SCC bridges over troubled waters

In these belt-tightening times even the organisation that manages some 2,200 miles of the UK's waterways seeks to cut its IT costs, as Fleur Doidge discovers

Fibre networking beside the canals will support communications between locations

British Waterways has chosen pan-European integrator SCC to be its sole provider of integrated IT across its entire infrastructure following a competitive tender.

Tracy Westall, a director responsible for public sector business at SCC, said the deployment revolves around technologies that can be delivered as a service.

“Proven to remove inefficiencies and the organisation’s overspend, this is a practical and flexible solution that will free up resources that can be redirected towards maintaining the waterways,” said Westall.

“Forward-thinking and bold in its approach, British Waterways is strongly positioned to improve services to customers and partners, in line with its vision for the future.”

According to British Waterways, UK canals and rivers are enjoying a renaissance and are busier and in better condition than they have been for generations. The organisation cares for 80 per cent of English, Scottish and Welsh canals and rivers, totalling some 2,200 miles of waterways.

Half the population live within five miles of a British Waterways canal or river, and some 3.4 million people visit them each fortnight, including 33,000 leisure boats and 30,000 canoeists.

The organisation has about 2,000 staff and 122 networked offices. Robin Evans, chief executive of British Waterways, said the organisation’s absolute priority is to maintain investment in the waterways and this means reducing spending elsewhere.

“The proposed new structure will both redirect important funding to essential works, but also make us much more responsive to customers and partners,” said Evans.

The strategic review, dubbed ‘A Vision for the Future of Our Canals and Rivers’, and plan for 2012 is likely to affect every part of British Waterways. It has also influenced the decision to review how technology is delivered back to the business to achieve value for money, performance improvement and flexibility, according to Evans.

In the 2008­-09 financial year, British Waterways spent £101.6m on waterway maintenance and major works. Even though the organisation sells about £5m of water each year, its costs are diverse and extensive ­ some 28,949 tonnes of fly-tipped rubbish and visitor waste has to be removed every year.

Water works
The canals and rivers involved contain about 200,000 megalitres of water, half of which is recycled and supplied to users such as farmers and fire brigades. The organisation is aiming for increased sustainability, working on renewable energy projects. In themselves, the canals and rivers offer options for sustainable freight transport and provide £67m-worth of vital flood defence and drainage that helps counter climate change by transferring, intercepting and storing water.

The SCC IT transition must happen in less than three months to mitigate risk. The contract has been handed over from Fujitsu, which signed up in 2004 to deliver a five-year £7.5m IT revamp as part of a full outsourcing deal that would cut running costs by 35 per cent.

This latest round of efficiency improvements and internal restructuring with SCC at the helm is aimed at achieving savings of another £10m.

Fujitsu had been working on restructuring British Waterway’s existing IT infrastructure ­ consolidating servers by 60 per cent and improving communications between head office and engineers. Data-rich technical drawings must be accessible to staff working remotely.

Fujitsu remotely managed British Waterways’ desktops and provided helpdesk support. The organisation has an overall business objective of becoming largely self-sufficient of Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (Defra) funding by 2012.

SCC is also remotely managing the desktops and providing support around the clock. The integrator has implemented a fully managed and hosted service that includes the support and maintenance of its 1,500 PCs, desktop support, datacentre server hosting, an ISO 20000-certified service desk, Microsoft application support and network security.

An SLA has been drawn up that, according to SCC, goes beyond measuring performance to include relationship management, the success of ongoing transformation and the value of advice in strategic terms.

Server virtualisation will aim at further reducing energy consumption and machine utilisation. Remote management toolsets deployed by SCC will aim to improve control and availability of the network at lower risk, through technology as a service (TaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) programmes.

Support on a cost-per-user basis should extend the opportunities for remote working and Microsoft Sharepoint will be used to improve end-user communications.

The organisation currently uses Microsoft’s SharePoint 2003 for its intranet, but SCC will migrate all that information to SharePoint 2007, mainly for digitising documents.
After the migration is complete, SharePoint 2007 will be the basis for its corporate intranet and document archiving.

A managed services contract with Easynet uses some 500 miles of fibre-optic networking between 20 locations, laid under the towpaths of the rivers and canals.
SCC’s datacentre is connected directly to Easynet’s network. For other offices, British Waterways mixes leased lines and ADSL in sites with only a couple of PCs. IP telephony and videoconferencing are also supported to cut call and travel costs.

British Waterways has been quoted as saying that the decision to change outsourcing partners was driven by a need to further transform and improve the services delivered by technology, as well as ensuring operating costs go as low as they can.

Clauses around data security have also been written into the new contract, with SCC’s datacentre already being audited to ensure its security ­ not just the external environment, but how the datacentre is actually trying to secure the organisation’s data.

Richard Walsh, head of IT for British Waterways, said the organisation had to respond to pressure for the smartest, fastest and greenest solutions, delivered when and where they are needed, at a predictable cost.

“This requires us to be more flexible in how we deliver systems to our people and extend the opportunities for remote working,” said Walsh.

“We wanted a genuine collaboration with an organisation that both understands our culture and will help achieve service transformation, supported by the best available SLAs. And SCC delivered with the minimum disruption possible.”

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