Harrow in the furnace: How one London IT leader delivered change in lockdown

Chris Middleton speaks to Ben Goward, ICT Director of Harrow Council, about the challenges of supporting a big organisation in lockdown – from a standing start

IT leaders have had a tough lockdown, with teams having to enable, support, manage, secure, and troubleshoot remote working at an unprecedented scale. The buck has stopped with them.

The challenge has been particularly acute for professionals in the public sector, given local authorities' statutory duty to taxpayers. Factor in council employees using home networks, sensitive data flying around, third-party suppliers in the mix, and internal support teams unable to meet in the real world, and it's clear that failure is not an option if essential services are to be maintained.

But for Ben Goward, Director of ICT at Harrow Council, there was an added challenge: taking up the role in April - once lockdown had begun - after being CIO at Westminster City Council and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Not only that, but he found that much of Harrow's estate of employee laptops was unable to support remote, collaborative working and he was managing a team he had never met.

With 2,100 central employees to support directly, many previously based at the council's Civic Centre, the task was Herculean for Goward and his team.

He says, "Harrow has had a long-term outsource partnership with Capita, and then in the past five years with Sopra Steria which is coming to an end. And it was not well placed for the pandemic, as users had primarily had thin-client terminals on desks. So they would come in, sit down, and run a VDI [Virtual Desktop Infrastructure] Windows session.

"Around half of the users had a laptop, but it was a Windows 7 laptop with an old build. It didn't have Teams or any of the collaborative working capabilities that, certainly in my last post, were so critical to allowing staff to work in a more flexible, agile way."

The immediate priority was to enable the Citrix VDI system to be accessible from home. "We had to roll out - very, very rapidly - a set of soft tokens for people to install on their mobile phones so that they could, from their own computers, get access securely to Harrow's VDI environment.

"We had to put that in place in a matter of very few weeks, as well as trying to sort out all the Windows 7 laptop users. This presented really significant challenges. I've got a small IT team, because it's been largely outsourced, and I had to redirect that entire team onto supporting our users who were struggling to connect from their own PCs.

"An awful lot of support was needed for something that was entirely new for my team - and for the users themselves. But we had to do it. With the exception of 150 staff, who are absolutely tied to the building to provide face-to-face cover, or because they work in our contact centre, which still had an on-premise telephony switch, everybody was working from home.

"It drove a massive culture change. It was painful, with support issues and problems with performance when working in this way, but we did overcome it."

Goward also drove a rollout of Surface Pro Windows 10 laptops. "People didn't have Microsoft Teams. This meant that they hadn't been able to take part in, say, civil contingency planning meetings, court hearings...

"We had to do virtual committee meetings, so there was the whole elected member dimension too. None of this technology was in place."

At present, he is one third of the way through the device rollout, with 700 new laptops out there and 1,400 still to go.

Equipment and support challenges aside, there is an added dimension to the coronavirus crisis, and the public sector stands at the heart of it. Now many enterprises have demonstrated that they can function at close to normal via remote, agile working, and that services can still be provided to taxpayers, do organisations need to maintain large offices?

Do employees and their managers need to commute to work every day, when they could maintain a better work/life balance by working remotely - at least some of the time - with less travelling and improved productivity?

These are big questions. The virus is still out there and economic uncertainty, funding challenges, and ongoing concerns about public health, transport networks, and large gatherings are potent considerations.

The implications for towns and city centres are significant, especially in a property-focused economy with supporting businesses all reliant on footfall in urban centres.

So where does Harrow stand in all this? Is the transformation in workflows simply a blip before life gets back to normal? Or does the council plan to hang onto what some might see as a positive outcome from the crisis: a more sustainable approach to business?

Goward is clear that it could signal a new way forward, not just for Harrow but also for other local authorities.

"In some respects the timing is fortunate, because we are in this very old Civic Centre that is surrounded by car parking. It's a very old, dysfunctional building on an attractive site right next to Harrow and Wealdstone station, which is 15 minutes from Euston. With the housing crisis and so on, it's an attractive site for redevelopment.

"There have been long-term plans to move from that large Civic Centre into a smaller one, by moving to much more agile and flexible working. We've seen that we can continue to deliver excellent services as a council with this completely different way of working."

But he acknowledges that it's not an easy switch for everyone: "We're tracking as an organisation very closely things such as well being, mental health, productivity, and efficiency.

"Some people have unsuitable accommodation for a home office, particularly some of our junior members of staff, who maybe live in a shared house and don't have a desk. Some parents have kids at home or elderly relatives at home. We've got to keep an eye on that.

"But fundamentally, the council has seen that this has a lot of benefits for work/life balance and staff well being. And it obviously has a significant impact on our operation in terms of the accommodation that we want to occupy going forward."

Does Goward believe this is a view shared by his peers in other local authorities?

"I do. For us, there was immediate opportunity around our need to vacate our current property. I suspect other authorities have a larger footprint in terms of their current offices and, in an environment where there's declining interest in commercial property, they may be seeking to utilise that.

"It costs a lot of money to maintain an office in the current crisis, particularly with the need for more intense sanitisation and cleaning, energy consumption, and so on.

"I think every local authority sees agile and flexible working as a positive thing for the well being of their staff, but I think they will want to weigh that up against the consequences for the local economy.

"I'm particularly thinking about my last local authority, Westminster, where the hollowing out of city centres is going to be a really significant concern."