Case Study: Staffordshire County Council

Video Transcript

Afshin Attari, Head of Distributed Government, KCOM:

"A public sector network is a resilient infrastructure within a region which connects all the public sector users within that region. Effectively it's the internet for the public sectors within a geographical region. The other part, what it does, is create the infrastructure for the engagement and the evolvement of an e-commerce environment for government as we go forward."

Sander Kristel, CIO, Staffordshire County Council:

"The PSN will benefit Staffordshire residents, first of all, because there are quite significant cost savings to the PSN. We expect, as a minimum that the PSN will save us £10 million, but more importantly, by having a joint network in place for the public sector in Staffordshire, it's much easier for us to provide end-to-end services to our residents. Our residents currently don't understand exactly what a county council does or what health does, or what any of our other partners do, and by working better together the network will give them those foundations to do that work much easier."

Afshin Attari: "And a catalogue of services which allows the PSN to evolve over time."

Ian Parry, Deputy Leader, Staffordshire County Council: "This is a great opportunity for us to lay down some infrastructure that will allow us and partners to share some big cost savings."

Sander Kristel: "The PSN will deliver new ways of working for council employees I think. One of the most important ones is that council employees will be able to work anywhere in the county, they will have all of their services."

Vic Falcus, Head of IT Service Management: "Currently there are a number of national networks that the county council has to join, so for instance, we're connected to a national education network, we're connected to the N3 NHS network we're also connected to Government connects. Ultimately what we'd like to see is a single public sector network which meant we didn't have duplicate connections to different national networks."

Sander Kristel: "This network will help to improve services to our residents in Staffordshire because it will help the public sector to work much better together, to share the network in a secure way, to make it much easier for our staff to go out and about to locations and work anywhere within the council."

Afshin Attari: "I think we initially really parked the technology aspects altogether and we tried to understand what the desired outcomes were, with the first objective of delivering cost savings, secondly future proofing that solution to make sure it adheres to the PSN standards set out by the Cabinet Office and the third and most important part is to understands how the technology could deliver benefits to the citizens of the Staffordshire region which is the paramount reason for procuring the PSN network."

Ian Parry: "I think we'll judge success by the amount of interest we get in this. I mean obviously there are savings for us to be made but I think the biggest savings down the line are how we can convince other partners and public sector bodies in the county, and possibly outside the county too, to look at this contract as a means of them joining our public sector network and also making savings like we are."

Vic Falcus: "Moving forwards we've already got an agreement with South Staffordshire Health that they'll be joining the network. We're also having dialogue with Staffordshire Police, Staffordshire

Fire and Rescue Service to see if we can offer a network which will provide a cost-effective platform for them and to deliver again, partnership benefits."

Afshin Attari: "I think the future for PSN is very bright. We're seeing a lot of initiatives. There's two initiatives: one is the central government initiative around developing the standards for PSN which is by the Cabinet Office. The second part is the adoption of regional PSNs, as we've seen here in Staffordshire."