Winchester City Council serves a local population of approximately 110,000 residents across 250 square miles, providing a range of services from housing advice and benefits to recycling schemes and parking permits. Within the Council's current corporate business plan is a flexible working programme which is focused on how staff work and the benefits that can be accrued by adopting more flexible working patterns.
Sheila Davidge, Head of Information and Management Technology comments, "We offer a variety of flexible working options - we have people doing nine-day fortnights, four-day weeks, part-time people and people working full time at home" . To make this vision a reality Blue Chip helped Winchester City Council implement new technology to enable staff to work effectively from any location on any device.
>> Solution
Winchester City Council selected Citrix XenApp as the application to deliver flexible working by providing virtual desktops and applications across the Council, regardless of location. Initially a trial of 50 users was piloted, including Sheila, running Wyse thin client terminals. The trial was so successful the project went live and over 250 thin clients have been rolled out to date. The project expects to rollout thin clients to the majority of the Council's staff.
>> Success and Company Benefit
There are a number of key benefits that have been realised since the start of this project; staff sickness has been reduced; power consumption by ICT has been reduced and commuter miles have been reduced. In a recent staff satisfaction survey 77% of staff welcomed the adoption of flexible working.
Sheila comments "At some point we're going to go thin client wherever practicable. The thin client device consumes four to 10 watts whereas PCs consume significantly more".
UCM Group looked to service provider Blue Chip to support their IT infrastructure and users across two continents in addition to developing a robust and secure computing platform.”
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