30 January 2014
Bolton Council operates more than 800 services for over 262,000 residents, as well as for businesses and visitors. One of its aims is to enhance the relationship it has with citizens, particularly the accessibility of information on a 24/7 basis. As a result, it has developed a highly mobile workforce – 3,000 of its 15,000 staff have a mobile phone as part of their toolkit, and increased availability of communication and collaboration on the move is therefore essential.
This would require an update to its network infrastructure along with the introduction of new technologies. At the very core of the council’s ambitions was a need to deploy a next-generation infrastructure across both WAN and associated LANs. All subsequent developments could then be built on this solid foundation.
A highly collaborative approach was required to ensure that this network infrastructure could be successfully implemented across a diverse estate of town halls, offices, buildings, depots and other locations. As a consequence, Bolton now has a network which supports IP telephony, video and multimedia applications and unified communications, immediately making its sites better positioned for efficient and productive communication and cooperation.
The day-to-day running of the infrastructure is provided by Kcom via a comprehensive managed services contract. This ensures that the network runs smoothly and delivers the performance that Bolton needs to operate on a daily basis. Kcom’s network operations centre monitors the council’s communications infrastructure 24 hours a day, seven days a week, evaluating voice quality and anomalies across all devices.
Bolton’s ICT team has full transparency and control at all times, and detailed monthly update meetings are held to cover system use, power outages, down times and similar related network management issues. Kcom says that this ultimately promotes a best practice approach which ensures that the council is able to participate in the optimisation of its infrastructure as well as ensure that it is getting value for money.
According to Kcom, the cost streamlining programme undertaken midway through the contract period has resulted in a 30 per cent reduction in costs across all fixed-line communications services. The optimisation of Bolton’s managed services, which ensures the council is not tied into an inflexible contract which fails to deliver value for money, has resulted in a total saving of approximately £500,000 over four years.
While cost savings are a priority, it was critical for the council to ensure that accessibility and quality of service for Bolton’s citizens were not compromised. Consequently, a managed migration saw old and new systems running alongside each other, and a single service experience is wrapped around both – so neither users nor the people of Bolton feel ‘downgraded’.
