Bracknell Forest Borough Council

Bracknell Forest Council have an ICT strategy that is current, business driven and actively being pursued – but it has been written in isolation from the ICT strategies of other local authorities locally and throughout the country. Because of the relative isolation of ICT organisations within the local authority space and the historical pursuit of isolated strategies, opportunities are missed for group sourcing of solutions, authorities working together on common issues and projects, authorities providing data on business transformation activity in a multiple authority and accurately measurable way. In other words, authorities can’t benefit from group purchasing, cannot benefit from learning from each other and working together, cannot effectively compare themselves against other authorities because of a lack of cohesion from a strategic point of view.

There is a great opportunity to develop a platform where local authorities could develop common ICT strategies and share them with other authorities. The platform would provide a template for the strategies and allow authorities to use classic examples against each strategic work stream, have a common format when approaching potential suppliers with a set of requirements, allow complete alignment across multiple authorities for collaborative working, potentially also allow authorities to track progress against strategic goals – and also to share data centrally with the government.