The financial footing of councils remains unsustainable and equally the basis on which all local public services are financed is no longer sound.

- Joanna Killian, Chair of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers, SOLACE

A Council’s Challenge: to do even more with even less

Councils and local authority organisations across the country are faced with difficult decisions as the need for fiscal austerity continues. The 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review (covering the period 2011/12 – 2014/15) tasked councils with making cuts of 28 per cent. The June 2013 CSR (for 2015/16) requires a 10 per cent cut in local government resource budgets.

In many cases, the “easy” savings have already been found and councils are facing the need to undertake radical transformation in order to meet future cost reduction requirements.

In The Local State We’re In, PwC’s annual local government survey for 20132 , the consulting firm highlights the desire of council chief executives and leaders to develop a more agile organisational model. The survey identifies the areas that chief executives and leaders believe will contribute most to savings in the period to April 2015. Top of the list are those areas that lead to greater agility such as improving service delivery processes and “disposal, rationalisation or better use of assets”.

Agility is often hampered by history

Creating a more agile organisation can yield substantial savings but it is not always easy to achieve. Often councils, like other large organisations, are hampered by the rigidity of existing, legacy infrastructure.

Council offices are frequently housed within old and inefficient buildings, with activities fragmented and scattered across the city. Not only are these premises expensive to heat and maintain, but the buildings often occupy prime real-estate sites that could be sold for redevelopment. They have become valuable assets that are illsuited to their current purpose.

Within these dated buildings, the internal architecture of small offices and anterooms actively inhibits a modern, collaborative approach to work. Council employees are tied to their individual desks, within a rigid layout dictated by the physical constraints of the office building, its location and the IT network.

As a consequence, councils incur high travel costs shuttling people between expensive offices. As the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) found, busy staff often travel from internal meetings back to their base offices in order to complete work on their own desktop PCs3. Operational costs and carbon costs increase, while individual productivity decreases.

Maintaining quality of service and meeting the public’s concerns

Having departments scattered across different offices doesn’t just increase costs. It also damages the quality of service that councils can provide.

At a time when local residents are increasingly opposed to the need for cuts in council services, some councils are seeking to improve service quality by freeing staff to work more closely – and more visibly – alongside their citizen-customers.

Enabling virtual and mobile workspaces could also benefit the public purse. In a recent report by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) Action and Research Centre, The Flex Factor4, it was estimated that greater use of flexible working would save the UK Public Sector £1.4 billion per year.

However councils, and especially their CIOs, are also concerned about data security. The loss of confidential data by public sector organisations makes damaging headlines and, as security firm Trend Micro found recently5, although 52 per cent of UK mobile users regularly carry mobile devices containing sensitive work data, only 3 per cent are concerned about the theft of corporate data. Sixty one per cent of those who use devices for work do not even use password protection.

The CIO as savior?

The challenge facing many councils seeking to transform their services is how to escape from the expensive constraints of legacy infrastructure.

Can council CIOs deliver a 21st century update to information technology that enables a more far-reaching, cross-organisational transformation? One that addresses security concerns but enables a more mobile workspace?

Can IT infrastructure, rather than being a legacy problem, become part of an enabling solution?

By consolidating our sites, not only have we saved money on office space, we’ve also been able to reduce the management overheads associated with running the PC estate.

Richard Warren, Head of IT Service Delivery, London Borough of Merton

Dissolving the one person/one desk/one device model

Improved service delivery and the consolidation, or rationalisation, of real estate are two inter-related areas that councils expect to yield significant savings in coming years. Those agile councils that have already had significant success in this area have achieved it by updating their IT infrastructure in a way that dissolves the traditional one person/one desk/one device model.

Creating a virtual or mobile workspace

For many, this has been achieved by adopting a virtual desktop solution. This has two immediate benefits.

Firstly, freeing individuals from their physical desks enables them to work wherever best suits their needs. Virtual teaming and inter-departmental collaboration are made simple when individuals can take their tools with them and work for an hour, a day or a week with another team. That same freedom enables staff to connect remotely – enjoying the same speed and security as in the office – whether responding to local needs in the homes and offices of residents or simply working flexibly at a place and time that suits. Individual employees and the organisation as a whole become more productive and more flexible, leading to greater organisational responsiveness and agility.

Secondly, unshackling people from their desks allows much better use of space. As flexible working advocates Flexibility.co.uk have shown, most office desks are in use only 45 – 50 per cent of the time6. Freeing staff to work wherever best suits their needs supports a hot-desking environment. Together, hot-desking and flexible working enable better use of real-estate assets and support a move to modern offices in cheaper locations that are designed for 21st century working.

Example: London Borough of Tower Hamlets

Tower Hamlets, one of the host boroughs for the 2012 London Olympic Games, sought to provide employees with a greater degree of flexible working while saving costs through real estate consolidation. Driven in part by anticipated disruption during the Games, Tower Hamlet’s Smarter Working program used Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix AppDNA to provide a flexible and secure desktop to its 4,700 staff, giving them the option to work from home during the Games. The project was so successful that, by the end of 2012, the council had decided to move permanently from its Anchorage House headquarters with savings of £7 million per year.

