Realising the benefits of greater flexibility in the way that employees work

Increasingly, county and district councils are looking at flexible working in order to improve organisational and individual performance, the end objective being the improvement of services to the public, whilst reducing operational costs. Many councils recognise that technology offers options that can lead to a more satisfactory means of working and a subsequent increase in employee satisfaction and performance.

However, for agile working in the public sector to be successful, the systems underpinning it must be reliable and scalable. Remote workers must have access to the same desktop view and applications they would have if working from a council office. The virtual desktop environment must also be able to cope if the numbers of workers rapidly increases, for example during times of adverse weather. Following five years of heavy snows, many councils now have remote working policies in place to cover these periods.

Citrix – A Platform of Choice

Citrix is becoming the standard agile worker platform of choice for local government organisations. It has been successfully implemented by many and is proven to deliver, be secure and to meet the governance requirements to which they must adhere. We ourselves have worked on such projects and were recently awarded another proof of concept for an exciting Citrix project. This will see a dramatic shift to a major deployment of Citrix XenDesktop 7, one of the first XenDesktop 7 roll-outs in the UK.

This proof of concept will be similar to our work with Places for People, one of the largest property management, development and regeneration companies in the UK. Almost immediately, employee efficiency and customer service levels were reported as “having never been better.”