Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council has been named as the local authority with the Best ICT Service by Socitm (Society of IT Managers), the professional association for public sector ICT Management.

Socitm has been running a Benchmarking and User Satisfaction survey since 1998 to help those who supply ICT services to better understand the views of their users. The survey covers customer satisfaction and training adequacy in public sector authorities in the UK.

This was the 4th time that Dudley MBC has participated in this survey, which was distributed to all staff (excluding ICT Services) and members. Of those responding, over 70% of their users stated that ICT is completely integral to their jobs.

All scores in the survey were marked 1 (low) through to 7 (high) and Dudley MBC scored an impressive 5.67 for customer satisfaction. This was the highest mark throughout the UK, where the average score was 5.10.

Pete Hipkiss, Customer Support and Services Manager credited Axios Systems’ assyst ITSM solution with helping them to achieve this award, “assyst is central to all of our business ICT processes. It is the glue which bonds everything together.”

Other areas in which Dudley scored highly are:

- How seriously they take ICT security (6.03)

- Customer service skills of ICT support staff (6.02)

- Technical competence of ICT support staff (6.00)

- Ability to fix problems (5.98)

- Ease of contacting ICT (5.89)

Ailsa Symeonides, Sales and Marketing Director at Axios Systems said, “We are delighted that Dudley MBC has won this award. It just goes to show that although the public sector is facing huge challenges at the moment with budget cuts and redundancies, a good ICT Service can still be achieved with the right tool.”