Lambeth maps future with cloud applications

Lambeth Council has been modernising its business applications environment over the past few years, against the background of cost pressure, Covid, and now the rising cost of living crisis.

With a long history as a progressive borough, even a militant one, Lambeth has a culturally diverse population that has been economically under the cosh for many years. It has almost 330,000 inhabitants, is just over 10 square miles in size, and was known as a landing place for lambs in the Middle Ages, hence the name.

Hamant Bharadia, assistant director of finance at Lambeth Council, says it has learned to do more with less, and, in relation to IT, has pursued a cloud strategy that involves Oracle and Microsoft technology.

Lambeth Council became the first UK public sector body to adopt Oracle’s suite of business applications in the cloud, in 2018.

Bharadia says, in a video on an Oracle web page: “We are a £1bn business, with 3,000 staff providing 700-800 services to our businesses, residents and wider community. Over the last 10 years, our funding has reduced by 50%, about £250m. But the demand for our services has not changed and has become more complex.

“The reasons for the move to the cloud were to have a simpler and easier solution, to have nimble, anywhere, anytime access. That is critical for us.”

Lambeth has a long-standing relationship with Oracle, and was one of six London councils in a multi-year Oracle shared services partnership that started in 2012, and ran until March 2018.

Bharadia tells Computer Weekly that when it was looking, in 2017, at moving its applications to the cloud, Oracle came out ahead of SAP in terms of breadth and depth of functionality, especially in relation to financials, while Workday was still in its infancy at that time. There was also continuity in respect of the previous joint customer relationship with the other London councils, namely Barking and Dagenham, Brent, Lewisham, Havering and Croydon.

“The reasons for the move to the cloud were to have a simpler and easier solution, to have nimble, anywhere, anytime access. That is critical for us”

Hamant Bharadia, Lambeth Council

Bharadia has worked for the council for 32 years, and recalls having the ICL system, Lafis (Local Authority Financial Information System), as well as the shared Oracle partnership. “That [the latter] had its challenges – getting everybody to agree to the right kind of format, specifications, processes. We managed it, but it came to end of life.

“At that point, we’d already committed, as an organisation, that our future lay in the cloud primarily. We couldn’t justify occupying central London property to store databases. [The other dr was about flexibility of working.”

The intention was to reduce the council’s property estate and get staff working flexibly, with a view that “data can be accessible from anywhere”.