SAPinsider Technology Executive Forum Issue 1 2021

delivered savings in the service level agreement (SLA) provision to the authority. Nottinghamshire County Council also decided not to move SAP onto the Microsoft Azure cloud hosting service as part of a data center upgrade that took place recently in partnership with CGI. With changes expected to take place in the coming years in the way the county of Nottinghamshire is governed, the senior leadership team had to make a decision about whether to continue to sweat the existing SAP tech- nology or carry out an upgrade and hope it worked for any changes in the structure of the council. “As a county council, you buy something that you know will work,” says Davies of the security local government bodies gain from tried and tested technologies. The UK is not alone in modernizing the way local governments operate, and the impact of the global pandemic will place increased pressure on local authorities across the world to achieve operational savings so they can deliver more to their citizens. As a result, local government CIOs and major tech- nology providers will be challenged to ensure the applications and services selected and implemented are adaptable to meet the new and sometimes demanding needs of local government. Davies has worked for a number of local government bodies during his career and says many government orga- nizations don’t use all the functionality a platform like SAP offers, possibly leading to the full value of a tool not being realized. Coping with and Beyond COVID-19 Technology teams in all organizations were chal- lenged and proved their worth during the global pandemic. Davies, who had only just joined Nottinghamshire, says the technology team expe- rienced some network challenges during the first week of the national lockdown in the UK. “We hadn’t rolled out Microsoft Teams fully and even a week before I said let's just roll it out, but we did not. Then the pandemic came, and in five days Teams was rolled out, and nobody needed any training.” Davies' story is a common one from the pandemic as workforces rapidly adapted to new technologies at their homes in order to deliver their workloads. “I have always believed that data holds the answer; any solution without data is just an opinion.” —Mark Davies SAPinsiderOnline.com 45