Purpose

Approval required from the Director of Strategy & Resources to incur expenditure of £10,665k on the 2024/25 IDS Digital Scheme which includes the specialist resources (internal and external) to commission and implement these services.

Decision

The Director Strategy and Resources has given approval to incur capital expenditure of £10,665k as follows:

·  Scheme 33407/000/000. £5,415k essential corporate ICT infrastructure upgrades (ESP) for 2024/25.

·  Scheme 33374/000/000. £5,250k consisting of essential work required to the Council’s key business applications to ensure they are up to date and compliant and to fund Digital Efficiencies. This includes investments to ensure compliancy for GDPR and PSN.  This significant investment in the Cyber agenda will help ensure that the ongoing threat to our information and systems is minimised. Expenditure will allow the council to retire and replace end of life and non-compliant critical corporate reporting capabilities. It will also allow the council to have a planned programme of application consolidation, refresh and retirement which will afford the potential for financial savings in hardware, software, support and maintenance costs and will keep the estate compliant.

This expenditure includes the engagement of specialist internal and external resources and the associated project management to implement this scheme.