24 November 2014

Medway Council is using virtualisation to enable flexible working for employees and reduce operational and IT costs.

Head of ICT Moira Bragg says Medway Council wants to work more flexibly to reduce the number of properties occupied by staff.

The council provides services to a population of around 270,000 citizens in Kent. As part of the Agile Working programme, it implemented Citrix XenDesktop to virtualise desktops across the IT estate.

“Most local authorities are looking for ways to transform their services,” says the council’s head of ICT Moira Bragg. “At Medway, we have a programme looking for ways to drive efficiency: doing things better, but more efficiently. That includes working more flexibly to reduce the number of properties occupied by staff.”

The deployment is being rolled out in stages. It has begun with the most complex departments, such as those scattered across many sites and using a wide variety of applications. Bragg’s team has so far migrated the 500 most challenging of 2,800 desktops onto virtual desktops accessed via Dell Wyse thin clients.

As a result of virtualisation, Medway has also been able to consolidate Children’s Services into a single building from the three it previously required.

The deployment has also led to more collaborative working. Hotdesking areas have been created within existing offices, dissolving what Citrix describes as the old “one person, one desk, one device” mentality.

The move is projected to save upwards of £1m over five years for the council. Cost savings are expected as a result of centralising hardware procurement and reductions in energy consumption of around 24 per cent.

Completing the desktop deployment will take about a year. A virtual telephony solution is also on the transformation list.