Fordway's shared services help councils reduce costs and improve disaster recovery

To meet the need to reduce costs while protecting front line services, Chiltern and South Bucks District Councils agreed to work together to implement a shared services initiative. They chose Fordway to design and implement a new IT infrastructure to support the initiative using a shared platform to streamline service provision across the two councils while enabling each to maintain its own identity. Fordway has considerable experience in shared service provision for public and private sector organisations, from establishing the governance principles and shared security requirements to implementing systems, managed cloud and disaster recovery solutions.

The move to shared services has provided the two councils with massive efficiency and cost savings. Systems from parking to estate management have been combined and the running cost of IT for the two authorities is the same as Chiltern alone paid previously. As well as refreshing the infrastructure both councils have benefitted from DR failover which neither council would have been able to afford on their own. And Fordway has been able to keep both councils running without losing a day's work during massive operational and IT changes!

Sim Dixon, Head of Business Support at Chiltern DC, commented, “This has been due to two things – a good solution and the IT team that Fordway provided. Throughout the process they’ve stayed calm and just got on with the job. They’ve also been really good at skills transfer, so I know my team will be able to handle everything on their own when the project is completed.”

For more information on the this project, download the case study.