South Wales Evening Post - 3 March 2007
So now we know: Swansea Council's response to the collapse of its grandiose plan for a revolutionary IT system is - to change the name of the project.
"We are dropping the name Service@Swansea," cabinet member for eGovernment Mary Jones has announced.
"The new system will not be called that and we have three alternatives that we are looking at."
I may be wrong, but I have a sneaky feeling that changing the name outside the one-stop shop is not going to be enough to salvage this shambles.
The whole sorry saga of the council's fumbling adventure in the fairytale world of eGovernment has dragged wearily on for so long, it may be instructive to remind ourselves of the story so far.
We begin, dear reader, with the optimistic announcement in July 2004 of plans for a new one-stop shop, email and telephone service. We were promised that, by 2006, we would be enjoying the benefits of a new call centre where, no doubt with a sprinkling of magic dust, 80 per cent of our council inquiries would be resolved.
There was more. Satellite centres would be rolled out to communities like Morriston, Penlan and Bonymaen, where people could pop in on their way home from work to request services or pay bills.
There would be a cost attached to all of this, of course, but we were assured that savings, made by reducing duplication and improving efficiency, would be ploughed back into other services.
By July 2005, a 150-seat call centre would be based at a revamped County Hall.
But by the end of that year, the call centre had still not appeared and we were told it was no longer part of the first phase of the council's plans.
A new website and automated complaints handling service was also suddenly on the back burner.
The warnings that something was rotten in Service@Swansea began to grow louder.
"The council will be paying millions to have the same people sat at the same desks in County Hall providing the same service but through a private company," one source told this newspaper.
"Nothing else is affordable."
As the old year ended and 2006 came in, contract discussions with that private company, Capgemini, stalled, delaying the introduction of the new computer system needed to back up Service@Swansea .
At this vital stage, the main architect of the scheme, council chief executive Tim Thorogood, departed from the scene after a planning row over his Gower home.
By then, the estimated cost of the project had soared to £170 million. The council had gone cap in hand to the Assembly to ask for a loan of £14 million, amid growing concern that the scheme had turned into a black hole that was sucking staff and resources out of other services.
By April that year, it was revealed that the final cost was still unknown, and plans for the second phase of the project were scaled down dramatically. The call centre, which had been at the heart of the original project, was now under threat because of spiralling costs.
Despite these funding fears, Capgemini was insisting "there is still a business case for Service@Swansea" . Not with Capgemini, there wasn't. The council scrapped their involvement.
The estimated savings were scaled back from up to £50 million to £26 million. Even then, only £7.4 million had been identified thus far.Finally the council bit the bullet. Its multi-million project was dropped in favour of buying a £1 million software package from Cardiff Council.
There will be no call centre; instead, we are told we will have to "rely" on face-to-face meetings with staff at the County Hall customer centre. So, it's not all bad news then.
And as for that change of name: how about OffTheShelf@Cardiff?
