Posted on 01st July 2012
Mansfield District Council implements a new enterprise-wide IT system from Integrated Business Software and Solutions
Like many other Local Authorities and Government Agencies across the UK, Mansfield District Council is having to work hard to make significant cost savings while maintaining high levels of service. It is a region where the political landscape changes regularly, which creates its own challenges. To help meet and overcome these challenges, the Council has implemented a new enterprise-wide IT system from Capita IB Solutions that, according to Eve Szubert, Mansfield District Council’s Financial Services Manager, is “…far superior to the capabilities of our previous system.”
The district of Mansfield is a largely urban area, situated in the north west of Nottinghamshire and populated by around 100,000 residents. It is the only local authority area in the county to have a directly elected Mayor, who gives Mansfield strong democratic leadership and who has direct engagement with the local people.
From an IT perspective, the Council had been running a UNIX-based system since the 1980s. The Ingres Database became unsupported, and by 2010 the system was less fit for purpose and becoming heavily reliant on spreadsheets and other databases.
Linda Miller, Mansfield District Council’s Financial Information Systems Manager, explains, “In 2009, we carried out a detailed independent financial systems review, which included interviews with lots of people throughout the Council to determine how they use the systems and what improvements they wanted. This review produced an extensive document, detailing everything we needed in order to optimise our financial systems.”
She continues, “Amongst many other requirements, the report identified that the Council wanted to have a much more flexible working environment, with more hot-desking and remote/home working.
Our previous system was very terminal-based and simply could not provide the solution we wanted moving forward. There were too many weaknesses in the system, particularly around procurement, a lack of workflow and cumbersome, inflexible reporting.
As we were heavily reliant on spreadsheets, this meant that we had very little integration across the Council and we also needed to phase out the hardware platforms.”
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