Bristol City Council establishes more mobile and flexible workplace

Computacenter solution
Bristol City Council partnered with Computacenter on a comprehensive project to deliver a new workplace IT environment for its 7,000 employees. Computacenter helped to evaluate the best software options and licensing models; design, build and install the new environment, which includes a new backup infrastructure; and train users. Computacenter’s remote deployment methodology minimised disruption and costs for the council and its staff.

Results
The new end user environment is a key enabler for the council’s business transformation programme. It will help reduce costs and improve services through simplified management, easier collaboration and greater staff productivity.

Customer profile:
Creating a safer, greener future for the people of Bristol
One of England’s eight core cities, Bristol is home to around 432,000 residents. The tenth largest local authority in the country, Bristol City Council is responsible for a wide range of services across the city, from social care and education to planning and transportation.

Located throughout 100 sites across the city, the unitary council’s 7,000 employees are committed to making Bristol an active and creative city that offers a safer, healthier, cleaner, greener and more attractive place to live and work.

Business challenge:
Supporting business transformation
Like many other councils, Bristol City Council is facing contradictory challenges: the need to make around £90 million of savings in its budget over the next three years demands significant cost savings, while services need to meet the needs of the city’s growing population.

To address these challenges, Bristol City Council has embarked on a major business transformation programme that impacts the entire organisation.
Paul Arrigoni, Service Director of Business Change and ICT at Bristol City Council, comments: “The initiative runs to 2016, and includes establishing more cost-effective digital channels to deliver services and increasing efficiency to enable us to meet growing demands on a smaller budget. Overall, we expect the programme to contribute net cost savings of £50 million to the council’s budget.”

A critical aspect of the programme involves reducing the council’s real estate from 35 core offices to two core buildings, with a small number of locally based offices. This will transform the way employees work, resulting in an increase in home and mobile working and therefore the need for new methods of collaboration.
To support these new working styles, Bristol City Council had to ensure it had a suitable IT environment. “We needed to update our end user IT infrastructure to enable employees to be able to work productively across a wide range of locations,” comments Paul.

An increase in digital public services, and the need to support them, was also driving the need for the change in end user IT.

Wendy Collins, Desktop Project Manager at Bristol City Council, comments: “Our existing end user environment was reaching end of support, and was struggling to meet our needs, particularly when it came to supporting digital services and sharing information.”

The ageing and diverse estate was causing some incompatibility issues between desktop and business applications and when sharing information both within the organisation and with partners. “We were keen to establish a unified, industry-standard environment that would support our plans for change,” adds Paul.

IT solution:
Enabling a more flexible workplace
Bristol City Council issued a competitive tender to find a partner with the appropriate skills to assist with its desktop transformation project. “Due to the complex nature and scale of the project, we didn’t have all the expertise or resources internally, and were keen to minimise risk and disruption,” explains Paul.

Following a stringent evaluation process, the council selected IT services and solutions provider Computacenter. Wendy Collins comments: “Computacenter had vast experience in rolling out new desktop environments, and best practice processes for project governance, quality control and reporting.”

The project began with a comprehensive product evaluation and selection project. Computacenter helped the council identify the solutions that would best suit its requirements. The technologies selected for the standard build included Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Office and Outlook, Microsoft Lync and Microsoft Exchange. Alfresco was selected as the collaboration and document management solution.

The company’s software licensing specialists worked with the council and Microsoft to negotiate a new Microsoft Enterprise Agreement that met the council’s needs around these solutions at the lowest cost.

Reducing risk and disruption:
Following meticulous planning and preparation, Computacenter’s engineers and council ICT staff migrated around 150 workplace devices a night to the new environment.

“Around 8,000 devices across 100 sites were impacted by the project, so it was a challenging logistics exercise,” comments Wendy. “Computacenter’s experience meant it was able to provide advice on how to minimise the disruption caused by the rollout though. For example, it provided ‘super user’ training to key staff within each business area. This was vital as we had to keep delivering services throughout the project and the super users provided ongoing support after the day of migration.”

Additionally, Computacenter provided dedicated training via floor-walkers to help council staff with the new workplace technologies following the migration.
With a new desktop/laptop environment live, the council also needed a storage system that could cope with the inevitable increase in data volumes. “We were getting low on storage capacity, so worked with Computacenter to design and build a new backend infrastructure, which is based on Cisco UCS and EMC technologies,” explains Wendy.

Results:
A platform to support business transformation
Bristol City Council now has a flexible and fit-for-purpose end user environment to support its business transformation. “The new workplace technologies integrate seamlessly to provide employees with an improved end user experience,” comments Wendy.

The new environment has already helped the council:
Enable greater collaboration: Employees can now share knowledge and information more easily with colleagues and partners, regardless of their location.
Maximise employee satisfaction and productivity: The ability to work flexibly inside and outside the confines of the office not only supports the organisation’s wider transformation programme, but also improves productivity.

“As well as enabling greater efficiency, the contemporary workplace environment supports Bristol City Council in our drive to digitally enable more services,” comments Paul.