Craig Barker

One of the less visible challenges of Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) was what to do about customer telephony and contact centres.

On paper, consolidating contact centres into a single operation might sound like the obvious answer. In reality, it wasn't a day one requirement, and the operational services themselves hadn't yet been harmonised. Different teams were still working in different ways, supporting different processes, and in some cases delivering services differently across the legacy authorities.

In the last few days I’ve seen some encouraging posts about collaboration and sharing across local government, and Will Callaghan who is an expert in this area is pulling together a register of 'Software Partnerships'. The latest addition is VIPER, which has prompted a bit of reflection.

Over the last two days, the Digital team has hosted nine T Level students from Carlisle College, marking the end of their first week on placement with us. The students are studying Digital Support Services: with Cyber Security, and earlier in the week they spent time with colleagues across our Cyber and Information Security, and our Infrastructure teams, gaining first-hand experience of the operational side of council technology.