Yesterday, Tony Newton, Secretary of State for Social Security, effectively announced one of the biggest facilities management operations in the UK by launching the Information Technology Services Agency. This move is in line with the Government’s Next Steps initiative for streamlining the Civil Service. The Services Agency develops and runs the computer and telecommunications systems for the Department of Social Security’s locations throughout the UK. It currently employs about 3,000 staff and for the financial year 1990 to 1991 has a budget of UKP370m. Now that the Department’s information technology services has agency status it will have a greater amount of autonomy and will be managed by its chief executive, John Kenworthy. It will be able to authorise capital projects up to UKP1m and will have the authority to reinvest a proportion of its efficency savings. The Agency is looking for a 5.5% efficiency gain in its first year of operation and Kenworthy says that this will be attained by delivering its services to time and to budget – for which staff will be entitled to a bonus scheme. All current staff employed by the Agency will remain civil servants and their contracts of employment will be protected, but Kenworthy is firm in his resolve that his employees will be moving away from the bureaucratic culture of the Department. He denied that new staff would be offered higher wages as the National Association of Local Government Officers fears, but added that they would be given short-term contracts. The Agency is in charge of the computerisation of social security benefits. The planned system will link 500 Department of Social Security offices and 900 unemployment benefit offices to four processing centres connected by a packet switched network using Open Systems protocols. To get this system in place the Agency is pursuing an Operational Strategy linking various projects together which constitutes one of the largest civil government computerisation programmes in Europe. The end result will be a system with 42 dual-node ICL Series 39 Level 80 configurations each with FDS5000 disk storage, VME operating systems, TPMS transaction processing software and IDMS-X databases, running applications written in Cobol using ICL’s Data Dictionary System and in-house programmer’s workbench. The network will be entirely X25 with local offices being networked via British Telecom and through Racal’s Government Data Network. The terminal system is based on ITL minicomputers and Newbury Data terminals with the systems integration coming from British Telecom Applied Technology. Local networks will be linked using 802.3 Ethernet protocols. Service management information for the network is held on an Ingres database which will be 8Gb in size when the strategy is complete. This system is now being piloted on a client-server architecture using Unix front-ends with a database server running on an ICL 39/80 using SQL protocols. Newton also took the opportunity to establish the National Insurance Contributions Unit which attain Agency status from April 1991, specialising in National Insurance collection and the maintenance of 56m accounts.
