16 Mar 2011
Herefordshire Council is the first local authority in England to expand its community-wide public sector network (PSN) to include 20 NHS sites, and in the process has switched service provider to save £130,000 a year.
Although much of the network is now being managed in-house, the council is relying on Updata to provide and manage the physical circuits linking end sites to eight exchanges.
The network previously included just the community schools and local council corporate sites, but it is being extended to incorporate hospitals, clinics and corporate NHS sites. It has gone from 6,000 to 8,000 users.
Siemens had previously been managing the circuits for the school and council sites before Updata came on board.
"The network includes everything from IP telephony, files, folders, fast application access, email, anti-virus, web filtering, and in the future, unified communications and videoconferencing," said Alicia Bolger, ICT operations manager at Herefordshire Council and NHS Herefordshire.
"There was a deep relationship between Herefordshire Council and the NHS, and consequently we decided to merge the two IT teams so as to manage the network and monitor functions in-house," she added.
"The key driver for us is the mobility it allows our staff. So any of our users can go to any site and log into the service, whereas previously they would have to go to their main site or go home."
"We were using BT originally to deal with the NHS circuits, and this was costing us £170,000 per annum," said Bolger.
"But by bringing the NHS sites into the PSN, even though this cost us £80,000 to do, we will save £130,000 a year as a result," she added.
The bodies share information with the NHS on patients, but Bolger highlights that this is only done when security measures allow it.
"We may share case load information, or information on clinical systems that hold patient data, but we will only do this when there is a legitimate reason to do so," said Bolger.
"Because of data protection and security, when this is done it has to be signed off by each of the individual managers involved."
Herefordshire Council also plans to extend its network even further because of its success so far.
"We are certainly considering incorporating other public sector bodies, such as GP practices," said Bolger.
"Also, if David Cameron's ‘Big Society' idea takes off and we see a lot of small business partners coming into play, it would be useful for them to have access to the network too," she added.
"We are currently running a cost-benefit analysis on this and we are also looking at architecture designs."
The project is expected to be completed within the next few weeks.
The OPSN will be jointly provided by BT, Global Crossing, Virgin Media and Cable & Wireless. Local authorities can then connect to these using smaller providers such as MLL Telecom. The point is not only does it reduce costs but all must follow a set code of connection which will provide a uniform set of security requirements and controls to protect YOUR personal data.
Not a bad thing
Posted by: Andrew Hewson 18 Aug 2011
I don't care. As a tax payer, I just want to see my local authority spending wisely. Not necessarily going for the cheapest option, but definitely not going with an organisation just because they are a well known name and therefore the procurer automatically assumes they are getting the best value and the best solution.
Posted by: Joshua Wells 17 Mar 2011
In response to above comment...BT will continue to be a preferred network provider for many businesses, including public sector. But clearly, they are not the only one in this space, and I suspect given the need to reduce costs by all councils and authorities, then if it makes financial sense to consolidate multiple contracts with multiple providers (or even a single provider) within the same constituency onto a single network and single contract then we will see more of this. A shared network makes financial and 'efficiency sense' does it not????
Posted by: John Hart 17 Mar 2011
With the government's shared services agenda, surely we are going to be seeing more of these types of contracts. With BT as the 'preferred' national carrier, are we going to see more authorities look to reduce costs whilst increasing efficiencies to the detriment of some of our larger more 'established' network providers? Interesting times
Posted by: Too good 17 Mar 2011
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