Staffordshire PSN Case Study

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1 Staffordshire PSN Case Study 1

2 About Staffordshire County Council Staffordshire County Council is one of the largest county authorities in the country. It provides a range of services to a population of 830,000. Staffordshire is a two tier authority with the county council working closely with eight districts councils and Stoke City Council. The county council also works closely with wider partner organisations including charities, the voluntary sector and the police, fire and health authorities to help improve the prosperity, health, safety and environment of the whole county. There are sixty two elected county councillors, providing a link between the authority and its residents. A cabinet of ten councillors make policy decisions headed by the council leader. These decisions are scrutinised by various council committees. The county council continues to raise its profile nationally and internationally to increase investment and boost Staffordshire s economy. This was traditionally based on manufacturing and mining, but now has an increasing number of new skills based industries, tourism and rural enterprise. Executive Summary Staffordshire County Council has procured a network that will become the Public Sector Network of Choice for the Staffordshire region. Staffordshire County Council is significantly changing its operating model and the way it provides services to the public. By commissioning services to a larger degree and enhancing its shared services agenda, the council will not only support its 120M savings programme but will also deliver better, more joined-up services to the public. With the creation of an integrated Health Trust the council takes, in many respects, the lead nationally on integrating social care and health services to the direct benefit of the public. The council and its partners see Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as part of the foundations of such collaborations and improvements. When the council s existing network, telephony and contact centre contracts came up for renewal, it was therefore a logical step for the council to take the lead in exploring partner appetite for implementing a Public Sector Network solution (PSN). This has resulted in one of the first PSNs that will incorporate health, council and education services and has the potential (and ambition) to expand to cater for other public services in Staffordshire. The council s existing network that already connects over 400 schools, 150 county council properties and over 50 district and borough council sites is being migrated to a carrier class, BT Exchange hosted network. The county council has now agreed to work with South Staffordshire Health Informatics to migrate their 180 sites onto the new network. By replacing separate networks with one core infrastructure and through the sharing of overheads, the public purse will save in the region of 1m per annum from direct contract cost savings. These efficiencies will potentially grow further with the migration to the PSN of further agencies such as Staffordshire Police, Staffordshire Fire and Rescue and North Staffordshire Health and by sharing related technologies such as telephony and contact centres. However, the real significant savings will materialise when shared services, such as the Integrated Health Trust become operational. The Staffordshire PSN is one of the first that will consolidate all Public Sector partners to a single operating vehicle that moving forwards will provide even greater opportunities for improved front line service delivery and wider rationalisation of costs. 1

3 Lessons Learned Define your strategic business aims from the start; the purpose of a PSN is to help to enable the transformation of public services, not to drive technical change as the primary aim. Take the lead; in some environments it might be difficult to get agreement from partners from the start. Keep them involved but don t let wider partnership complexities slow down your pace. If your solution is robust and efficient, partners will join. Use the competitive dialog process; the process allows you to define your requirements over time. This gives you the ability to explore different options and get partners involved even if they haven t signed up yet. It also helps you to drive legal discussions at pace. Be open throughout; you have to be careful not to leak solutions between suppliers during the process but be as open as you can with your potential partners. It will build trust and avoid problems later down the line. Share your costs transparently; don t see this as a money making scheme. There are significant financial benefits in sharing services. A robust PSN can form the basis of those collaborations. Seeing the PSN as a profit base in itself will disengage partners and risks losing major benefits at later stages. Don t let security get in the way; network links can be shared securely even in more challenging environments. Obviously security and privacy of information will always need to be at the heart of any ICT service provided, but the implementation of a PSN does not need to increase any risks. 2

