Among the many success of Swindon Borough Council in its response to the Covid-19 crisis last year were its speed of response, the willingness of staff to move from one role to a more important one and the resilience of its IT.
But, a report to members of the corporate and resources overview and scrutiny committee also said the council should learn some lessons to be better prepared.
The report by director of operations at Euclid Street Sam Mowbray said: "The council is incredibly reliant on IT – we face the risk of other sorts of potential major incidents, one of which is the risk of a cyber attack."
While the councils' technology was strong last year partly because its IT staff had spent four years making sure it would work in a crisis, Ms Mowbray said: "We are in a much
less resilient position if those assets and that infrastructure are unavailable. I am concerned that services are not considering the possibility of IT not being available within their business continuity plans. Addressing this is a key priority of the council this year."
The report says the council had been encouraging staff to use tools such as Ms Teams to allow remote working for years with little take-up - but the lockdown showed the benefit of increasing those efforts: "While previously we may have avoided pushing out new technology without thorough testing, we’ve learned that there is some benefit to just getting it out there and ironing out problems as you go along."
Another lesson is that if allowed to find the solutions, the council's staff can accomplish unexpected things: "The household waste recycling centre booking system is a good example. In the early days of that system we had a number of complaints, there weren’t sufficient slots available and there were problems with the resilience of the booking system. We stuck with it and kept improving it, using customer feedback to help us make it better. We now have a customer experience which is much better than it was before Covid."
Chairman of the committee Coun Rahul Tarar said: "It was a very good and clear report and all the members of the committee accepted its conclusions
"The Covid pandemic was an exceptional circumstance that we all faced and the next one will be something else, but it's good to know that the lessons are already being implemented post-Covid, that will mean we have a better system in place to prepare for any eventuality."
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