Increasingly, county and district councils are looking at flexible working in order to improve organisational and individual performance, the end objective being the improvement of services to the public, whilst reducing operational costs.
Many councils are realising the benefits of greater flexibility in the way that employees work, recognising that technology offers options that can lead to a more satisfactory means of working and a subsequent increase in employee satisfaction and performance.
However, for agile working in the public sector to be successful, the systems underpinning it must be reliable and scalable. Remote workers must have access to the same desktop view and applications they would have if working from a council office.
The virtual desktop environment must also be able to cope if the numbers of workers rapidly increases, for example during times of adverse weather. Following five years of heavy snows, many councils now have remote working policies in place to cover these periods.
Citrix is becoming the standard agile worker platform of choice for many local government organisations. This model has been successfully implemented by many and is proven to deliver, be secure and to meet the governance requirements to which they must adhere.
BrightCloud has worked on many such projects and was recently awarded yet another Citrix proof of concept for an exciting project. This will see a dramatic shift for one of our local government customers to a major deployment of Citrix XenDesktop 7, one of the first XenDesktop 7 roll-outs in the UK.
This proof of concept will be similar to our work with Places for People, one of the largest property management, development and regeneration companies in the UK. Almost immediately, employee efficiency and customer service levels were reported as “having never been better.”
Over the last year, it is estimated that this not-for-profit property organisation has saved over £731,000 in capital and support costs and reduced its carbon footprint by nearly 400 tonnes. These are both significant savings for an organisation that is accountable to regulatory bodies and corporate responsibility policy, for which Place for People has BITC Platinum status.
The business case spoke for itself and we were able to present our credentials as a long term IT partner to many public sector organisations including councils, NHS trusts and emergency services agencies.
