Westminster City Council CIO role 'to be deleted' as part of revised Tri-Borough shared services strategy

New proposals suggest Tri-borough can make savings of £6.55m a year

Westminster City Council's CIO role is "to be deleted" as part of a revised ICT strategy at London's Tri-borough partnership of councils.

Ben Goward is currently acting as interim CIO at the council.

The Tri-borough partnership, which involves Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, and Hammersmith and Fulham councils, began after the three authorities signed an IT shared services deal back in December 2013.

The partnership has undergone several tweaks since it was first introduced including establishing Ed Garcez as the CIO of the overall function. But the latest operating model will see the implementation of a shared ICT services function because of the "disconnect between the three sovereign ICT functions".

According to the Tri-borough, the function will ensure a more cohesive approach, and will ultimately deliver value for money, including annual savings of £6.55m from 2017/18.

In a document that details the recommended changes by Hammersmith and FulhamCouncil, the borough states that the following posts will be ‘deleted' with effect from 1 April 2015:

Chief Information Officer - Westminster
Director for Procurement and IT Strategy - Hammersmith
Head of Information Systems Division - Kensington
Head of Business Technology- Hammersmith
Head of IS Strategy - Westminster

It states that the following new posts will make up the shared IT service divisional leadership team:

Head of Business Partnering
Head of Digital Services
Head of Information Management
Head of Operations
Head of ICT Portfolio Management
Head of Strategy and Enterprise Architecture

And that two other posts (four strategic relationship managers and one problem manager) will also be created with effect from 1 April 2015.

The estimated cost of implementing the new IT strategy is £143,000 in total, with change management costing each council £35,000.

According to the borough, the proposed model has been designed to be "inclusive and easy to extend to further partners". It claims that there have already been some successes in establishing wider shared services and joint working.

Its examples include a shared service with Kensington & Chelsea, Kingston, Lambeth, Sutton and Westminster to deliver a mobile device security solution and "flexible and inclusive framework contracts accessible to a wide range of partners, with Islington already consuming services under the framework".