Local authorities are under pressure as never before to cut costs significantly and quickly. At the same time, public sector organisations must focus on stimulating their local economy, particularly in rural areas, to help drive the recovery.  Little, if anything, can – or should – be ruled out.

So what are your options?  Sharing services and greater collaboration within and between public sector organisations can offer considerable cost savings.  By partnering and working more collaboratively with public and private sector partners, the private sector organisations, voluntary organisations and community groups within your regions, you can combine resources, skills and experience to deliver more for less.

We can help local authorities to collaborate at three levels:

Organisational collaboration

• Remove organisational and location barriers, allowing staff to work from any location

• Consolidate the number of data centres within a region

• Achieve economies of scale through aggregation of demand across a region

• Reduce duplication and inefficiency by deploying shared business services,  shared applications and shared resources,  e.g. shared contact centres, shared CCTV control rooms, shared out of hours help desks

Collaboration between individuals

• Improve working practices and outcomes by reducing barriers to the flow of information across and between organisations.

• Provide staff with software tools (telephony, audio, video and web conferencing, document management and messaging services) so they can communicate and collaborate with colleagues that are not co-located.

• Enable multi-agency teams to collaborate more closely and frequently, blurring organisational boundaries.

• Create a culture of immediate collaboration rather than putting off decisions until face to face meetings can be arranged.

• Reduce travel expenses, increase staff productivity, speed up time to resolve issues, and cut CO2 emissions.

Connecting communities 

• Social networking tools allow the public sector to collaborate with communities like never before.

• Social networks enable a diverse mix of community groups, charities and volunteer organisations, public sector organisations and individuals to collaborate around an idea - whether it’s arranging a street party or saving the local library or post office.

• By collaborating with BT we can work together to bring network connectivity to all corners of your region and by doing so deliver network enabled services to improve outcomes to citizens.

We have a long history of helping public sector organisations reduce costs and transform services: 

• Norfolk County Council has a BT network that connects over 1,000 buildings, including 450 schools in one of the most rural areas in the country. Unified communications and collaboration will be available to 20,000 staff, enabling them to work together when not co-located.  Five thousand staff will be able to work remotely and have access to applications, just like being in the office.  By consolidating to a shared data centre located in BT’s  network, the council has reduced the cost of managing school servers across the county by up to 40 per cent.

• The N3 network, run by BT, connects 18,000 NHS sites and 1 million employees across England and has saved an estimated £900 million over seven years

• In the Kent village of Iwade, a local authority investment of £13,000 helped unlock BT funding of £62,000 to bring ‘up to 40mbps’ super-fast broadband to 1,300 homes and businesses.

• In Northern Ireland, BT has been chosen by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI) to deliver a £48 million broadband project to provide 85 per cent of businesses with next-generation broadband by this year.

If you want to find out more about BT’s experience in helping the public sector to drive down the cost of public service delivery without compromising on the quality of services delivered, please contact your account manager or drop us a line at local.government@bt.com.