Reference story - Bracknell Forest Borough Council
"We no longer have to spend much of our time cobbling together inadequate in-house software programs to cope with an irregular server set up."
The Situation
Bracknell Forest Borough Council is a local government authority looking after the population of Bracknell Forest, a community situated in Berkshire. Covering an area of 10,937 hectares (27,024 acres) the Borough has as of 2003 an estimated population of 110,100. The council has a vision to make Bracknell Forest a place where all people can thrive; living, learning and working in a clean, safe and healthy environment. They take responsibility for a number of crucial areas including Education, Children’s Services, Libraries, Leisure services, Social Services and Housing.
Delivering such a wide range of services means the council has to work to ensure that their budget is focussed on delivering services that make a difference to local people. Council staff are constantly monitoring for way to minimise “routine” and ongoing tasks such as IT maintenance.
In June 2006 the council started an ongoing project to standardise their IT structure including simplifying the Microsoft - and Novell file server environment. They wanted to improve performance and cut costs for the 340 users of the Citrix Infrastructure that compliments the current user base of 1400. They turned to RES Wisdom as it was the simplest way to ensure simple upgrades to the system and future proof the system.
The Challenge
Council IT staff found they were spending much of their time bogged down in the routine maintenance of servers using Citrix to maintain applications. They needed to unify servers to reduce support costs across organisation and running the management of applications up and down the system. It was hoped creating like for like servers and a uniform build across the organisation would create a structure that was more in keeping with the exacting demands of a local government body in 2007.
Richard Dawson IT Services Manager, Bracknell Forest Borough Council; “The piecemeal way the IT infrastructure had been built over the years was not adequate enough to offer the level of support that was needed. We needed to transform the structure so it was stable, and standardised from end to end. RES Wisdom was the only product we looked at as it was the only one that could deliver the functionality we needed to maintain the system.”
"We no longer have to spend much of our time cobbling together inadequate
in-house software programs to cope with an irregular server set up."
Richard Dawson
IT Service Manager • Bracknell Forrest Borough Council
The Solution
The council IT department needed to find a way to maintain servers that would cut the amount of time staff spent on doing a routine yet tricky job. They had created a number of in-house products over the years but this was definitely not best practice. Bracknell Forest Council staff chose RES Wisdom as they felt it was the solution that best suited their needs. It plays a key support role for administrators by completing complex tasks ensuring server rebuilds and ensuring standard reconfigurations in seconds. RES Wisdom allows for routine maintenance in a fraction of the time automating IT tasks across the entire network, freeing the System Administrator to concentrate on other tasks and therefore reducing time to deliver. Consistent performance throughout the organization allowed for an improvement in IT productivity. Administrators could organize and streamline all Citrix Servers quickly and easily.
RES Wisdom offered the capability the council needed and also slotted into the existing Citrix infrastructure of council’s 340 users. Staff now had the ability to build automated modules and software without any manual interaction.
The Benefits
The fully automated nature of RES Wisdom meant that IT staff could drastically cut the time spend on the routine maintenance of servers. The time spent maintaining a server was cut from one day to an hour. With twenty servers across the organisation this has had a dramatic impact on projects carried out by the IT staff. IT staff have found they are able to shave two weeks off the length of an IT project. The organisation can now allocate its IT resources to areas where they are needed most.
Richard Dawson, IT Services Manager, Bracknell Forest Borough Council says that implementing RES Wisdom has drastically changed the working day. “We no longer have to spend much of our time cobbling together inadequate in-house software programs to cope with an irregular server set up. The automated nature of RES Wisdom and the standardisation of servers allow us to easily find faults and roll out standard applications quickly and promptly.”
Justin Swyer Citrix Specialist, ICT Services, Bracknell Forest Borough Council concludes “The implementation of RES Wisdom has had a dramatic impact on our organisation.
We no longer have to spend much of our time cobbling together inadequate in-house software programs to cope with an irregular server set up.
Richard Dawson, IT Service Manager, UK