UV IT Annual Statement
Financial year 1st April 2010 to 31st March 2011

ContentsPage

1.Executive Summary

2.The Urban Vision IT Team

3.Business Continuity

4.Ordnance Survey responsibilities

5.Graphical Information Systems (GIS)

6.AutoCAD

7.ESRI – A GIS software package used by Salford

8.GGP - What is it and what are our responsibilities

9.Planning

10.Highway records (CONFIRM system)

11.Property records

12.Customer complaints

13.Freedom of information

14.Investment

15.Efficiencies and improvement

16.Future Developments

1.Executive Summary

1.1The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of the ICT support provided by Urban Vision and to describe the relationships between Urban Vision, Salford City Council and Capita Symonds from an ICT perspective.

1.2The IT team manage a number of critical systems on behalf of the Council and these are detailed in this report. These systems support a number of key services including Planning, Highways and Property management.

1.3Prior to the formation of Urban Vision, the ‘Development Services’ Directorate was an integral part of Salford City Council. The computer systems for that Directorate, and the IT team that supported them, were situated at the Civic Centre campus. There was no dedicated server room for the Directorate and the servers were generally located in uncontrolled areas such as on floors and under desks.

1.4With the inception of Urban Vision Partnership in January 2005, plans were developed to move the seconded staff. The moves were planned in stages over a period of a month, with IT providing the installs over consecutive weekends.

1.5The server’s were moved to a dedicated new server-room at Emerson House and placed in a secure environment in purpose built racks.

1.6Areas of responsibilities- The work of the Urban Vision ICT team can be categorised into four main areas:

  • Infrastructure/security/e-mail/telephony (Urban Vision staff only)
  • Help desk and support.
  • System support involving upgrades and data management
  • Support for third party clients such as Salix Homes, The Urban Regeneration Company, City West and the Emergency Planning Team.

1.7Since the inception of Urban Vision, Capita Symonds has invested considerable resource and expenditure in order to develop both the IT infrastructure, and the portfolio of services it offers.

1.8Urban Vision has had some challenges around the provision of its IT network, notably for providing access to both Salford City Council employees and Capita Symonds employees. To facilitate this the IT team, in conjunction with Salford City Council and Capita, have designed and implemented a new infrastructure that uses the resources and potential of both Salford City Council and Capita to bring about a mutually beneficial structure that is able to support Urban Vision whilst being fully interoperable with Salford City Council, Capita and other 3rd parties.

2. The Urban Vision IT Team

2.1Urban Vision has an IT Team of sixstaff with a diverse range of experience and knowledge. The team provide support for Urban Vision users based at Emerson House, Swinton Hall Road Depot, Salford Civic Centre and outstationed personnel.

2.2The Urban Vision IT team support a number of users and Directors across the City including colleagues in the Sustainable Regeneration Directorate.

2.3In addition, the team provide support to external clients such as Salix Homes, City West Housing Trust, and before 31st March, 2011, The Central Salford Urban Regeneration Company.

2.4There are around 420 users based at Emerson House, including 30 or so Capita Staff, for whom we also provide localised support to for hardware and software.

2.5Since April 2010 users are able to log support calls via Capita Firstpoint Helpdesk ( by phone, by email or online).

2.6In terms of support this comes in the form of managing the users Operating Systems, Hardware and Software and the software supported includes the following :-

  • Microsoft Operating Systems ( Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7)
  • Microsoft Office Application Suite ( Office 2000, Office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2010)
  • Autocad 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 & Autocad Add-ons
  • Autodesk Revit Architecture, Autodesk 3d Studio Max
  • GGP GIS
  • ESRI GIS
  • Confirm Highways System
  • Bespoke In-house Systems support
  • Uniform Planning System
  • SAP System Support
  • Ebydos System Support
  • Capita Desktop
  • Specialist Design Packages such as In Design, Dreamweaver CS4, Photoshop, Adobe Bridge, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Acrobat Professional, Adobe Creative Suite.
  • Cotag Badge System ( Badge Security System for controlling Salford Sites access and monitoring).

2.7There are a total of 23 servers located in Urban Vision ( 17 windows servers and 6 linux based servers), these servers house the majority of the systems which are used by Urban Vision and some by Salford Council, including :-

  • Uniform Planning System
  • Highways Confirm System
  • Highways Geoworks System
  • Public Access System linking to Uniform Planning System
  • Legacy bespoke In-house systems ( Salford Assets, GMP Assets, City West Assets, RTB System etc)
  • Group and Department servers housing shared company data
  • Realise System
  • Mastec System
  • Print Servers managing users print job to networked printers
  • Engineering Projects folders for current and archived Projects.
  • Internet Proxy Server for Urban Vision allowing users to access internet via Capita Symonds.

2.8The Urban Vision IT team is alsoresponsible for the following activities:

  • Maintenance of hardware (file servers) – daily house-keeping, updates, backups, restores, log-checks
  • Configuration of hardware (file servers and workstations)
  • Setting up shares
  • Setting up and managing local security groups
  • Maintaining records of users
  • Managing user space
  • Setting up PDA devices for mobile working
  • Installation of software
  • Upgrade of software
  • Configuration of software
  • Providing technical information to aid the purchase and upgrade of hardware and software.
  • Various levels of training in the use of software used within the company.

