Firstly I’ll introduce myself, I’m Pete Card and I’m the Service Delivery Director at Luton Borough Council looking after the Service Operations within DDaT. I used to head up the Civica team when the service was outsourced but I transferred with the Civica team at the beginning of September last year and joined the Council’s DDaT team. There could be whole blog post about the insourcing, but I’ll save that for another day!
My team are responsible for the day to day operational service provided by DDaT. We cover Server Infrastructure, Network, Desktop, Application and Service Desk so never a dull moment!
Along with the rest of the Senior Leadership Team for DDaT, we recently visited Hackney Council where we were hosted by Opama Khan and some of her team (picture of Opama with her old pal our boss Atika). It was really good to share experiences and challenges with both teams facing similar issues even if we are a smaller Authority and team than Hackney. It was interesting to listen to their experiences of having moved their service to AWS Cloud as we did last year look at moving to Azure as an option as we had to refresh our server infrastructure. Due to timescales and cost we decided to refresh are on prem infrastructure as we were also in the midst of planning the return of the service to Luton and having to plan our separation from the Civica infrastructure. Since the visit, my colleague Donna (Luton’s DPO) has built a good relationship with James Scott, the DPO at Hackney, who has already been really helpful with a number of ideas for improvement, including an AI tool for redaction we are now looking at. Its great to see how supportive the local gov network is!
We are currently building our roadmaps for the year to feed into our Service Plan. For my team this is focused heavily on Network refresh activity, Server 2016 and SQL 2016 replacements and also a laptop refresh. We have now hit the 5 year point from when Covid forced a mass roll out of devices to support home working for the Luton Officers so we have 1000+ devices to refresh this year. This has given us the opportunity to review our laptop specifications to ensure we have the optimal configs for the roles and to ensure that we have cost effective devices. All the time when looking at our work plans we are ensuring that the activity that we undertake is supporting our Luton 2040 vision and whilst the work that my team do doesn’t directly push for our Digital and Data plans, it does lay the foundation for all our future plans.
This was just a brief update on some of the activities that the Service Operations team are working on currently, we have a very busy year ahead!