Case Study

Bracknell Forest Borough Council Deliver Flexible Working

Covers Citrix MetaFrame XP & Centralis consultancy & project services.

The Customer

Bracknell Forest Borough Council is an organisation of 4,000 staff with an annual turnover of £140m, providing a wide range of services to the local community of 115,000 citizens. Located in the Thames Valley, the Borough of Bracknell Forest is home to the headquarters of forty six national and international businesses. As a centre for commercial and technical excellence, the area commands very high real estate costs.

	We have seen direct savings in the region of £300,000 a year from the project, which has allowed us to reduce our total office accommodation footprint by 20%.
	Ian Slee, Assistant Borough IT Services Manager, Bracknell Forest Borough Council

The Challenge

Like many organisations, Bracknell Forest Borough Council has been under pressure to provide flexible working solutions to their staff, driven by both the Government’s eGovernment and work-life balance agenda and the need to retain and recruit quality staff in a competitive marketplace. The main difficulties in delivering more flexibility were the wide range of IT services which a Unitary Authority needs to provide, many of them “fat client” applications unsuitable for deployment across an already congested WAN, and the wide range of specifications and configurations which existed in the installed base of PC clients.

This meant that some applications were restricted to the main offices where there was sufficient bandwidth, while others could not reliably be deployed due to conflicts with existing applications or operating system settings on the PCs. Taken together, these factors effectively tied individuals to their own desk and PC, making the overall provision of systems access very inflexible and the use of available space inefficient.

Defining & Delivering the Access Solution

What Bracknell Forest Borough Council  needed was a solution which enabled the secure delivery of any application to any client, without the need for high bandwidth connection or local client configuration. This would enable access from mobile devices and home PCs, as well as allowing users to log in from any office PC to make better overall use of devices and office space.

To achieve these goals the Council selected Citrix Access as a technology and Centralis, a Citrix Managed Consulting Partner, as a solutions partner.  Citrix Access would provide a flexible, scalable solution based on MetaFrame Presentation Server, Web Interface and Secure Gateway technology.  Centralis provided technical skill, best practice and proven experience.

In line with Bracknell Forest Borough Council’s policy of skills transfer to the public sector, Centralis involved the Council’s technical staff at all stages of the project, including the server builds and application packaging.  Centralis also documented these processes and provided handover training to allow Bracknell Forest Borough Council staff to manage the system when it was deployed.

	The Citrix Access solution provided by Centralis has enabled the Council to introduce hot desking and home working services
	Ian Slee, Assistant Borough IT Services Manager, Bracknell Forest Borough Council

Starting with a proof of concept build in 2001, the main production and test farms were deployed in 2002.  The production farm has more than trebled in size since then to nineteen Citrix MetaFrame Servers and now features integration with the Council’s flexible working portal "BFAnywhere".

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Benefits to the Customer

The completed solution has combined improvements in flexible working with significant cost savings. Ian Slee estimates that the Council has improved service delivery to the end-user and saved £300,000 per annum by reducing the overall office accommodation footprint by 20%.

"The Citrix Access solution provided by Centralis has enabled the Council to introduce hot desking and home working services. The approach taken provides a standard method for the delivery of access to all back office systems. Previously we were restricted to where certain applications could be installed. This was due to conflict with other applications installed on PCs or network bandwidth restrictions. The Council’s ICT Services support team are now able to rapidly deploy access to any back office application, independent of the end client desktop version or location. This environment also enables the team to rapidly rollout upgrades of back office applications without the need to modify any client workstation configuration." states Ian Slee.

"Overall we have seen direct savings in the region of £300,000 a year from the project, which has allowed us to reduce our total office accommodation footprint by 20%."

Conclusions

Bracknell Forest Borough Council have proved their commitment to flexible working and seen the financial and operational benefits such a move can offer.
Rodger Olive, Public Sector Business Manager at Centralis comments "This is a great example of where a long term partnership between customer and Centralis has delivered proven benefits over a number of years. Being able to improve services and reduce costs is a significant achievement."

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