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Jill Ashcroft, South Lanarkshire's service delivery manager, says outsourcing its desktop services has had a transformational impact on the business, with benefits felt by both the council and its end users. Before moving to a managed service for its desktop systems, the council's approach to IT procurement and management lacked coordination: "Everyone was buying from different sources and none of those included any form of support. Not all the applications worked on all the equipment, and while we had a small desktop services team, because of the proliferation of all these types of kit, they found the support overhead impossible to handle."

With support and management of the whole infrastructure creaking, the council decided the only way forward was to share its desktop burden with a third party: Digital Equipment. "Five or six years ago, this was a radical thing to do," says Ashcroft.

The council devised a standardised set of equipment that would be available to departments via a lease from Digital. Although some departments saw it as an increased cost, most quickly became used to allocating budget to pay for desktops, including both leasing and support. Despite having 4,700 PCs, printers, laptops and iPaqs in use, the council's managed services approach led to relative IT harmony.

When, after five years, the council was legally obliged to put the contract up for tender again, it chose to continue with a managed services approach. But between the start of the first contract and its termination, Digital had been acquired by Compaq, which had then merged with HP. "Our original contract was with a different organisation - a smaller, more locally-based organisation," recalls Ashcroft. "But HP became a little too big for us."

IT services company Computacenter, though a large company in its own right, proved to have a far better local presence for South Lanarkshire. That coupled with its "understanding and knowledge of [our] processes", persuaded the council to offer it an £11 million, seven-year contract in January 2004.

Ashcroft confesses the hand-over between the two suppliers wasn't as easy as she would have liked. "There was no animosity, but it's obviously difficult moving from supplier to the next. It's something we took note of in the current contract and we have built in a much better set of arrangements for transitioning out."

Since the council leased all the existing desktop machines from HP, it had to buy the leases from the company as part of the contract exit. It has continued to charge those costs back to individual departments, with Computacenter taking over the support.

The council now has a three-year refresh schedule in place to swap out the HP machines with newer models, but until the lease costs have been recovered, the IT department is merely relocating older machines to other employees as the replacements arrive.

Ashcroft has already observed "appreciable differences" in desktop services, but acknowledges that might simply stem from the fact that HP's contract was in its later stages and the Computacenter deal is just beginning.

To ensure Computacenter maintains that current level of enthusiasm, the council has built break points into the new contract for assessing progress and the process improvement. "Managing such a distributed desktop estate can be extremely challenging and we will be looking at various initiatives, such as pre-imaging and security patch management, to help us both reduce costs and complexity," says Ashcroft.

Although there have been some cost savings already, with Computacenter charging more for support but less for leases on the new equipment, Ashcroft says the main benefits have come from Computacenter's application of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), standard guidelines for service management created by the UK government. "We saw them as somebody who would raise our game in terms of service management and service delivery."