Winchester City Council Case Study 

Proactive provision of training and knowledge transfer makes a real difference to utilisation of SAP BusinessObjects

“We had a heck of a hill to climb if we were to get our Business Objects implementation delivering the reports and information that were so crucial to our department. We had no internal expertise and relied heavily on CONTEMPORARY. They were proactive in providing training and knowledge transfer and have made a very real difference to the ways in which we now utilise Business Objects across the Council. ”

Winchester City Council is one of 11 district councils in Hampshire, covering an area of 250 square miles and serving a population of approximately 110,000 residents. A designated heritage city, Winchester attracts an estimated four million visitors each year.

The Challenge:

Several years ago, two departments within Winchester City Council – Revenues & Benefits and Housing – adopted Business Objects as their standardised departmental information reporting and data analysis tool. At that time, the Council had in-house Business Objects expertise but over time these ‘Super Users’ moved on to other positions outside the Council, leaving these departments with no real access to the high level, specialist technical knowledge that Business Objects platform needed.

Both departments relied upon Business Objects to generate reports, used by departmental staff and managers to review detailed information on various cases and initiatives as well as providing up-to-the-minute snapshots of the departments’ overall progress and identify areas that needed additional resources.

A wide range of reporting templates had been developed by the ‘Super Users’ but with their departure, the complexity of Business Objects meant that departmental staff no longer had access to the expertise needed to create and run new reports. The subsequent pressures added to the already over-stretched resources of the Council’s IT department which recognised the immense value that Business Objects could bring to the Council but which also lacked the technical knowledge to develop and run the required reports and maintain the system..

“We were satisfied that we had made the right decision to adopt Business Objects as the reporting and data analysis tool for these two departments,” explained Peter Byrne, Project Manager at Winchester City Council. “Indeed, we suspected that we could roll out Business Objects to all of our other departments over time, ending up with a single, cross-Council solution that would deliver economies of scale, improve our efficiencies, reduce the burden on our IT department and allow us to deliver the information that was needed where it was needed and when it was needed.”

However before such an ambitious policy could be implemented, Winchester City Council had to substantially improve its internal knowledge of Business Objects and implement policies and procedures to ensure a streamlined delivery of accurate information. 

  To see the solution, read the case study.