As part of an ambitious project called The Way We Work, Hertfordshire County Council is consolidating 50 offices into three sites and enabling mobile and collaborative working for council staff.

“We want to give people the ability to go to any PC and just log on,” says network manager Dave Mansfield.

“When we looked into what is required to do that, we found we needed roaming profiles, clustered servers for resilience, storage area networks, data mirroring across the wide area network (WAN) ­ – all kinds of things.”

Although the council is still responsible for the design and ownership of its WAN, Hertfordshire has outsourced the management of the network infrastructure to IT service provider a&o.

So, given that day-to-day management of the network is no longer the role of the network management team, what in-house skills will Mansfield require going forward?

“It has become evident over the past few years that I need people who are no longer just specialists,” he says.

“For example, the systems and technology to enable flexible and remote working often require changes ­ – a bit of business process management, a bit of security, a bit of something else. The people I employ need to broaden their skills beyond their original core networking competencies. First, they need a better understanding of the IT part of networking ­ – servers, for instance.”

Given that the networking industry and technologies are changing fast, Mansfield says another key skill he
needs is the ability to track what is happening in the market.

“At the moment there is a general trend towards complexity, so I need people who can understand the bigger picture. Today’s networking workers need to be more like analysts,” he says.

It is also crucial they understand the council’s own business, says Mansfield. “In the past, network managers were just given technical tasks. Now it is imperative they also understand why we are doing something and what we are trying to achieve, and all their decisions must be informed by that.”

Equally important, he says, are skills to manage and form productive business relationships with external network equipment and service providers.

“My people need to have some understanding of the technology and they need to be able to cajole the suppliers to deliver what we want even if we have not quite signed up for it. This is because when you sign a contract that lasts three to five years, by the end of that period what you are doing bears no relationship to what you signed up for,” says Mansfield.

From such well-managed supplier relationships, other benefits accrue, he believes.

When the council began designing a voice over IP system, for example, Mansfield’s staff were able to call on named engineers at a&o to help.

“I need people who have those kinds of relationships with suppliers ­ – which means when we are at the initial stages of a project, we can access their knowledge base, find out what they have done with other customers and avoid known pitfalls from the outset,” he says.