4 Staffordshire PSN Case Study Background Staffordshire County Council embarked upon the procurement of a Public Sector Network for the Staffordshire region in December The procurement was finalised in December 2010 with the award of a contract to KCom. The county council has an excellent reputation in the delivery of network services having won the Cisco Innovation awards in 2004 for the Best Corporate Network by building one of the first MPLS Wide Area Network that brought together not only its council estate but also connected its 400 schools and then evolved to connect all borough and district councils to facilitate the delivery of Shared IT Services including a single CRM, E-Payments and decriminalised parking systems. The current Staffordshire network delivers 7 x 24 services to around 40,000 client access devices. The new network embracing health will easily exceed 50,000 devices and that is before any further partners come on board. The council also has a disparate telephony infrastructure supporting over 9,000 extensions that will also be migrated onto the PSN as part of the implementation. There is also an opportunity for any public sector partners in Staffordshire to use the contract and network to reduce their telephony and contact centre costs. Procurement Recognising that its existing network and telephony contracts expired in 2011 and that the network was due for technology refresh, the council embarked upon a Competitive Dialogue (CD) Procurement process. The CD process was selected for the following reasons: The council wanted to allow suppliers to provide ideas and innovation into the process, not just to respond to the council s specification of requirements and any predefined assumptions. The contract needed to cater not only for the council but also provide a framework that would cater for the wider adoption of the PSN by wider partners, particularly health in the first instance. The council needed a contract that would cater for change such as the growth or decline of the client base, the addition of new partners and the decline of sites as property is rationalised. The requirement was not a commodity purchase and dialogue was deemed to be essential to create the appropriate operating model. The value of the contract is significant; the council s spend on network and telephony services is around 4m per annum. The contract is for an initial term of five years with the potential to extend this for a further five years thereafter. If the vision to bring in all public sector partners is achieved then the contract allows for spend in excess of 100m. The review of the network was not just a review of technology and suppliers, it very much brought into question the roles of internal staff who currently support the network. As there was a potential for staff transfers to the successful supplier it was again deemed appropriate to follow a procurement that allowed dialogue and examination of the options. The council wanted to work with participants to work through these matters, to ensure that the right framework was created that incentivised the right behaviours and led to true benefit realisation. The competitive dialog process made it possible for potential partners to be involved throughout without making a significant contractual commitment to joining the PSN to start with, hence increasing trust in the process. 3

5 Aims and Objectives Strategic drivers To support a significant change to the way the council operates, delivering effective services to the public directly and through others, harnessing robust and efficient ICT. The council needed to achieve significant cost savings and wanted to lead in supporting other public organisations to do the same. To support the Social Care and Health Integration agenda. To facilitate improved flexible working and aid property rationalisation. Tactical and Technical The council s existing contracts expire in 2011, as do those of the South Staffordshire Health partners. The council has a new Headquarters, Staffordshire Place opening in September 2011 that consolidates approximately 20 properties in central Stafford. The new building needs a network and a telephone system and a solution that supports its flexible working ambitions. Network refresh was overdue. The council needed to reduce costs and overheads. The council wanted to reduce risk and further improve service availability. The council felt it could rationalise the fixed and mobile telephone estates. The council needs to meet the ever increasing demands placed on the network and to support new technologies including Voice, Video, High Speed Internet and Cloud access Providing ICT services with others is an efficient and cost effective way of delivering innovative services. 4

6 Staffordshire PSN Case Study The Dialogue Process & Contract Award The process commenced on the 24th December 2009 with the submission of an OJEU notice. The next stage of the process was the evaluation of the 12 submitted Pre- Qualification Questionnaires (PQQs). The evaluation of the PQQs reduced the field to seven participants and this was completed by the end of February. At this stage dialogue sessions commenced and Initial Outline solutions (IOS) were proposed and discussed, leading to Refined Outline Solutions (ROS) and the submission of Final Outline Solutions (FOS) in May Upon the evaluation of the submitted Final Outline Solutions the council reduced the participants in June to three, of which Kcom was one. The remaining suppliers would all remain in dialogue until the submission of Final Bids. This ensured that should any single supplier decide to withdraw from the process that the council still had a competitive playing field, this risk did not however transpire. Further dialogue sessions took place during July and August with Detailed Solutions being submitted, in response to the council s Invitation to submit Detailed Solutions (ITSDS) in August. At this time the Invitation to submit a Final Bid (ITSFB) was issued with a closing date of the end of October. The council evaluated the submissions, in line with the scoring criteria that had to be agreed at the PQQ stage (65% Qualitative and 35% Financial) and in November awarded KCom the status of Provisional Preferred Supplier. Following on from the standstill period that passed without challenge, the contract was formally awarded to KCom. This was exactly one year after the commencement of the process. Unlike other procurement exercises the agreement of the contract was conducted throughout the dialogue, with participants clarifying and detailing contractual issues as part of the process. This meant that the detailed population of contract schedules was completed after KCom were awarded the Provisional Preferred Supplier status and was a quick and relatively painless exercise. As soon as the standstill period was complete the contract was signed. The implementation project commenced in January 2011 and the council and KCom are now in the process of unbundling BT Exchanges and finalising the detailed design and implementation plan together with their partners. 5

