Hillingdon backs real-time generation technology use

The London Borough of Hillingdon is using technology to enable more flexible working as part of its aim to attract and retain the best staff now and into the future.

Work to update the borough's IT infrastructure is delivering benefits above and beyond simple cost savings and operational efficiencies, said Hillingdon head of information communication and technology (ICT), Steve Palmer.

"We started out about six years ago to respond to business pressures in terms of better use of assets, but also because we wanted to become an employer of choice," he told IT PRO.

"We wanted to rationalise the building space we used, which led us to offer more flexible, mobile and home working. But within that, we realised we needed to develop a more flexible way for staff to deliver the outputs of their jobs."

"We've shifted from the notion of output-based workloads as opposed to a nine-to-five based one," he said.

The council has been working with Cisco partner, Logicalis to implement a communications infrastructure that is both secure and flexible enough to facilitate mobile, home and hot desk-based working practices.

"We have been able to recruit a lot more internal staff that would not normally have been available to us by enabling more flexible working," said Palmer. "But we've also seen growth in the effective use of our web-based transactional services to our other end users - the residents - where we were processing 5,000 to 6,000 transactions a months in 2002. That's now upwards of 80,000 a month, five years on."

He also welcomed research carried out by Logicalis, supporting the notion that flexible working facilities are increasingly becoming a differentiator to younger generations about to enter the workforce.

Palmer said: "The research is a real wake-up call to embrace these enabling technologies, particularly to the public sector in a cultural sense, who also need to find new ways to engage younger people more in the democratic process. We need to look at blogging, social networking and instant messaging if they would rather use them than wait for a man from the council to come 'round with a form to fill out."

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