Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Access all areas: meeting public sector needs with smartnumbers

Improving control room resilience
Tony Watson, Vice President Government sales, Resilient Network talks about how smartnumbers helps public sector customers meet their challenges

If there is one thing I would like to say about smartnumbers, it’s what a strong option we are for helping public sector customers meet their challenges — to reduce costs, increase resilience and squeeze every last drop of benefit out of the investment they make.

We’ve taken a very upfront approach to this issue and always lead with our proven ways of reducing cost, backed up by how we can support their resilience and business continuity.

It’s a rare public sector client who isn’t looking for ways to make savings by rationalising their property portfolio, smartnumbers products underpin this, making changing property structures a simple and painless process that’s invisible to the end user, for example, using smartnumbers to port legacy numbers to new destinations — without the need for a number change.


Our second big issue focuses on business continuity. We have a highly-credible and strong track record of providing business continuity to the emergency services. The same goes for our work with the Ministry of Defence; our work with them is a great testimonial.

Ensuring business continuity and maximising resilience is a legal requirement for the public sector under the Civil Contingencies Act, so it’s an issue that they cannot ignore. We’ve been dealing with public sector business continuity requirements for so long that smartnumbers is now invited to present at public sector multi-agency resiliency forums. We cover how smartnumbers can help them meet their requirements, share how we’ve helped other public sector bodies and explain how they can sweat the investment they have made (or are about to make) in smartnumbers services.

And of course London 2012 is really making people think about how they would cope with disruption to their services and getting them to assess what measures they’ve got in place. Again, smartnumbers is in there already, engaged with the host boroughs, exploring their telephony resilience in the face of the extra strain their systems will experience and the increased likelihood of cyber attack.

The other conversation to come out of the business continuity area in general and London 2012 in particular, is about flexible working. There’s a big push going on to make sure London-based public sector staff can work from home for the seven weeks of Games time to ease pressure on London’s public transport network. Operation Stepchange is scheduling working from home events during February to test that the facilities needed for effective remote working are in place. Research shows that almost a third (32 per cent) of IT decision makers feel losing inbound voice communications would be business destroying, and yet only 9 per cent of London-based workers receive 100 per cent of their calls when they are not at their usual place of work(1).

That’s a specific London pain point that smartnumbers can ease, but flexible working is relevant elsewhere in the country too. All across the country, public sector bodies such as police forces have to prepare to cope with reduced staffing levels as they second workers to support London during Games time. We’re talking to public sector customers about using smartnumbers services as short-term measures, but we suspect that many will choose to leave them in place beyond the summer, as a back-up or as part of a longer-term shift to flexible working.

All the information can be found on our website www.btsmartnumbers.com and in our public sector cases studies. I recommend you take a few minutes to look in particular at our experience with:



1. smartnumbers survey of 100 enterprise IT decision makers and 1,000 London-based employees, 2011.
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