IT direction and delivery

Through its partnership with IBM the Planning Portal has successfully managed to maintain high performance and extremely high availability (>99.9% for 10 out of the last 12 months) despite more than doubling demand from users.

The contract with IBM for support/development and hosting of the Portal ends in February 2008 and consequently a procurement for future IT provision will take place during summer 2007.

The Portal will seek to gain improvements in both efficiency and value for money while maintaining absolute stability on which to develop cutting edge services for its users.

During this period the Portal is upgrading its web services from basic provision to the latest robust, high-performance web service technologies with improved security and access features.

While this is going on, work will continue to develop and deliver new services requiring constant attention to secure infrastructure and performance.

This is of primary importance whilst 1App is being rolled out.

The Planning Portal is a Government IT success and will continue to share best practice and lessons learned wherever possible across Government for example with the Scottish Executive and The Northern Ireland Planning Office.

The secure IT platform the Portal provides has enabled the integration of Building Control and is providing for the development of e-Consultation tools in support of ongoing reform of the planning system.