Agenda item

Linda Roberts introduced the report for members and went through some key points and KPI’s and welcomed questions from the committee.

Councillor Adeleke referred to the sickness scrutiny committee and asked how this was made up and if there is any medical opinion in this committee.

Linda Roberts explained that when they are going through particular investigations they request occupational health and any medical assessments and those reports would be presented to those to review, she said they don’t actually have the medical people in there as they wouldn’t require that level of detail, the reports are sufficient to understand where things started, where they are finishing.

Councillor Mahmood referred to the risks with the ICT, computing and internet these days to carry out our function. He said he had looked at the risk of things going wrong and the mitigating risk going down to amber, he asked if they’ll be putting anything in place to guard against a big IT failure.

Ben Trueman explained that they take every opportunity to make the systems as resilient as possible, he said for example we have diverse phone lines so if one gets cut between one of the primary sites and the data centres we have a secondary line, he said they have also build into the data centres virtualizes servers rather than dozens of individual servers so if one of them fails it immediate will fall to another virtualized server. He said at every layer of technology they have built in resilience as much as possible and that as a final sanctuary they have disaster recovery and they have a separate disaster recovery data centre which is quite a lot of work to bring that up so not something we want to do unnecessarily so as much as we can we frontload resilience into our system. He added they are looking more at cloud technology which lifts a lot of dependency from the systems and we make use of the resilience that our suppliers, and especially people like Microsoft have got built in to their offerings.

Nigel Howcutt added that we also have an audit for cyber security, business continuity and disaster recovery. He said they give us an independent viewpoint on how well things are working or any areas for improvement, this ensures they are doing things the right way.

Councillor Mahmood noted that there doesn’t seem to be pressures & budgets for ICT and that he could see.

Nigel Howcutt responded that they are looking at budgets for both lockdown and normal times, the budget setting for next year makes sure the capital programme supports the need for ICT and that the revenue support provided is enough for new licences and they have new licences, as Ben Trueman mentioned for the cloud technology and that is increasing the ICT budget. He said that they will also add the reserve to cover any short term instances.

Councillor Mahmood asked if as we are all at home could we have a ticker on the website providing regular updates on things that are happening, somewhere where residents can go to see what’s happening.

Ben Trueman explained that tickers are quite unfriendly to the kind of adaptive technology that is used. He said they can work with the Comms team and look at the nature of the content on the website however on the whole comms manage the content and ICT manage the technical side of things.

Outcome:

The report was noted.