British Waterways steers new IT course

The security of boating licence-holders' details is a key concern for British Waterways

British Waterways, an agency that cares for 2,200 miles of the country’s canals and rivers, faces a challenge familiar to many organisations in the current downturn –­ how to achieve financial savings, in this case of £10m.

In an effort to hit this target, British Waterways has not only embarked on an efficiency drive and internal restructuring, but has also changed its outsourcing partner, with Fujitsu being replaced by SCC.

British Waterways chief executive Robin Evans said the absolute priority is to maintain investment in the waterways.

“This means reducing spending elsewhere. The proposed new structure will redirect important funding to essential works, but also make us much more responsive to customers and partners,” he said.

Richard Walsh, head of ICT at British Waterways, said the decision to change outsourcing partners was driven by the need to “transform and improve the services delivered by technology, in addition to ensuring our operating costs are as low as they possibly could be”.

Although cost was also an important factor, Walsh said the key for British Waterways was having clauses written into the contract to ensure its data was secure.

“We have already audited SCC’s datacentre to make sure it is secure ­ – that’s not just the external environment, but what is actually being used in the datacentre to secure our data,” he said.

“We are a government organisation, but we’re also a commercial one, so it’s not just about complying with directives, although we ensure we adopt industry best practice.”

British Waterways has a number of revenue streams, including boating licences, mooring and angling fees, and income from a large property portfolio.

This money helps to pay for more than 1,500 PCs across the UK, and a distributed workforce of about 2,000 people. The agency has 122 networked offices, with the biggest being in Leeds where 200 staff work.

British Waterways’ fully managed and hosted service with SCC includes support and maintenance of its PCs, an ISO20000-certified service desk, together with Microsoft application support and network security.

“We’re basically buying a managed service. SCC has chosen to virtualise its infrastructure, but from my point of view, it is what’s being delivered to us as a service, rather than the technology behind it that matters,” said Walsh.

British Waterways currently uses Microsoft’s SharePoint 2003 for its intranet, although one of the early tasks for SCC is to migrate all the information to SharePoint 2007. “We’ve moved to SharePoint 2007 mainly for digitising documents. After the migration is complete, SharePoint 2007 will be the basis for our corporate intranet as well as our document store,” said Walsh.

The agency’s communications needs are met by a managed services contract with carrier Easynet, using fibre connectivity to link 20 sites.

“Easynet uses the towpaths that run alongside the canals for some of their networks, and they are adjacent to our sites,” said Walsh.

SCC links into Easynet’s network from its datacentre. For other offices, British Waterways uses a mixture of leased lines and ADSL connections where only one or two PCs need to be served.

Walsh said the organisation also uses IP telephony and videoconferencing over the network. “We have had free calls for a fair while now,” he said. “And it helps with our green agenda to reduce employees travelling.”