Reorganisation starts with identity
Long before systems are brought together, the shape of a new authority is being decided by its identity and tenant choices.
Local Government Reorganisation is usually described in terms of services, governance and finance. The technology conversation tends to follow, and when it does arrive it is often framed as a systems question: which case management platform survives, which finance system, which contact centre.
Those decisions matter, but they rest on something more basic. Every predecessor authority brings its own Active Directory, its own Microsoft 365 tenant, its own approach to Conditional Access and its own history of accounts, groups and administrative rights. Until those are understood and brought into a single design, the new authority cannot give people one identity, cannot share information safely between teams, and cannot make reliable decisions about anything built on top.
A common baseline comes first
The most useful early step we have found is a technology landscape assessment that every predecessor authority completes in the same way. Core and statutory service areas, the systems that support them, how critical each one is, where the data lives, how identity is managed and where Cyber Essentials stands. When each authority describes its estate using the same template and the same criticality scale, the programme can compare like with like, and the identity and tenant questions surface while there is still time to plan for them.
The government's Digital and Cyber Playbook for reorganisation makes a similar point about foundations. The assessment is not glamorous work, but it changes the quality of every later decision.
Identity decides the shape of the organisation
Choosing a target tenant, and an identity model for it, is effectively choosing how the new authority will work. It determines how staff from different predecessor councils collaborate before and after vesting day, how access is granted and removed as roles change, and how safely the organisation can adopt Copilot and other AI tools later on.
Programmes that leave identity until the systems decisions are made usually find that the systems decisions were constrained by it all along. Long before the systems are brought together, the shape of the new authority is already being decided.