research

■ 50% of councils which support procurement through G Cloud have a policy for cloud IT. This compares to 33% in 2016.

5 Creating an environment for change:

engaging and influencing across

the business

I have never known a facilities

team who can tell me how

much our data centre costs to

run, let alone are able to help

with a calculation of what we

might save if we moved out

and sold the building.

Stephen Vercella, Head of ICT at Wiltshire Council

“

16

Education and the art of the possibleAnother opportunity lies in doing a better job of building the case for cloud among senior leaders and elected members.

“Organisations with on-premise datacentres tend to have a habit of sweating those assets. The problem is that a complex legacy estate makes change very difficult and very costly,” says Gareth Pawlett, CIO at Cheshire East Borough Council.

“If you want innovation, fast delivery of new services and rapid change, you have to have an environment which allows you to do all of that. The job for IT is to work right across the organisation and talk to people about what we can do to enable transformation and establish a business case together which will deliver what we agree we need.”

One major factor which can help IT teams achieve this is an increasing clamour from people within councils who want much more flexibility from their IT systems.

“We see a real push from the business to have access to the tools they need for their job wherever they are: at home, working on the street or face-to-face with clients,” says Marion Sinclair, Head of Strategy and Enterprise Architecture at Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

“Of course, you need cloud solutions to do that. You also need investment in security like the multi-factor authentication we are putting in place for our cloud offerings and training so that people understand the risk of what they are doing. The demand from the business is positive but it creates challenges of its own, so an important part of the job is education.”

Working with elected membersAccording to Maryvonne Hassall at Aylesbury Vale District Council, the challenge is not only to work with the senior leadership team, but also with elected members, both of whom will have strongly held ideas about the role of IT.

“If you want to deliver IT-led change across a council, you can’t do that without working with both of these groups.

The senior leadership team are the ones who can spell out the vision for how the council will work in the future and create an environment for change which might otherwise be lacking.

The elected members will bring a range of views. However they feel about technology, it is about helping them understand that the motivation for what we are doing is based around the needs of our customers in a world which is changing rapidly.

Across the board, there also has to be an emphasis about the importance not just of keeping up but keeping ahead of what our customers need so we aren’t working in an out-of-date way.”We see a real push from

the business to have access

to the tools they need for

their job wherever they are.

Marion Sinclair, Head of Strategy and Enterprise Architecture

at Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

“In summary■ Public cloud is now the most

commonly used form of cloudcomputing among councils.

■ IT leaders are using public cloud toprovide a platform for developing newservices and deploying new technologiessuch as AI or machine learning tohelp councils plan new services.

■ The flexibility of a cloudenvironment allows councils todeliver change at a faster pace.

eduserv.org.uk 17

Hackney CouncilHackney is working to put

‘digital’ thinking at the heart

of its service strategies

Case Study

For Rob Miller, Director of ICT at Hackney Council, havinga strategy that is focused on the technology they use risks reinforcing traditional silo divides between ICT and the Council’s services. Instead, their ICT and digital team are working closely in partnership with colleagues across services to make sure that digital thinking is informing the development of their strategic priorities and they are shaping the way forward together.

“For Hackney, we are treating the adoption of cloud services as an enabler of digital service change, not simply a matter of how we manage our IT infrastructure. Adopting modern, cloud services will help us deliver better services for our borough’s residents and businesses, adapt more rapidly to changing needs, and make the most of new technology opportunities.

This will require us to work in new ways. We need to learn Agile delivery skills, including engaging with senior colleagues and elected Members to help them

understand how this will be different from the PRINCE2 projects that they are used to. We need to look at how we manage our finances, responding to the shift of spend from capital to revenue that will happen as we move to greater use of the cloud. We need to develop our technical and information governance skills so that we are managing and securing data held in cloud services robustly. And we need to learn new commercial skills to ensure that we can make the most of new UK Government frameworks through the Digital Marketplace and manage the consumption of cloud services to avoid nasty surprises when the bills arrive.

Key to using cloud services well will be making sure that our strategic approach is rooted in our service strategies. We need clear technology principles to make sure we make the right choices and can provide services that deliver for our users, but the strategy has to be service led, not focused purely on the technologies we use.”

18

This research shows that there is still some way to go before we can say that councils are truly ‘cloud first’ in the way they run and deploy IT.

At the same time, however, across local government cloud is now largely seen as the preferred IT model for the future.

It is neither a lack of understanding about how IT can benefit councils, nor concerns about the viability of cloud in their organisations which is slowing the rate of adoption - rather, a combination of legacy IT commitments, existing long-term contracts and the way finance teams budget for IT costs are constraining progress.

Use of cloud is gathering pace, and councils are adopting it in increasing numbers, with the use of hyperscale public cloud in particular playing a more significant role in council IT.

The result is that today, the majority of councils are running hybrid IT models with cloud running alongside on-premise infrastructure and legacy applications.

The biggest challenge for councils will be the need to manage this complex environment while supporting their organisation as they increase their use of cloud.

Although every council will have its own unique challenges around IT and demands from the business, it is clear that there are many issues common across local government.

Rather than coming up with individual solutions in isolation, cloud services expand the opportunities for council IT leaders

to collaborate in accelerating the move to more effective IT platforms and methods that can enable better, place-based outcomes for their citizens and communities.

Martin FergusonDirector of Policy and Research at Socitm

This research was conducted between November 2017 and February 2018.

The quantitative research is based on the responses of 373 responses received from UK councils in response to Freedom of Information Requests and was completed by January 9th 2018.

This was supplemented with qualitative interviews with nine UK councils of different sizes and deploying a representative variety of IT delivery models who we refer to as our panel of local government IT leaders.

We would like to thank the following for their contributions to this research report:

Andy Evans, Head of ICT, Middlesbrough Council.

Roy Grant, Head of IT, York City Council

Maryvonne Hassall, IT Strategy Manager, Aylesbury Vale District Council

Simon Hughes, Head of Digital, Mid Sussex District Council

Marion Sinclair, Head of Strategy and Enterprise Architecture, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Rob Miller, Director of ICT, Hackney Council

Rob Musekiwa, Senior IT Consultant, Enfield Council

Gareth Pawlett, Chief Information Officer, Cheshire East Borough Council

Omid Shiraji, Interim Chief Information Officer, London Borough of Camden

Stephen Vercella, Head of ICT, Wiltshire Council

Laurence Whitlock, Director of IT at Strata (provides IT support services to East Devon District Council, Exeter City Council and Teignbridge District Council).

Kathleen Mackey, Research and Interviews, Eduserv

Methodology

Acknowledgements

Conclusion

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