Building the foundations for Digital Transformation

At Hounslow we are well on the way with all kinds of exciting work as part of the Digital Strategy. To deliver all these great services there is a lot of work that goes on often 7 days a week by the teams that report to me, and they are the unsung heroes of the work we are doing as the work done provides the foundation for all such work. 

The numbers in terms of transactions on the systems we look after on are huge for example our new online phone system has processed over 160,000 calls since it went live December and with the last phase planned today 13th May this figure will considerably increase after this. Other highlights that show the scale we work on over the last half year: 

  • 12.2 million emails  
  • 2.2 million activities in teams – up by 27% 
  • 5.2 million files in one drive – up by 6.5% 
  • Over 500,000 files on SharePoint – up by 12% 

This is in addition to the 200 plus virtual servers the teams support both on premise and in the cloud and all the work that is needed to allow our 2400 plus colleagues to operate 24/7 including our website. 

Elections 

Since January the team have been preparing for the Elections – this has involved all the planning for the polling day, the postal vote verification at Hounslow House and then the count itself. Then this week we have been ensuring the 22 new Councillors are up and running to make what is a busy time for time as smooth as possible for their Digital access. 

Team work  

There have been a lot of changes over the last 2 years with the Digital Strategy and for me, personally, doing a Digital wide show and tell every 2 weeks with the odd quiz thrown in has pushed me out of my comfort zone but I like to think I am a total natural now! 

In the final changeover today for our phone system, we moved to a new platform to ensure the resident experience can continue to improve and we have transferred over 2500 numbers – we have had 144 queries with no major issues to report. This work has involved teams across the Council collaborating virtually for most of the time but for go live day most of us have been in the building. It has been a reminder of how much (even though the tech works really well) we can get out of doing stuff with a purpose face to face.  And of course we could not have done all this without Brucie.