WDH Consolidates IT Hardware and Software Support to ICM

Published by Richard Lord for Wakefield & District Housing in Housing

Wakefield and District Housing (WDH), one of the UK’s largest housing associations, has consolidated its IT infrastructure hardware and software support to ICM. WDH anticipates that the deal will save costs of at least 10 per cent a year.

ICM will support all the hardware and software that interconnects the computers used by WDH’s 1,400 employees. Desktop PCs in 21 offices, as well as laptops and PDAs used by employees such as estate officers and maintenance people, will rely on ICM’s service to operate effectively. The IT infrastructure also supports WDH’s call centre which takes calls from tenants 24 hours a day.

Eric Backhouse, Infrastructure and Customer Services Manager at WDH, said: “WDH is at the forefront of technology use in our industry and is therefore increasingly dependent on it to deliver tenants a first class service.

"We simply cannot afford for there to be problems as that has a direct impact on our employees’ ability to get their job done effectively. Handing over to ICM will not only save us costs, but it will also improve the reliability of our IT systems.”

WDH has consolidated its IT infrastructure support contract from four separate providers, which maintained different elements of the system, down to ICM. This will significantly reduce the management overhead for WDH’s IT team as they will now deal with a single account manager at ICM.

As part of the new contract, ICM will also undertake a full IT infrastructure health check to assess the current state of the system and recommend changes to improve efficiency.

Tony Granelli, Customer Services Director at ICM, said: “Working with four separate service providers was proving a headache for WDH. They were often pushed from one vendor to another instead of someone just fixing the problem for them.

"Consolidating that to ICM gives them a single point of contact, safe in the knowledge that any issue will be resolved quickly. Our system health checks will also ensure that we understand how WDH’s IT supports the business so that we can make improvements that have a positive impact on the organisation.”