NEWHAM London Borough Council has published the details of a confidential report to try and prove that its 2004 megadeal with Microsoft has paid off.

The findings show that when compared to six other London councils, and when measured on IT alone, Newham does fairly well. But it is debatable whether the information helps Newham justify the Microsoft deal under the terms of the agreement it struck in 2004, or that it was better off making the controversial choice of Microsoft over open source.

Richard Steele, CIO at Newham, said on Friday that "radar" reports produced by Socitm had demonstrated that Newham was in the "top quartile" of performing boroughs, as required by deliverables set in the 2004 Microsoft deal and agreed by the elected council. Steele, a vice president of Socitm, gave the consulting firm's radar study of Newham, Benchmarking ICT Performance In London 2006, to the INQUIRER yesterday.

But Roland Waterhouse, Socitm's principal consultant, said the findings should not have been made public.

"It's Socitm's view that this as a confidential document," he said.

Anna Hooper, Socitm benchmarking consultant, said: "The information about the councils is confidential. It's not published to anyone else. This is extremely important."

Other councils had taken part in the study on the understanding that the findings would be theirs alone. The councils who took part in the 2006 radar study, according to information supplied by Newham, were Camden, Ealing, Hackney, Havering, Hounslow and Newham.

Newham looked from the radar results to be among the better half of councils with regard to their use of ICT. But the radar compares only six of 32 London councils and makes no comparison with any other authority in the UK.

The Microsoft MOU specified in 2004 that the deal must propel Newham into the top decile of performing councils in the whole of the UK. This success was to be assessed by reference to the Common Performance Assessment targets performed by the Audit Commission. By this measure it failed, the INQUIRER found on Friday.

Measured on ICT alone among a handful of London Boroughs, Newham does quite well, according to the Socitm radar study. It's scores for capacity, management of resources and quality of service were top among the six measured councils.

The council's supply, support and maintenance of Microsoft platforms was outsourced to Hewlett-Packard, an arrangement which according to Socitm's classification of each performance measure, would have taken care of these three key factors.

The 2004 deal also involved installing the latest hardware and software throughout the council, which would have had some considerable impact on these performance measures. Incidentally, the open source strategy that the council weighed against a Microsoft deal in 2004 also recommended a technology refresh.

On this reckoning, the Socitm study may have provided a local justification for outsourcing IT services. Socitm's high scores were achieved with a below median investment in IT compared to the other six boroughs. Newham had notched a below average performance for Socitm's "improvement" measure.

Newham ICT staff were told that this was because they were already doing as well as they could by the other performance measures, so no improvement had been made. This measure was only in relation to these six other councils, however, and it is not known whether the council was already doing dandy before its wholesale move to the latest Microsoft software.

On effectiveness, Newham council did better than average, but less than best. This was the measure most closely related to the Audit Commission's Common Performance Assessment because it considered how well the council was turning its technology investments to the benefit of its citizens.

It might not be possible to see how well Newham did by Socitm's measure in 2007. Waterhouse said a followup study had not been done because they were only done when councils paid for them. Steele said a 2007 study was being published in May. It is uncertain whether another survey would be as favourable as the last.

Newham would have commissioned the 2006 study to follow a council-wide technology refresh implemented as part of a deal that was so high profile it was reported as far afield as the Wall Street Journal. However, the latest technology refresh has been delayed because of compatibility problems with the Microsoft software. µ