The client is very safety-conscious, which results in a lot of resistance to change – we know what we do now is safe, and anything different represents a risk. This manifests in ICT – the attitude “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” means that servers, operating systems, networking equipment, databases and apps were all difficult to maintain, and cyber security had to provide extra layers of protection because the apps and systems had less provision of their own.

I wasn’t so much given the task as took it on myself. I needed to demonstrate to the business what the cost was of running services and apps on ICT that was getting old. I needed to change an attitude that was innovative in other areas but not in ICT, that had already tried to halve the ICT budget (around £120m at the time) because they said it didn’t match national averages (I demonstrated at the time that it was close to the average for our industry sector at about 3% – construction – which is twice the national average of 1.5%), and that was suspicious of any spend in areas that they didn’t understand.

I brought together stakeholders to find a source of information that would be both convincing (stand up to challenge) and compelling (get the investment). In the end I found reports from the helpdesk (via QlickView) showed what was happening.

The organisation was losing around 4 million working hours per year due to unplanned downtime on Priority 1 calls on Line of Business apps (ie where the person affected could not be productive because the outage was critical to their work).  Multiplied by the combined average hourly cost per worker this worked out at around £240 million per year.

• before circulating this result, we challenged it extensively and mercilessly to ensure it stood up to scrutiny and we had practiced responses – a lot like preparing to meet the press over a sensitive subject
• we didn’t break it down by app, since the aim was to get an overall project to replace everything old, not to target specific apps and networking equipment leaving a headache for the future
• with the size of the problem and the evidence, we changed attitudes by rumour and report rather than by writing a formal business case – since the return on investment would appear to be unbelievably good if it was in a business case

Within 5 months of the finding, ICT was ordered to replace everything and given autonomy to do so. Servers were virtualised and a new data centre built, replacement networking equipment obtained and a process of installing WiFi begun (it’s held up because of supply chain from Ukraine since the illegal invasion by Russia), up to date operating systems, databases and apps to replace outdated apps are all part of the programme for replacing legacy equipment.

The ICT budget has grown to £138m and the business is confident that ICT knows what it’s doing even if the rest of the business doesn’t understand. This means that the business supports innovation coming out of ICT and works harder to drive the changes in processes and behaviours necessary to realise benefits from the change.

• Benefits Management
• Business Change Management & Communication
• Behavioural Change
• technology leadership

• Purpose to Portfolio

• Government and Public Services
• Engineering and Construction