Late last year Microsoft UK embarked on an interesting and highly fruitful journey with three of our closest customers from the UK Local Government sector.  The three councils, the London Borough of Newham, Wakefield Metropolitan District council and Warwick District council are all members of a user group we run in the UK called the Microsoft Shared Learning Group.

The Shared Learning Group (or SLG) was set up in 2005 with the goals of:

·         Sharing best practice around implementing and supporting a Microsoft based ICT infrastructure.

·         Jointly developing solutions to meet the emerging transformational government agenda

·         Lobbying on behalf of Local Government (or more affectionately the little man of government J) around key issues of the day.

The group has developed into a truly useful forum for the 11 councils directly involved, Microsoft and commercial partners.  Much is happening across 7 focus areas.  Flexible working is one, very important aspect of this work.

I must admit to being slightly disheartened with progress across government to date.  There are plenty of technical solutions that meet a specific need and can (and have) shown dramatic improvements in efficiency and customer focus.  The challenge seems to be in turning point solutions into credible corporate offerings that can make the kind of impact that Councillors and Chief Executives are demanding and citizens expect (in ever increasing numbers).

The reason for this blog is to introduce a video from one of those customers mentioned above.  Newham are no stranger to mobile working pilots and have dabbled with 3G phones, digital pens and tablet PC’s to name but a few.  For this exercise though we took a different approach.  Common sense dictates that people respond better and deliver more when they feel engaged in a process rather than feel they are being coerced.  Our engagement developed a solution from the ground up, based on the end customer’s (in this case a group of managers from across the council) specific challenges, experiences and day to day pressures.  Our only caveat was that once we had captured the scenario’s and agreed a functional solution, we would apply the new technology set from MS (Exchange, Vista and Office 2007) to them to build proofs of concept.

So by listening to customers, base lining and agreeing some corporate and departmental objectives and using a creative process to build strong ownership within the council we were able to move from concept to live pilot within 2 months.  And the killer here is that the solution is almost entirely a customised implementation of standard Microsoft products.  The cost of deploying these solutions (when considered against the sizeable organisational benefits) is therefore reduced dramatically.  Flexible working can now be achieved by councils of all sizes as a matter of course, rather than by exception.  Of course, I’m assuming here that the customer has a broad licensing agreement with Microsoft.  There is no reason this could not apply to any other platform, it just wouldn’t be as good J.

Enjoy the video