Building a large-scale telephony solution
For more than a century, Durham County Council operated under a two-tier arrangement, comprising the county council itself and seven district councils. However in 2009, as a result of national reorganisation of local governments, the seven district councils were merged into Durham County Council, forming a single unitary authority.
As a result of this reorganisation, Durham County Council inherited a variety of legacy communications systems and platforms.
In particular, the Council found itself managing a distributed telephone system architecture that meant there was effectively a different telephony system in each building in the county – each with its own supplier or service provider.
Faced with disparate, ageing and even obsolete solutions – and the excessive costs and management headaches it came with – the council needed to appoint a single supplier to deliver a single telephony structure in order to make economies of scale and simplify the support process. The project would also include telephony infrastructure for a contact centre and the centralising of the customer services function. This would involve the complete transformation of its network, replacing its current systems with a single, fully resilient platform that was centrally hosted in the council’s two data centres.
Durham County Council is a very large organisation, with over 15,000 employees, and the new platform would be rolled out to approximately 10,000 users.
Because of the complexity involved in the project – encompassing a number of different sites, organisations and teams – the council needed the roll-out to be undertaken in a very controlled fashion.