Example: Basildon Borough Council

Basildon has saved £2 million over four years in office leasing costs by using a Citrix XenApp hosted desktop to facilitate real estate consolidation. The council is looking forward to further future savings from lower energy bills arising from the reduction in office space and from the introduction of low energy, thin client hardware.

Benefits of a device neutral desktop

There are further benefits, too. A virtual desktop can be delivered equally well to legacy PCs (extending the life of expensive hardware), to low power thin-client devices (significantly reducing energy costs and carbon emissions) or to personal devices (enabling a secure, flexible and employee-empowering Bring Your Own Device policy).

Example: Welsh Government

The devolved government of Wales wanted to create a “work anywhere” environment that would reduce the space, physical infrastructure and IT infrastructure requirements of public buildings. At the same time, the environment would give employees the freedom to access information and to work wherever they wished. The government also sought to reduce the energy consumption and carbon emissions of its activities and of related commuting. Creating a virtual computing platform for its 5,500 employees enabled it to reduce energy consumption by 9.6 per cent and its carbon emissions by 11.7 per cent. The project has also allowed the government to break its traditional PC upgrade cycle, extending the life of desktop hardware and saving a projected £3 million over the program’s life.

Example: London Borough of Merton

Merton has also used Citrix virtualisation technologies to offer mobile workspaces and a Bring Your Own Device scheme to its 1,750 employees.

Other agencies across the public sector have also benefited from a virtual desktop approach. For example, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) reduced desktop energy costs by 90 per cent when they moved to a new office, adopting a ratio of seven hot-desks for every ten staff and equipping those desks with twin-screen, thin-client hardware.

An entrepreneurial approach to shared services

The benefits of a virtual desktop approach can also extend beyond organisational boundaries. Some CIOs have extended their virtual desktop solution to provide a “desktop-as-a-service” to other local organisations.

Example: Sunderland City Council

Like many local councils, Sunderland sought to encourage local economic growth and enhance its own service delivery while also cutting costs. To achieve this ambitious task, the council took the innovative approach of creating a city-wide cloud services infrastructure. Deploying a solution at this scale reduced computing costs for the council’s 6,000 staff. The council was also able to offer IT-as-a-Service to local schools, businesses, social enterprises and health authorities. The cloud platform is expected to reduce IT operational costs by £1.4 million annually over the next five years, through a reduction in hardware costs, energy costs, software licenses, maintenance on individual desktops and improved IT management.

Example: London Borough of Merton

Like Sunderland, Merton is looking to become a shared desktop provider for other organisations, in this case, other London councils.

This approach has also been adopted in other areas of the public sector such as education. For example, leading further education establishment Highbury College initially adopted a virtual desktop to meet the evolving needs of its student body. Its provision of a virtual desktop solution to a neighboring primary school was partly responsible for the school’s improvement in Ofsted ranking

Points to consider when assessing virtual desktop solutions

By dissolving the traditional one person/one desk/one device link, a virtual desktop solution can be a powerful enabler of genuinely transformational change across council organisations.

However, it is vital that the selected solution is fit for purpose. Important considerations when assessing alternative solutions include:

• Security – How secure is the connection between the end-user and the organisation? Is sensitive data retained on the end-users device? Does the solution comply with government requirements for a Public Service Network (PSN)?
• Performance – How does the solution manage performance for remote users on a wide range of devices?
• User Familiarity – Does the solution provide end-users with a familiar Windows desktop experience?
• Video Performance – Does the solution adequately support video and other bandwidth-intensive applications?
• Completeness of vision – Does the supplier offer a complete, end-to-end solution with a clear vision of the evolving future of work and the growth of mobile workstyles?

With Citrix, you are buying a complete end to end solution that provides remote access, network optimisation, application streaming and a virtual desktop. It’s also very lean on the network.

Jav Yaqub, IT Services Manager, Scottish Environmental Protection Agency

Conclusion

Local and regional government organisations are being pressed to achieve ever more with ever less resource. Demand from the public continues to grow while budgets are constrained. Worse, after several years of financial austerity, the “easy” savings have already been made.

Across the UK, council Chief Executives and Leaders are looking to more complex areas such as the consolidation and rationalisation of real estate assets and the improvement of service delivery processes to yield savings.

Within this context, the creative CIO has an opportunity to lead cross-organisational transformation: turning IT from a rigid, legacy problem of one person/one device/ one desk to an agility-enabling opportunity of virtual and mobile workspaces.

Several UK councils have already generated multi-million pound savings by deploying a virtual desktop solution that releases individuals from their desks, enabling services to be delivered more flexibly and closer to the customer while releasing councils from outdated and inefficient offices.