CentraStage Bristol City Case Study
Bristol City Council | CASE STUDY
Case Study Bristol City Council ICT support secure future with CentraStage, after concerns of long-term sustainability.
“CentraStage has enabled Bristol City Council to achieve more with fewer resources, at higher speed. At the end of the first week, the new, centrally controlled IT management solution was installed and in full operation, across all the ICT Support Service’s client schools” Steve Ralph, Bristol City Council Schools ICT Manager
case study Bristol City Council
email [email protected]
WeB www.centrastage.com
Bristol City Council | CASE STUDY Client overview
The Challenge
Bristol City Council ICT Support and its team of 14 technicians has been providing ICT and Curriculum Support to local schools for over eight years, and now supports 110 schools.
Rapid growth in the provision of school PC’s, and a climate of intense competition for school contracts from other IT serviceproviders, served to highlight problems with Bristol City’s existing IT support infrastructure, which jeopardised their long-term future.
In the summer of 2010, grave concerns arose over the long-term sustainability of the ICT Support Services in the face of mounting challenges and perceived deficiencies with the existing service. With their future at stake, the team convened in 2010 to draw up a comprehensive survival strategy.
Although the team worked to the best of their ability, they were constrained by deficiencies with the ICT infrastructure. Remote support was limited, all calls were manually recorded on paper by individual schools, so that responsiveness was slow, and customer complaints had begun to rise in response to delays in installation and in responses to computer downtimes. Even worse because there was no integration system, support staff were required to separately carry out system builds, monitoring, auditing and remote
About CentraStage
The Solution
CentraStage is an IT support platform with a difference – affordable, advanced remote device management.
CentraStage has helped Bristol City Council deliver more services without expanding their existing headcount. The results are compelling:
A web-based device management platform designed to improve the management of servers, PCs and laptops, CentraStage can save IT support organisations both time and money. From individual users to sophisticated IT managed service providers, CentraStage is designed to run on any device, computer, server and laptop.
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support through different systems, placing enormous strain on staff resources. As school PC numbers increased, this further increased admin burden, hampering the speed of service. With the Council unable to increase the size of the ICT support team correspondingly, this meant that the service could not be scaled to meet the needs of expanding schools and expanding PC numbers. These difficulties were amplified by mounting external threats from a schools budget squeeze, a rapid increase in the number of school PC’s and aggressive bids from rival service providers. In an era of fiscal prudence and school expansion, it was imperative that Bristol City Council found an IT system which could deliver better services faster, more efficiently and at a lower cost than the competition, without increasing their staff size.
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Staff are now able to visit schools and perform tasks of a ‘higher value’ such as consulting and performing a knowledge share to school staff. Increased support, speed and flexibility with which services are delivered and the quality of their monitoring, auditing and response times. Up-dated online records provide readily-available, tangible evidence of the support they provide to each school. Reduced admin and associated labour costs, transforming the reputation of the Support Service.
Functionality includes audit, monitoring, remote support, deployment and reporting.
•
case study Bristol City Council
email [email protected]
The ability to monitor each school in real-time has enabled them to provide an incredible flexible and responsive service. Improved response time by automating recorded phone calls to an online logging form.
Due to CentraStage being a ready to go, cloud service, Bristol City Council were in a position to implement from day one. The previous model of engineers working in silos and schools going through a manual process of writing down support messages before springing them on engineers during call outs was gone. Instead, schools are now safe in the knowledge that they benefit from the network effect of the Council using CentraStage and the Council’s engineers’ resources being pulled together.
WeB www.centrastage.com
Case Study Bristol City Council ICT support secure future with CentraStage, after concerns of long-term sustainability.
“CentraStage has enabled Bristol City Council to achieve more with fewer resources, at higher speed. At the end of the first week, the new, centrally controlled IT management solution was installed and in full operation, across all the ICT Support Service’s client schools” Steve Ralph, Bristol City Council Schools ICT Manager
case study Bristol City Council
email [email protected]
WeB www.centrastage.com
Bristol City Council | CASE STUDY Client overview
The Challenge
Bristol City Council ICT Support and its team of 14 technicians has been providing ICT and Curriculum Support to local schools for over eight years, and now supports 110 schools.
Rapid growth in the provision of school PC’s, and a climate of intense competition for school contracts from other IT serviceproviders, served to highlight problems with Bristol City’s existing IT support infrastructure, which jeopardised their long-term future.
In the summer of 2010, grave concerns arose over the long-term sustainability of the ICT Support Services in the face of mounting challenges and perceived deficiencies with the existing service. With their future at stake, the team convened in 2010 to draw up a comprehensive survival strategy.
Although the team worked to the best of their ability, they were constrained by deficiencies with the ICT infrastructure. Remote support was limited, all calls were manually recorded on paper by individual schools, so that responsiveness was slow, and customer complaints had begun to rise in response to delays in installation and in responses to computer downtimes. Even worse because there was no integration system, support staff were required to separately carry out system builds, monitoring, auditing and remote
About CentraStage
The Solution
CentraStage is an IT support platform with a difference – affordable, advanced remote device management.
CentraStage has helped Bristol City Council deliver more services without expanding their existing headcount. The results are compelling:
A web-based device management platform designed to improve the management of servers, PCs and laptops, CentraStage can save IT support organisations both time and money. From individual users to sophisticated IT managed service providers, CentraStage is designed to run on any device, computer, server and laptop.
•
support through different systems, placing enormous strain on staff resources. As school PC numbers increased, this further increased admin burden, hampering the speed of service. With the Council unable to increase the size of the ICT support team correspondingly, this meant that the service could not be scaled to meet the needs of expanding schools and expanding PC numbers. These difficulties were amplified by mounting external threats from a schools budget squeeze, a rapid increase in the number of school PC’s and aggressive bids from rival service providers. In an era of fiscal prudence and school expansion, it was imperative that Bristol City Council found an IT system which could deliver better services faster, more efficiently and at a lower cost than the competition, without increasing their staff size.
•
•
•
•
Staff are now able to visit schools and perform tasks of a ‘higher value’ such as consulting and performing a knowledge share to school staff. Increased support, speed and flexibility with which services are delivered and the quality of their monitoring, auditing and response times. Up-dated online records provide readily-available, tangible evidence of the support they provide to each school. Reduced admin and associated labour costs, transforming the reputation of the Support Service.
Functionality includes audit, monitoring, remote support, deployment and reporting.
•
case study Bristol City Council
email [email protected]
The ability to monitor each school in real-time has enabled them to provide an incredible flexible and responsive service. Improved response time by automating recorded phone calls to an online logging form.
Due to CentraStage being a ready to go, cloud service, Bristol City Council were in a position to implement from day one. The previous model of engineers working in silos and schools going through a manual process of writing down support messages before springing them on engineers during call outs was gone. Instead, schools are now safe in the knowledge that they benefit from the network effect of the Council using CentraStage and the Council’s engineers’ resources being pulled together.
WeB www.centrastage.com
