Cambridgeshire county council was, until recently, a fairly typical organisation of its size in terms of its communications infrastructure. Many of the technologies had been acquired one by one so the employees' mobile phones didn't necessarily communicate seamlessly with the switchboard, and not all phone lines worked through the Internet.
There was nothing inherently wrong in this, and many organisations find their communications systems work perfectly well in this way. But Cambridgeshire wanted to upgrade from its existing installation and move to something working through voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology.
The authority's technology architect, Alan Shields, explains that, in common with a lot of large organisations, there is a move to flexible working arrangements with the staff. "Many staff are regularly working from home one or two days a week and we need to give them a more flexible range of communication methods," he says. "Also, as part of our overall accommodation strategy, all new and refurbished offices are set up to work flexibly with a 10 staff to seven desks ratio."
Finding the technology
The first step the council took in realising its plan was first to find information. It researched its information from the Gartner Group, a leading corporate research organisation, and sent out a formal request for information to a number of suppliers. Avaya's technology won the bid (through their support of a submission from Vodafone's Unified Communications Group (formally Central Telecom UK Ltd), who are an approved Avaya Platinum Business Partner).
Avaya's Richard Moss confirms that he was pleased to receive the request to support the Unified Communications Group; all local government agencies are working towards being greener but the document suggested that Cambridgeshire was ahead of the curve in this instance.
Avaya's approach to technology helped, he suggests, because of its modular structure. "We were able to construct a model that fitted their core needs," he says. "We had a centralised core which housed all the applications and then pushed the features out to a number of remote sites, giving all users the same features and functionalities that head office was benefiting from but with the entire estate administered centrally."
Real Benefits
It's worth taking a step back and considering how everyone having the same facilities would translate to actual benefits in the real world. Effectively it could put an end to calls not being answered. If a staff member was out and 'on the mobile', the switchboard could transfer the call as easily to a mobile as it could a landline: the system recognises both as nodes on the network.
This is one of the obvious boosts to many levels of service. Cost reductions and increases in internal efficiency would follow immediately.
Shields says the biggest difficulty in the three-year process was the cultural move away from a managed communications system to one that would be managed in-house. "We simply did not have the required skills and needed to obtain them in a very short period of time. This was achieved through some excellent training and awareness sessions from Avaya and through recruitment of specialist staff."
Roll out
The installation is taking three years and running to schedule – it is now in year three. It includes 9600 IP handsets, voicemail, provision for online meetings, One-X-Soft phone (which is a portal for mobiles over the Internet) and an intelligent presence server, which tells a staff member whether someone is there to answer their call even before they have picked up the phone.
Shields says the Council is well on the way to full business transformation thanks to the new technology. "It's helped meet our objective to develop an empowered and responsive workforce whilst delivering an estimated 20% saving over a three year period." In real money this translates to £1.2 million.
In productivity terms the mobile workers don't need to return to base for communications as much as they did previously. Travel to meetings has been reduced and there's a load less time spent playing telephone tag. In terms of solid cash there is a single converged network, reduction in costly ISDN lines and of course the travel reductions have improved overall expenditure.
The Avaya installation will continue to roll out through the Unified Communications Group. Moss sees the relationship with the council continuing. "Avaya will provide them with the latest upgrades for the forthcoming years – and work with them to share knowledge on where other similar organisations have made cost savings through new ways of working and through further utilisation of the technology they have."
