Budget cuts and the drive to share services has encouraged some unlikely collaborations between neighbouring councils and other local public sector agencies, and some local authorities are now seeking to embed the practice by sharing their network infrastructures.
As network and telecoms contracts come up for renewal, they are finding the money to merge network infrastructures to achieve future savings, more efficient sharing at the applications level and to join up service delivery across agencies. They are also keeping an eye on the development of the Public Service Network (PSN).
The Cabinet Office is pushing for the creation of a framework contract for the PSN by the year end, signing up service providers for the Government Conveyance Network (GCN), which will interconnect PSN network service providers. In the meantime regional PSNs are set to emerge out of existing projects to share network infrastructure.
In North Yorkshire the failure of commercial suppliers to bring broadband to the region forced the county council to set up its own supplier. Named NYnet, it has set up a wide area network (WAN) for North Yorkshire connecting over 800 sites representing over 90% of all public sector network traffic for the area, including healthcare, education and police.
Each agency has an independent virtual local area network. As they all run on the same physical infrastructure if local authority A wants to talk to PCT B it is a small job to change the settings.
Andrew Fawcett, head of product development at NYnet, says:"We would say we were almost first on the block with the concept of a shared WAN. We have not called it PSN although in all but name it is PSN. It adds another layer of security to the network and we will in due course become a PSN service provider.
"The physical infrastructure of the shared network is all in place and the challenge we face is crossing the chasm into delivering at volume the benefits from shared applications, which is what PSN is about."
Those benefits are starting to emerge. Scarborough and Harrogate borough councils and North Yorkshire county council now share call centres to provide customer services out of hours.
In June, Connecting North Yorkshire, a body made up of NYnet and other partners, won funding of up to £16.4m from Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK), a government organisation, and is working with the European Regional Development Fund to secure match funding.
Dave Cullen, chief executive of NYnet, says: "When we added up the spend of all the key public services agencies in the region we got to an aggregated spend of £8m per annum on networking and telecoms services. We easily got to an infrastructure costing half of that."
The next step for NYnet is to promote economic regeneration in the area by providing broadband services to businesses.
Fawcett believes that strong leadership is the key factor driving shared network infrastructures, and that bringing in the health sector can prove the greatest challenge, because of security concerns. "In health there is a huge level of nervousness about patient confidentiality, which is used as a convenient excuse not to do things, and PSN should sweep away that excuse," he says.
Staffordshire county council is making good progress towards integration with health partners within a shared network infrastructure. Chief information officer Sander Kristel expects its emerging PSN to save the council £10m.
He believes true shared services may only be achieved through sharing a network infrastructure. "To provide better services to the public it is necessary for us to work much more closely with others," he says. "To do that it is best to share network infrastructure where it is much easier to share data securely."
Kristel describes the move to a shared network infrastructure as partly opportunistic. "Our current network contracts were up for renewal, our telephony systems needed replacing and some of the other partners in Staffordshire had similar timelines," he says.
"We have taken a very pragmatic approach, as the requirements of the PSN were not available when we went ahead with it. However, our supplier KCom is part of the national PSN group." The contract is valued at £23m.
Working across multiple public sector agencies, the network has to comply with multiple standards including those for N3 and GCSx, but Kristel is confident that the PSN will be closely aligned to those standards.
Staffordshire is bundling the shared network core into BT exchanges at the moment. "Traditionally local authorities have put comms hubs into their own building, but for partners to trust the PSN we found it necessary to put it in BT exchanges." At the network edge it is rolling out fibre and also quite a lot of copper, in a pragmatic attempt to create a flexible infrastructure.
The council is also putting in Cisco telephony and contact centre technology, which it plans to share. "The idea is the customer should not really need to understand who does what and where," Kristel says.
He already has an agreement with South Staffordshire Health that it will join the network, and says: "I understand from the Cabinet Office that we will be one of the first in England who will share with health partners We're also having conversations with Staffordshire Police, Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service."
He describes the process of setting up the shared network infrastructure as less complex than first expected: "We share the costs equally and the county council charges a very minimal administration fee to manage the contract."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Tracey Caldwell
Quelle/Source: The Guardian, 18.07.2011
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