Throughout 2012, the pressure on public authorities to adopt shared services, rationalise office space and implement flexible working policies is set to mount. The Cabinet Office’s recent Strategic Implementation Plan (SIP) on ICT is tasked with delivering better public services for less cost and more staff will be encouraged to collaborate across departments and required to alter working practices, share desk space and work more flexibly.
The headlines around this have so far been firmly fixed on the G-Cloud initiative. But I think there's more to Cloud in the UK public sector - and in a perhaps surprising corner: voice communications.
Cloud-based voice – an aid in estate rationalisiation?
Why? Because our experience shows that an organisation that deploys an intelligent, robust and agile Cloud-based voice solution has the ability to not only cuts costs but also vastly improve public services and customer satisfaction at the same time. While wide-scale change programmes may deliver significant cost savings, the risk and fear of failure are holding back innovation and the speed of change. The right voice solution will provide the answer to this.
The drive from local authority chief executives to unlock the savings available from their property estates and services continues in earnest. Estate rationalisation is seen as a vital way of reducing operational costs and whether it is relocating out of redundant space and consolidating or moving into new modern and efficient property, it is an undertaking being explored by many public sector chiefs. Conversely, however, we have concerns that such a wide-scale project will disrupt operations to the extent that productivity levels will suffer and services to the public will be severely impacted.
How can organisations ensure that while it may be undergoing significant change, customers, partners and staff are still able to communicate and ensure ‘business as usual’?
It is imperative that organisations implementing large change programmes take steps to minimise disruption. One often overlooked or underestimated cause of disruption is an organisation’s ability to continue to manage inbound telephony services – services that allow calls to all your existing published numbers to be delivered to your new or interim location.
The key here is flexibility. Projects such as large office moves rarely go off without a hitch, and in order to de-risk the whole process you need the ability to reroute calls to any location at the drop of a hat – even to staff at home. A further hurdle is the fact that the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and the Code of Practice for Business Continuity Management BS25999 enforces the need for public authorities to provide emergency and public services in the event of business disruption, making this a matter of compliance. Therefore at the start of any estate rationalisation project you need to make sure you are building voice continuity into the equation.
One of our customers, a government Department with 4500 staff, was closing a number of key offices and merging with others, while making better use of space elsewhere – the challenge was to maintain continuity of service simultaneously across multiple platforms. It did this by deploying a full hosted call direction service in the form of BT smartnumbers – a service offered by Resilient Networks through BT. It enabled the department to maintain seamless continuity during its radical accommodation restructuring and the added agility lays the foundations for future location projects.
For many organisations the next step from estate rationalisation is to implement flexible working policies for staff. Flexible working reduces office overheads, travelling costs, improves staff retention, reduces recruitment and training costs, and keeps other staff overheads to a minimum. But true collaboration is needed for flexible working to reach its full potential. Organisations implementing new working practices are faced with a number of challenges, including how to ensure that staff can manage their own availability to receive calls wherever they are based and how team members can effectively communicate and collaborate with colleagues across virtual teams. In addition to this, it is imperative that service to the public is not impacted by policies such as home-working.
Single number
A single number assigned to an individual or a role ensures that flexible working won’t impact the ability of the public, partners or team-members to reach someone, but before rolling out flexible working, IT directors need to ensure that staff have the ability to manage their own phone service, from any device and wherever they are located. By its nature, with flexible working organisations have to hand over an element of management to employees.
The Ministry of Defence, which has introduced hot-desking at its headquarters, provides a single secure telephone number for life to an individual, a post or a virtual team which they themselves manage – they are contactable at all times using one number and can pick up messages from anywhere.
Cloud-based voice services can bring speed of response to an organisation. In last year’s pandemic flu outbreak,for example, the Health Protection Agency was required to rapidly operationalise a nation-wide calling service. After several difficult false starts using traditional on-premise call centre equipment they used BT smartnumbers to create a virtual call centre for handling their rapidly growing spike in traffic using agents located in temporary and shared offices around the UK.
It is also important to explore further functionality, such as centralised voicemail, call routing options, announcement services that can be controlled across teams, wherever the individual members are based.
A resilient and robust voice solution successfully de-risks projects that while undeniably beneficial carry many potential issues with them. While the pressure to cut costs and enhance productivity and service has never been greater, there is also little room for error. Cloud-based voice solutions provide the safety net to embark on those large-scale game-changing initiatives in 2012.
Andrew Bale is CEO of Resilient Networks.
