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Dividing line

The case for investment



Hillingdon Council needed to replace its aged legacy PBX by the end of September 2004. Faced with spiraling costs the Council started an IP telephony proof of concept pilot in late 2001



We started small, with six phones in the first instance, and needed to convince ourselves that not only was the technology maturing to a point where it was viable operationally but also that we could make the business case for the investment to be made.

The story starts a little earlier however. From a standing start in 2000 we had recently completed the installation of a new cabling infrastructure in our Civic Centre in Uxbridge. The work was based on a business case that predicated the necessary investment on the basis that a reliable, flexible, industry standard, resilient network was needed if we were to deliver our ambitious plans for modernisation and service improvements across the Council.

Before we carried out the work we were often getting more than 40 cabling related fault calls a day in the Civic Centre alone. Our network infrastructure investment also provided us with a hub on which we could extend the core to include our outlying buildings, allow Councillors and staff to work more flexibly and from home and provide a solid base on which to meet the challenges of multi agency working as our organisational boundaries rapidly blurred.

We set our chosen network installation partners, Xpert Systems Limited a target of becoming a true strategic partner. They installed the network but we needed more than that. We needed a partner organisation who would work proactively with us as new service challenges were set and as new technologies and approaches appeared. We also set the company of achieving with us a target of 99.99% minimum network availability. The availability target has been met as we have continued to place more and more demands on our infrastructure.

So what of IP telephony?
Well, for us, it was clear that we had to replace our legacy systems. The question was whether to make the leap of faith to a then largely untried IPT or run with a traditional PBX replacement that would almost certainly reduce our rationalisation options for many years. We would have loved the luxury of a further year to make these judgements but life isn't like that…

Hillingdon has been working hard to reduce its cost base by rationalising its property assets (to the tune of £300k annual revenue and more than £1m a year in cost avoidance achieved already). In the year 2000 our Civic Centre housed 1150 or so staff. It will house nearly 2000 (allowing for hot desking and a variety of flexible working initiatives) by the end of 2005. That sort of increase, if we had run with a traditional PBX replacement would have meant that our original replacement cabling infrastructure would have been creaking at the seams by now.

Working to benefit the people
Our IPT pilot progressed and quickly expanded to nearly 40 telephones. The attraction of being able to double the capacity of our network and use the handsets as switches supporting our desktop PCs was becoming overwhelming but IPT functionality was still developing.

In late 2002/early 2003 we moved to replace with IPT and awarded a contract to Prime Business Solutions Limited. This set some immediate challenges for us as we needing to work with two companies who are competitors whilst ensuring that they left their commercial differences well away from our doors. We were blunt in our expectations of both of them - they needed to work for the benefit of the people of Hillingdon and I have to say that both rose to the challenge admirably.

Prime needed to overlay the IPT on the existing Xpert installed and maintained network. That meant disclosing some of their operational methods and configuration ideas to each other but the key common factor was that we were using a Cisco network and the proposed and accepted IPT solution was Cisco IPT. We already had a strong strategic partnership with Cisco too.

We worked then, and continue to do so, with their Internet Business Solutions Group. Part of that work allowed us to take a private sector model business case they had and turn it into something that could be used by all public sector organisations.

That work has received UK and international recognition and is available for anyone to see and learn - CLICK HERE.

We are currently refreshing that work with them and the model is being used in support of our widespread corporate modernisation programmes. Why mention the business case? Simply because it allowed us to position our decisions on whether to move beyond an IPT pilot within an overall framework of improvement for the Council.

A detailed project plan and careful management of expectations, user training and a phased approach for the introduction of the full range of IPT functionality led us into an 18 month rollout that we completed in June, nearly two and a half months ahead of schedule. The implementation has gone remarkably smoothly but we have learned quickly how important resiliency is. Downtime on computer systems is one thing, downtime on computer systems and telephony on an integrated network is quite another.

80 per cent of our residents want to contact us by telephone for non sensitive issues and the word would soon get around if the new telephony system was not delivering. Prime supported us well during the whole of the implementation process, with zero downtime during migration and real commitment to resolving issues when they arose.

Leap of faith
IPT has enabled us to implement effective automatic call distribution, we are using “softphone” on laptops, we have doubled our network cabling capacity and are rolling out a variety of previously unheard of functions to the desktop.

Yes there are organisational, cultural and managerial challenges but our experience is that IPT is not the unreliable, still developing technology that I hear from some quarters. It is apparent that everyone will have to make this leap eventually, our belief is that joined up Government and the need for efficiencies across the board makes this a leap of faith we are glad to have made. However we have learned from some of the following particular challenges:
  • Need to carefully address resiliency

  • Need to train users effectively and not “trust” their skills

  • Phase introduction of functionality

  • Train our desktop technical staff to deal with IP phones as another desktop issue

  • Quickly react to their being no switchboard operator consoles available in the market at that time!

  • Test, test and test again

  • Employ specialist help to deal with quality of service issues
We could not have made the business case for investment in IPT without taking “other” factors into account.

www.hillingdon.gov.uk