South Lanarkshire Council joins forces with Computacenter Scotland

South Lanarkshire Council has signed an £11 million contract with Computacenter Scotland to help enhance its IT systems and services.

Under the seven-year deal, Computacenter will provide a range of desktop-related services to the council, which will aid improved service delivery for staff.

South Lanarkshire is one of the country’s largest local authorities, providing services to 307,000 people in central and southern Scotland and employing nearly 16,000 people.

Jill Ashcroft, Services Delivery Manager for South Lanarkshire Council, commented: “Desktops are more and more becoming an integral part of most office-based work at the Council, and play a critical role in providing and supporting the services we deliver to our customers. It is therefore essential that our desktop infrastructure is efficient and cost-effective to manage. The contract with Computacenter will enable us to take our desktop infrastructure to the next level, and improve both cost management and performance.”

Under the managed services contract, Computacenter will become responsible for the entire lifecycle of the council’s 5,000 desktops, laptops and printers from procurement and installation to routine maintenance and disposal.

Andy Purvis, Director of Computacenter Scotland, commented: “The managed services model is becoming increasingly popular for local government organisations as it enables them to retain control of their IT strategy while also gaining access to additional expertise and resources. IT transformation is a massive priority for the public sector, as technology – especially the Internet – is becoming increasingly important to the successful delivery of local government services.”

Recent research conducted by Computacenter revealed that more than 95% of public sector organisations rated IT infrastructure transformation of great or moderate interest.

Transformation will form a key part of South Lanarkshire’s new managed services contract, and will include the implementation of a structured service improvement programme.

“Managing such a distributed desktop estate can be extremely challenging, and we will be looking at various initiatives, such as pre-imaging and security patch management, to help reduce both costs and complexity,” said Ashcroft. “The contract with Computacenter enables us to take a more structured approach to IT service delivery, and make greater use of best practice in service management as detailed in the Office of Government Commerce ITIL [IT Infrastructure Library] approach. As a result we will be able to deliver a range of business benefits to the council and our end users, and add value to our desktop services.”

The contract with Computacenter, which will run until July 2011 with a three-year option to extend, replaces a previous agreement with another IT provider.