Chris has been working in various flavours of IT for local government for over 10 years, and currently leads the ICT Architecture and Integration team which specialise in developing System Integration products, system architecture and CRMs.
Eye catching title huh? In my previous post (Open Source? Yeah, we’ve heard of it…) I talked in brief about how we were using Open Source and how it was saving the Council significant amounts of money. We have now calculated that we are directly saving the council £204k over an initial 5 year period and are going to save a further £228,905 every five years thereafter. How are we saving this money? We built a search engine framework to replace two third-party products. A website search engine and an address search system. These systems were costly and becoming more expensive as additional functionality was required. So we decided that we’d build our own search engine to cover the needs of … Continue reading
Dear Open Source, We’d just like to give you a lovely big, warm hug from everyone in the team. We <3 you Open Source! Yours truly Chris Jones Architecture team leader Architecture and Implementation department Shropshire Council
Is it weird for a Council’s in-house development team to publicly blog about the things it does? They’re only serving internal customers, so what relevance does it have to anyone outside those walls? Isn’t it just a waste of time and public resources? Continue reading