3.Business Continuity

3.1Urban Vision is committed to ensuring business continuity through pro-active infrastructure design and testing.

3.2As part of this commitment, Urban Vision IT is in the process of implementing and testing data recovery infrastructure and procedures over the next few months. This is being done with considerable investment from Capita Symonds and by using the skills and experience of the local IT team, and involves the use of a pre-configured, mobile data centre.

3.3Additionally, Urban Vision have developed a mirrored, fully-resilient, tape-less storage solution, split across two remote sites, that provides both backup & restore capability as well as ‘hot’ DR restore point, should it become necessary.

3.4The IT infrastructure has been fluid and dynamic since 2005, and developments, improvements and changes continue, in order to provide the best possible service whilst realising efficiencies and expanding its potential. Since moving away from Salford City Council, many best-practice policies have been employed by Urban Vision from Capita including; Change Control, Licence pooling, laptop encryption, client & server monitoring, asset management & inventory control, hardware standardisation, build-documentation control, removable storage encryption.

3.5New Server room dedicated for the placement of UV Servers in tailor-made server cabinets :-

  • Access controlled room via Cotag Badge Reader, restricted to IT Personnel only.
  • Dedicated Uninterruptable Power Supplies for each cabinet.
  • The power supplied to the cabinets was also a dedicated 3 phase supply from the main building.
  • Circuit Breaker Box located in Server Room.
  • Each phase power would supply to 2 cabinets each. With a total of 6 cabinets.
  • Fully air conditioned with 2 dedicated air cooler units, providing resilience and fail-over
  • Proper IT Installation Workbenches within server room, to allow for pc equipment builds, upgrades and repairs

3.6At least 2, dual-fed, 48 port switches for all network sockets on each floor, allowing for failures an any given switch and still have network connectivity to the floor.

3.7The added benefit of 2 Cisco Wireless Access Points per floor, allowing laptop users the freedom of wireless networking, both at Emerson House and the depot. Again any single failure would not affect the wireless operation.

3.8Filtered Mains sockets supplying power to each set of 6 desks, protecting .from mains spikes and minor interruptions

3.9A Number of new consolidation servers were purchased in 2007, to alleviate space issues / out of warranty servers. These new servers allowed the movement of data from a number of older servers, thus allowing the decommissioning of many older servers that were out of support and warranty and represented risks in both reliability and security.

3.10Implementation of Robotic Storage Devices on these 2 servers, to allow the automated backup of large amounts of data quickly to allow for adequate, regular off-site storage via he implementation of a full backup strategy allowing daily tape rotation and Weekly/Monthly off-site storage (located at Burrows House).

3.11With the continuing trend of buying additional IT infrastructure for Urban Vision, another 2 consolidation servers were purchased in 2011, allowing the migration of data/systems from a number of other older servers, providing increased performance and reliability and resilience as well as additional storage. - (still in progress)

3.12In July 2010, a major change was made to the network infrastructure at Urban Vision- Emerson House and the Swinton Hall Rd Depot, this involved making them into a more resilient MPLS (Multi Protocol Layered Switching) network configuration. This allowed us to implement our own Network Addressing for Emerson House and the Depot. Giving us greater reliability, more control over our own network and access to our network switches. This change also meant that UV was less susceptible to outages and IT issues at the civic centre, of which there have been many.

3.13We also now have a dedicated Firewall (with redundant, hot-swap backup) which provides security between UV – SCC , UV – CAPITA and UV – External (For our webhosting servers).

3.14Many improvements have been made on the network side (with the use of an OU (Organisational Unit), Sub tree of Salford’s COS Domain), which allows Urban Vision to execute login scripts on our PC’s when logging into the Salford Domain. Software rollouts can be automated, as well as automated scripts for fixes that can be centrally maintained. We also have an inventory management system (designed in-house) which allows us to maintain/audit/support our PC’s. This is both internal and external - for home workers (via VPN across Salford’s Network).

3.15Moving forward, we plan to continue migrating the few remaining old servers data to the recently purchased consolidation servers. This will also allow us enough capacity to grow for the medium-to-long term.

3.16Urban Vision is committed to ensuring business continuity through pro-active infrastructure design and testing.

3.17Additionally, Urban Vision have developed a mirrored, fully-resilient, tape-less storage solution, split across two remote sites, that provides both backup & restore capability as well as ‘hot’ DR restore point, should it become necessary.

4.Ordnance Survey responsibilities

4.1Introduction

A vast quantity of information held by Urban Vision on behalf of Salford City Council is map based, examples are the highway adoption records and the land ownership records held on the Councils terrier database.A number of systems used by Urban Vision and Salford City Council are dependent on up to date maps and these are discussed in a separate section of this report.

All Council’s are dependent on Ordnance Survey to provide up to date maps to enable the Council Directorates to maintain accurate records and its Urban Vision responsibility, on behalf of Salford, to receive and update the Council’s maps on a regular basis.

The maps are received from Ordnance Survey in a single format, these need to be translated into information that the various map based systems (GIS) across the Directorates can interpret.

