Helping to digitise government

Lorraine Butler, Director of Enterprise and Government at eircom Business Solutions, explains how its solutions are enabling greater efficiency and reform.

As anyone who works closely with the Government on ICT knows, these are interesting times. At eircom Business Solutions, it’s been our privilege to work with the public sector as it continues the long-term and far-reaching business of implementing the programme for reform.

As we look to 2015 and consider what may lie ahead, it’s worth pausing to focus on the positive. Many of our colleagues working in public sector ICT will agree that this is actually one of the best possible times for government to tackle the practical work of using ICT to deliver cost efficiencies, innovation, and improved citizen experiences.

That’s because so much of the critical, infrastructure-level groundwork has been done, including eircom’s own investment in nationwide fibre and 4G mobile infrastructure, as well as our significant investment in cloud.

In the area of cloud, every month that passes throws up more success stories of cost-effective IT infrastructure scaling using cloud resources. This can only be good news for agencies and departments seeking guaranteed cost efficiencies from their ICT systems, with no risk that peak-time citizen demand will go unmet.

But while the cloud remains a tantalisingly under-utilised resource for much of government ICT in Ireland, there are inspiring stories of real change, thanks to deployments of mobility, centralised ICT infrastructure, and modernised telephony solutions.

Our 4G network, now covering over 60 per cent of the population, is a critical asset for public servants whose 4G smartphones allow them to capture images in the field, remotely store and retrive images centrally and transmit these images between colleagues.

In terms of mobile technology, our government customers in the health sector are leveraging our mobile messaging technology platforms to co-ordinate patient activities.

Also in the health sector, high-bandwidth radiology images are now flowing seamlessly and securely among thousands of Irish hospitals, thanks to enabling infrastructure provided by eircom Business Solutions.

Our government customers are increasingly focussed on telephone and online as methods of improving citizen interaction. This is in response to citizen preference as well as service efficiency. Customers like Revenue and An Garda Síochána have selected the robust and high performance eircom network to underpin centrally managed services which are flexibly distributed across citizen-facing frontline staff on a nation-wide basis. We have the network reach and the versatile range of solutions to meet the needs of the most critical national services.

The diversity of ICT platforms and infrastructures right across the public sector poses tremendous challenges in terms of integration, efficiency and roll-out of new services. These are not changes that happen quickly, but they are happening, and the benefits these changes can bring – in terms of improved citizen service and cost efficiency – are worth working for. Our vision, in line with government’s, is for a secure, high-capacity, performance-managed network infrastructure that supports seamless information flow, efficient sharing of knowledge and resources, and citizen-focused service delivery.

That vision is one eircom Business Solutions is delivering on, thanks to four key strengths that are more pertinent than ever now to our public sector customers.

1. A network right across Ireland

eircom owns, invests in and manages both fixed and mobile networks, which is a tremendous advantage for the network-centric nature of public sector work both now and in the future. We have the largest dedicated high-speed fibre broadband network in Ireland, representing an investment of more than €400 million over three years, which will reach 1.6 million premises with fibre by mid-2016. On the mobile side, we’re now offering superfast 4G speeds to well over 60 per cent of the population, with 99 per cent population coverage in total, and more than 1 million mobile customers, including many in the public sector.

Although it’s not as well known, eircom’s €25 million investment in an IP multimedia sub-system provides vital underlying infrastructure to facilitate a whole new generation of advanced IP telephony services, with massive cost-saving potential for our government and enterprise customers.

2. Complete services for a fully digitised government

As government initiatives to digitise services increase, agencies and departments may find themselves needing to manage an ever-larger list of vendors. That’s one area where eircom Business Solutions offers value because of the breadth of our services portfolio. We have expert in-house resources, delivering everything from secure hosting and managed network services to cloud solutions, advanced voice, and extensive mobile solutions – including handsets and mobile device management (MDM).

MDM is a hugely important and growing area because the perimeter of an organisation’s network is no longer the four walls of its physical building. Citizen data is now in the field on mobile devices, and eircom Business Solutions has made a commitment to help maintain security in this area, by offering MDM solutions for the widest range of devices and mobile operating systems including iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows.

3. Expertise for peace of mind

Because we have invested in our own engineering force, we’re able to offer genuinely expert guidance to our customers in the public sector, who may simply want to discuss ideas before they commit to purchase decisions.

The pace of technological change is increasing, and agencies and departments cannot be expected to know everything there is to know about innovations in cloud, WiFi, mobility and advanced unified communications services. We invest significantly in these capabilities, so that when our customers feel ready to take the next step, we can offer informed advice.

4. An Irish partner committed to government

Looking to 2015, I’m inspired by the progress Ireland has already made in its reform programme and excited about the potential for some of the more untapped technologies to gain momentum. So much has been achieved already, and we’re keen to keep working hard to help the country achieve even more.

Lorraine Butler can be contacted via email at lbutler2@eircom.ie

Web: www.eircom.ie/business