Cambridge graduates: How a council IT leader is moving workers to a collaborative future

Chris Middleton speaks to Alan Shields at Cambridgeshire County Council to find out how a shared service has created shared innovation during the pandemic

The city of Cambridge is a global innovation hub and a centuries-old centre of academic excellence. But Cambridgeshire is also home to public sector innovation, with a shared services centre for the East of England, the LGSS. Alan Shields is IT Chief Architect for the facility, based at Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC).

The IT service supports nearly 5,000 users across multiple locations, from major offices containing hundreds of people to smaller satellite sites. That said, like most authorities CCC is "rationalising its estate as time goes on", explains Shields, referring to its property portfolio as much as to the supporting technology.

This is partly due to the coronavirus forcing a new culture of mass home working on local authorities, he says - up to 90 percent of staff have been based at home during the crisis. But the change is also in accordance with a strategic plan that predates the pandemic.

Alan Shields

"It's very much a response to the new ways of working - we were doing this before the crisis. The occupancy of offices was slowly moving down in terms of the amount of people who would go in on a daily basis.

We're moving to new premises that could cater for up to 700, but we'll only have desk space for half that number

"One of the major outcomes is we're moving our headquarters. Whereas our current HQ in Cambridge can accommodate about 1,000 staff, we're moving to new premises that could cater for up to 700, but we'll only have desk space for half that number."

In other words, the organisation made a strategic decision to have two-thirds of HQ staff working remotely on any given day. The remaining third - up to 350 people - will use hot desks whenever they need or want to be on site.

"We've been doing this kind of thing successfully for a number of years," stresses Shields, "but the move to the new civic hub will accelerate that."

From a technology management perspective, how big a challenge has it been to support this cultural and workflow shift - away from named individuals sat at their own workstations, and towards a more demand-led service?

"We have a flexible, mobile workforce," says Shields. "I would say that 95 percent of staff now have their own corporate laptops. But we do have some workstations that are set up with multiple screens and docking stations to allow them to work for longer periods.

It's very difficult to say to someone ‘work flexibly' without giving them the tools to do it

"We moved to that sort of resource a few years ago and found it very successful. We need this: it's very difficult to say to someone ‘work flexibly' without giving them the tools to do it."

But in such an environment, data security and IT estate management are equally affected. How does the organisation authenticate its users - ensuring the right people have access to the right systems and data at the right time?

"Obviously, our offices have corporate networks and you need to authenticate users via Active Directory - authentication is automatic when you log onto the network. It's slightly different when it comes to Wifi; we use certificates to allow people to authenticate to the staff Wifi, though we do have public Wifi for guests.

"If they are working remotely, we have an always-on VPN [virtual private network] that is installed as part of the build on every machine. And that authenticates them using the same certificate-based system. As an always-on VPN, the user can't break out of it.

"Obviously, if someone gave a family member their credentials, that would be against our code of conduct."

Can the IT team remotely disable or wipe a machine, if it is known that it has been lost, stolen, or accessed by an unauthorised person - bearing in mind the sensitive nature of some council services?

"No, at the moment our management of laptops is very much limited to the delivery and removal of software. But we are moving to Office 365, and part of that rollout will be the use of Microsoft Endpoint Manager and [cloud-based device and OS manager] Intune - with Intune not just for smartphones, but also for devices in general.

"Once we've moved to that management infrastructure, we will have the ability to wipe and control most of our employee devices."

The move to Office 365 will be completed by September or October, adds Shields.

So how do council employees currently meet virtually and collaborate when they are working remotely? What tools bring them together?

A lot of our remote infrastructure wasn't built for the load once everybody started working from home

"That's a bone of contention," he admits. "Before the virus outbreak, we had Skype for Business on premise, which allowed us to do calls, meetings, conferences, and video. But like a lot of our remote infrastructure, it wasn't built for the load once everybody started working from home. Quality of calls was causing problems.

"You've got to appreciate that once you put such a load onto an IT system, the problems start surfacing. All the things you ignored because they weren't an issue when you were running at 50 percent [remote working] rather than 90 percent.

"For example, it showed the cracks in the VPN. Things that we would never have seen if we weren't hitting really high percentages on the network. Unfortunately, we were also moving providers for our wide-area network. None of us saw this coming. We plugged our way through it, but operationally it was difficult.

"Added to that, we were implementing Office 365, so there was an emerging user base that had access to Teams, with Skype for Business usage decreasing. We have also introduced split-tunneling for Teams, which has improved those users' experience."

What about other popular apps and platforms that caught the public's imagination during lockdown?

"We weren't immune to the fashion for Zoom and a lot of the organisations we deal with use it, so you've got to jump on that as well. One of the frustrating things is we had all the collaboration tools we needed - probably too many - but because none of them talk to each other effectively, you still end up sitting in these silos.

People were using Zoom, they saw it on television, they saw central government using it, so it was a bit of an uphill struggle

"We didn't want to dilute the message about our Office 365 rollout, which is brilliant for flexible working. But people were using Zoom - they saw it on television, they saw central government using it - so it was a bit of an uphill struggle."

How has the organisation dealt with its telephony demands remotely, given the prevalence of contact centres and help lines in most local authorities?

"Our telephone system is VoIP-based, so some of our contact centre agents are quite comfortably working from home. We just issued them with a soft phone on their device, so we were quite well placed."

Overall, it seems that the coronavirus has merely accelerated the authority's strategic plans, rather than forced a rethink.

Shields concurs. "I'm not privy to decisions in the higher echelons of the council, but I can say from my own experience that, after the bedding-in period I've described, myself and my colleagues are working just as effectively from home as we were before. To a certain extent, we're working more effectively, because we're making the effort to communicate.

We will be more successful and work better because of everything we've been through in this crisis

"But I miss the water cooler discussions, the informal chats. And we recognise that for some people working from home isn't ideal - they don't have the correct environment for an office space, and they may have other distractions.

"There are the psychological effects too: working from home is not for everybody. So the authority is looking at ways of slowly bringing some people back.

"But ultimately, it will be about reinforcing the route that we were going down anyway, with the new headquarters only being able to cope with 350 people.

"This is a personal opinion, but I think people will be more accepting of that. They'll have the tools to work flexibly, and we will be more successful and work better because of everything we've been through in this crisis."