It is the role of officers within Urban Vision to undertake this Ordnance Survey liaison role and ensure that the entire map based information is current and accessible to all the mapping software across the City. Access right to the information needs to be protected and Urban Vision mange the access rights to this sensitive data.

4.2Background and history

In 2005 the city council entered into the Mapping Services Agreement (MSA) that allows the authority to use the various mapping products as defined in the MSA. The fee includes copyright/royalty payments for the use of the data in reports, publications and use on the intranet/internet etc.

The MSA is managed by Urban Vision on behalf of the City Council by Keith Walker who is the Authority Liaison Officer and Nigel Snell who is a Senior IT officer.

The authority is required to have an Authority Liaison Officer whose role and responsibilities are defined below.

4.3Existing commitment 2010/11.

Provider / Description / Cost / Cost centre
Local Government Information House / Mapping Service Agreement - The LGIH/ IDeA covers costs to supply InterMap and Intelligent Addressing / £10,518.68 / D5006
Ordnance Survey / Royal Mail PAF Royalities for Web Charge / £3,750.00 / D5006
Ordnance Survey / Mapping Service Agreement Fee / £51,131.83 / D5006
Ordnance Survey / OSMM Imagery Layer Data / £570.00 / D5006
Total / 65,970.51

4.4Role and responsibilities of the Authority Liaison Officer.

The Authority shall be required to appoint, following consultation with LGIH, an Authority Liaison Officer who shall be the principal point of contact in the Authority for the Service Provider and shall be responsible for specifying to the Service Provider the requirements of the Authority. The Service Provider shall not be obliged to deliver Mapping and/or Data Products and/or Services unless an Authority Liaison Officer has been appointed by the Authority.

The Authority Liaison Officer shall have the responsibility for completing the Order Form and, where appropriate, agreeing the format and media of the Mappings and/or Data Products and/or Services to be delivered to the Authority. They shall also, using reasonable endeavours, be responsible for the Authority’s compliance with the terms of this Service Provider Agreement. An Authority Liaison Officer (ALO) shall be responsible for requesting either Standard or Additional Services.

4.5Other duties carried out by the Authority Liaison Officer.

The MSA also requires the authority to maintain a Local Street Gazetteer (LSG) and Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) and to upload them to the National Street Gazetteer and National Street Gazetteer hubs.

As the council is using LLPG data on their website for address searches this incurs additional Royal Mail royalty charges for the use of the Post Office Address File (PAF). The ALO must complete an annual return via the Ordnance Survey for the assessment and payment of the PAF royalties and ensure payment of the annual licence fee to Landmark for the use of historical mapping data.

4.6Management of contractor licenses.

When a contractor is required to use the Salford Ordnance survey data a contractor licences must be issued to comply with the OS licence agreement, this process is managed by Keith and Nigel. In 2010/11 19 contractor licenses were prepared on behalf of various Directorates and this took on average of one day per licence to arrange and release the map information.

4.7Distribution and management of data throughout the Authority

MSA data is available to all directorates of the council and is used by most of them.

Urban Vision maintains a server that holds all the MSA data products in the format supplied by the service providers and can be accessed by anyone who wishes to use it by contacting Nigel Snell who looks after the security of the map server. Access is restricted but needs to be managed, access granted / removed etc. People from most areas of Salford City Council and Urban Vision access data directly.

All products except Mastermap Topography and ITN are supplied automatically on DVD/CD and are copied to the server as they are received.

Mastermap has to be ordered online using the Ordnance Survey website. The data is then supplied on DVD/CD.

Most GIS/CAD systems cannot use the MSA data in the supplied format and needs to be translated into the appropriate format.

Keith Walker translates the data into AutoCAD (a design tool used by engineers and architects) format for use by all the AutoCAD systems used throughout the authority and also creates index drawings showing the areas covered by the various products.

Nigel Snell translates the data for use in GGP and ESRI GIS systems and also issues data to Red Rose Forest and Salix Homes and some users require a site visit to load / update their data.

More types of OS data are now available which takes longer to load. Keith and Nigel also provide advice on using MSA products to other staff members and contractors working on behalf of the council.

4.8MSA products

Below is a list of the products, formats and update cycles of the data supplied under the MSA contract.

Ordnance Survey

Mastermap Topography dataGML formatQuarterly update

Mastermap ITN dataGML formatQuarterly update

1:10,000 B&W rasterTIFF formatContinuous update

1:50,000 rasterTIFF formatAnnual update

1:250,000 rasterTIFF formatAnnual update

Streetview rasterJPG formatSix monthly update

Boundary LineShapefileAnnual update

Address PointCSV formatQuarterly update

Code PointCSV formatSix monthly update

Intermap Technologies

DTM height data GML formatNo updates

DSM height dataGML formatNo updates

Non MSA Products

Landmark Historical OS mapsTIFF formatNo updates

OS Aerial ImageryJPG formatInfrequent updates

In summary the map information provides the bedrock of all the Council’s mapping systems and it is essential that these are managed in a professional manner, the following sections provide greater detail on how the maps are used in conjunction with some of the major graphical information systems used across the Council Directorates.