7 The Solution The solution is based on a traditional network design whereby concentration nodes feed the critical mass of sites in the main areas of population. The design uses unbundled BT Exchanges to host the core network infrastructure, this helps the council reduce a current risk around the loss of one of the buildings (typically libraries) where the impact of a disaster would lead to a major outage of IT services. Such a design was also deemed to be more credible as a PSN i.e. hosting infrastructure in a secure, purpose built environment would remove a potential argument from partners to say that the network was not secure\fit for purpose and would remove the feeling of loss of control by individual partners. The exchange based design also assists the council in removing a potential constraint around the rationalisation of its property estate. i.e. hosting a network hub in a council premise is a major complication when that property is sold. The design proposed the unbundling of 26 BT Exchanges with data centre links of 10Gbits\s and regional core capacity at 1Gbits\s. The logical design is illustrated below. 10Gbps Newcastle Dimsdale Kidsgrove Biddulph Leek 1Gbps 100Mbps North Distribution Ring Blythe Bridge Stone Cheadle Uttoxeter North Core Ring Penkridge Stafford Eastage Data Centre Kingston Data Centre Milford Rugeley Tutbury Codsall Finchfield West Distribution Ring South Core Ring East Distribution Ring Wombourne Cannock Lichfield Burton -on Trent Hednesford South Distribution Ring Cheslyn Hay Heath Hayes Burntwood Fazeley Tamworth 6

8 Staffordshire PSN Case Study Within each of the exchanges KCom also proposed the use of BT s local copper infrastructure to provide cost effective and bandwidth rich services to establishments within the Exchange footprint. Although the council were somewhat cynical about this to start with, they took some reassurance from wider case studies and the thorough analysis that highlighted how distance and quality issues could in the main be overcome through the bundling of copper pairs. The council also took some protection from the Service Level that was agreed within the contract. The provision of copper as well as fibre makes the solution more flexible, which clearly fits in with the era of uncertainty that the public sector currently finds itself in. The council also has access to available fibre and is providing 100Mbit fibre connections to all high schools. Having access to the exchange also ensures that the council can take advantage of emerging technologies such as Fibre to the Premise and Fibre to the Cabinet as well as access to other carriers who we expect to increasingly interconnect with exchanges. The maps below illustrate the geography of Staffordshire and highlight the following: i) The core network infrastructure serving the main areas of population ii) The councils existing sites and Schools iii) The South Staffordshire Health sites that will link to the same core iv) The layout of Staffordshire Police and Staffordshire Fire and Rescue sites that we hope to link in the future The purpose of the maps is to illustrate that the core infrastructure is fit for purpose and does not change with the connection of further clients. 7

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13 Benefits The benefits of the PSN are many and varied and the aspirations for the project have already been defined in the Aims and Objectives section. The contract with KCom for the five year initial term is 23m, the initial saving that the council makes is estimated to be 700,000 per annum. The cost to then layer South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust is a further 142,000 per annum which is close to a 60% reduction in revenue costs compared to building their own network. This was defined through the parallel procurement process that the NHS Trust carried out to validate value for money. The council and the South Staffordshire Health partners have agreed a totally transparent cost apportionment and governance model that ensures that both organisations fairly contribute to core costs and shared overheads. It is clearly apparent that both organisations benefit financially from reduced costs and any further organisations that then join the PSN will further contribute to the core costs which will further reduce the shared costs, benefiting all parties involved. The direct savings of the contract and the transparent and real partnership approach that the council has taken is clearly a hard to refuse offer to the whole public sector in Staffordshire even before the more strategic aims of sharing services is considered. There are also wider direct savings that have yet to be fully quantified, such as the reduction in electricity usage, reductions in call spend and the sharing of network links where premises are shared or are in a close proximity that can be linked by private fibre or wireless technologies. In rural localities this offers the potential for not insignificant savings where health and council sites are in the same village, but historically both organisations have paid an external provider somewhere in the region of 15,000 per annum for connectivity that in reality probably shares the same wire. While it is important to reduce expenditure through a shared network infrastructure the real value will accrue through the realisation of wider front line benefits. Staffordshire County Council and the NHS are improving the way they deliver Social Care and Health services to the Staffordshire populous by working more closely together and ensuring that services are seamless and that things can t fall through cracks. In 2011 the council is transferring a large proportion of its social care workforce to a new integrated service with the NHS. The new network will greatly simplify the ability of the new service to share systems and information and this will further drive cost efficiencies by sharing real estate, further reducing the cost of the network in the future. Improving the ability of staff to work in new ways is also key to the council s strategy moving forwards. The new network ensures that staff can access services anywhere on the network (or beyond using secure Internet technologies) and provides opportunities to deploy shared drop in facilities within the region that can be accessed by any public sector service practitioner. This has major productivity benefits if the worker would historically have had to return to an office base outside of the locality in which they are working. Examples of this also stem to health staff working in schools or social work staff working from hospitals. Improving customer service is also key to wider organisational ambitions. Nomadic workers can now be easily contacted on their device of choice (land line, home line, mobile) via a single number, this is further enhanced through the use of technologies such as Unified Communications that extend traditional telephony and integrate this with collaboration tools such as Video Conferencing, Instant Messaging and Presence. 12

