Dundee City Council:
a local government with 2020 vision 

The public sector – and particularly local governments – are under inexorable pressure. Day to day, these organisations have to work out how to meet the challenges posed by continued austerity and a changing society.

They’re facing cuts, which means putting greater pressure on people, processes and services. These cuts threaten to hit back office functions like ICT hard, because the focus must remain on protecting frontline services.

This budget downturn has coincided with an uplift in citizen expectations, driven by the relentless pace of technological change.

Dundee is ranked 20th in the UK for its digital hub, and its Council has an ambitious vision for the city’s future, proudly declaring its goal to be a ‘digital first’ organisation, underpinning a more digital, connected Scotland. It’s this ambition that made them perfect partners for Virgin Media Business.

They know adapting to change isn’t optional these days – it’s an imperative to survive.

They know it’s about getting real results. Every individual council transaction moved online saves between £2.40 and £7.50 for each of the 150,000 residents – money that can be saved and re-invested in frontline services. That’s the power of digital in austere times.

With an employee base of 6,000 public servants and frontline services that seep into the daily lives of 150,000 residents, adapting the Council is a formidable task. But for Lead IT officer Graeme Quinn, and his 30-strong IT team, partnering with Virgin Media Business has given them all the encouragement and foundation they need.

“The Virgin Media Business team was on hand to support us, providing guidance on more effective use of IT and – working with its partners – was able to demonstrate solutions that gave us confidence in the upgrade and the long-term viability of our digital vision, and eventual move to the cloud,” Graeme says.

“Some of our existing data centre technology was reaching end of life and as an organisation we were looking to transform our frontline services and support applications associated with flexible and efficient working patterns. All of this was set against a backdrop of budget cuts.”

Replacing servers was an absolute necessity. The Council needed to increase storage capacity across their data centre estate. They needed to be able to contract and expand on demand. And it was vital they enhance their overall connectivity and disaster recovery.

Together with our best in breed partners, we helped them migrate to high performance data centre technology – including the latest unified compute and flash storage – to reduce costs and improve productivity and resilience.

By placing technology at the centre of how the Council adapts to its new challenges and demands, they could harness its power to become more collaborative, more efficient and more secure. It was about sustainable transformation, not incremental cuts.

The collaborative approach with Dundee City Council has resulted in greater technical performance and more powerful machines, all using less space and power. Capacity across the entire infrastructure has increased and, crucially, the environment for deploying cloud-based applications and other services is now in place for the future.

Dundee City Council are adapting for the future, today. And it’s already paying dividends.