14 Staffordshire PSN Case Study Governance A governance model has been agreed that formalises the arrangements between partners. The model covers areas such as the following: Terms of Reference and PSN principles Cost apportionment principles Addition of new partners to the PSN or commissioning of further work e.g. shared R & D. Decision making e.g. impact of growth or decline within one partners estate and subsequent impact on charges Role of the Governance Board and role of the Operations Board In addition to the Governance model, each partner has a Call off Contract with the supplier that defines the specific service parameters and a contract with the council who hold the Framework Contract and initial Call off Contract upon which other services are dependent. A separate, albeit aligned Project Board is responsible for managing the initial implementation of the PSN and associated services. Next Steps The council are now deploying the purchased solution and the migration of the legacy network and NHS sites is due to be completed in 18 months. The council is in discussions with Staffordshire Fire and Rescue, Staffordshire Police and Staffordshire University and it is possible that these agencies will agree to join the PSN in NHS North Staffordshire have also expressed an intention to join the PSN at the end of their contract in The council is also reviewing its Data Centre strategy and exploring the rationalisation of council and Health Data Centres to further reduce costs and improve services. The PSN opens up a real opportunity to develop the Secure Staffordshire Cloud as a preamble or to complement the national initiative for a G-Cloud. Further benefits could be accrued through the aggregation of services such as Internet, N3 and Government Connect links. The council is also working closely with South Staffordshire NHS and are jointly reviewing wider ICT support and shared Infrastructure opportunities and the new relationship is expected to improve the opportunity for shared research and development investigations. The Staffordshire Local Enterprise Partnership is reviewing the local Broadband economy and we will be examining if the Staffordshire PSN or the component parts (e.g. unbundled BT Exchanges) offer any opportunities to improve any areas of market failure that may be hindering wider economic development subject to relevant legislation. 13

15 How central government could help PSN roll-out Ensure that central initiatives are aligned and help to encourage the aggregation of network services; improvements could be made to the Government Connects and N3 alignment that currently does not promote consolidation of Infrastructure by adopting cost models that do not appear to follow the underpinning costs. Ensure that security requirements are appropriate and do not provide those who do not want to engage in a PSN an excuse to opt out. Assist schools to adopt PSNs; the school environment and governance are significantly changing. However, targeted funding for schools to adopt PSNs would help to enhance the economies of scale to the benefit of all partners on the networks. In turn the PSN can provide schools with very cost efficient services like e-safety to keep children safe online. These types of services are often difficult for individual schools to manage. The loss of the Harnessing Technology Grant might be enticing particularly smaller rural schools to look at alternative network services that are not fit for purpose such as home broadband. Once certified as a PSN then authorised networks should be deemed to be the de-facto solution for government agencies in that region\area. Any organisations in the area should be strongly encouraged to join the Infrastructure or provide a comprehensive rationale for not doing so. A national PSN interconnecting regional PSNs would then allow for the driving down of costs e.g. the Staffordshire PSN could inevitably deliver a cost effective solution to the needs of Staffordshire Probation Service. 14

16 Staffordshire PSN Case Study Contacts Vic Falcus, Project Executive\Author - Staffordshire County Council Tel: vic.falcus@staffordshire.gov.uk Sander Kristel, Chief Information Officer - Staffordshire County Council Tel: sander.kristel@staffordshire.gov.uk Douglas McLay - Director of Health Informatics. Tel: douglas.mclay@southstaffshis.nhs.uk