Bringing local quality to ICT solutions

With the Review of Public Administration in Northern Ireland under way and new shadow councils already elected, attention is now turning to the tangible transformation of local government services.

Public sector organisations are facing many challenges. With depleted budgets, it is critical that they do more for less. More importantly, organisations need to find new ways of working to improve efficiency and be able to share services. And they need to do all of this while ensuring the appropriate level of security, risk management and resilience.

This is no easy task. Technology is central to meeting these challenges head on and is the key to better collaboration and improved public services. One company is leading the way in enabling these crucial changes.

Belfast-based eircom is working with local government, schools and other bodies, creating new technology propositions and giving small and large organisations the tools to streamline their operations.

Matt McCloskey, eircom’s newly appointed Sales Director in Northern Ireland, is originally from Ballymena and graduated from Queen’s University Belfast with a degree in philosophy in 1994. He spent almost two decades in senior roles in the telecoms industry in London before moving back home in 2007, and is now helping to build on eircom’s success and drive additional growth.

McCloskey returned to a region making a name for itself as an ICT hub, underpinned by rapid growth in digital platforms and supported by a talented workforce of new graduates.

Partnership

Having been involved in the roll-out of PSN services throughout the UK in his previous career, he is excited about the challenges that lie ahead and working closely with public sector bodies to help them transform through convergence and collaboration solutions.

“I’m driven by working with customers and building relationships,” he says. “My approach is to get a really deep understanding of a client’s goals and objectives, and together finding ways that technology can help to make a step change. It’s about helping them get more for less, streamlining operations, finding new ways of working and communicating with each other and their end users, and ultimately delivering better services for citizens.”

McCloskey adds that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution for customers: “Large organisations have complex issues and my job is to help find opportunity in that complexity. eircom gears itself towards fulfilling a partner role with clients. And that vision of collaboration and partnership extends throughout eircom’s organisation.”

He explains: “Our customers will have deep relationships with key people throughout our organisation, not just sales. We work together as one team with the customer to ensure our commitments are met and our service is exemplary. This passion for quality at eircom is supported by the fact that it has the highest numbers of Cisco-accredited engineers in Northern Ireland. In addition to highly qualified engineers designing customer tailored services, we are very proud of the fact that all systems are managed and monitored by a cutting edge network operations centre based in Belfast.”

Growing our own

Unlike many other rival companies, all eircom’s operations are locally staffed. With its strong commitment to ‘growing our own’ talent through training and apprenticeship schemes, eircom is a confident organisation with clear plans for growth going forward.

The company employs over 50 highly skilled staff in its Belfast office and almost 40 per cent of current staff have already secured at least one promotion enhancement. Its strong ‘people’ culture was recently recognised with an awards win in the Best Place to Work category at the Irish News Workplace & Employment Awards.

“Our people are the vital ingredient that sets us apart,” McCloskey remarks. “From sales, to pre-sales, service and support, we have a team dedicated to the customer and who take pride in delivering excellence. We have a clear vision for and commitment to Northern Ireland.

“We are in this for the long haul. We are making massive investments in terms of infrastructure and are creating new opportunities for young people seeking an entry point to an ICT career. Our aim is to become a key enabler and play a central role in the continued growth of the thriving local economy.”

Achieving great things

According to McCloskey, eircom calibrates its service portfolio to provide a complete, holistic solution to a client’s operational challenges and ultimately “transform the way they work to achieve great things”.

He remarks: “We can connect departments and organisations together and create a single network through wide area networking. We can help employees access this network through local area networking and Wi-Fi. We can help organisations and employees communicate more effectively and reduce travel costs through collaboration technologies. We do this to help clients transform the way they work to achieve great things.”

eircom has an established pedigree in partnership with public sector organisations. Among the projects eircom has worked on was a massive scheme to transform the communications network of the Northern Ireland Civil Service.

The Civil Service embarked on an ambitious programme of reform in recent years and selected eircom to help merge departments like finance, human resources, records management and IT, which had traditionally operated from separate sites with their own individual systems. To support this programme, the Civil Service set out a 10-year investment in communications technology and services.

Network NI

The initial deal for Network NI was scheduled to begin in 2007. It entailed connecting almost 300 government buildings across Northern Ireland on a single network that would be capable of handling shared services and also to reduce the complexity involved in introducing new services.

eircom selected the best and most cost-efficient connection for every site on the network and regularly reviews those links to ensure each site has the optimum mix of bandwidth. The infrastructure is backed up from the network operations centre in Belfast, where skilled engineers can monitor every single connection in real time.

Overall, the project has linked a total of 21,000 members of staff and is delivering huge savings for tax-payers. Recent customer scorecards returned by the Operations Manager within the Northern Ireland Civil Service saw eircom achieve an average score of 9.9 or 10.0 across nine service categories.

Track record

In other areas, eircom has also hooked up 1,100 schools on one wide area network (WAN) and has delivered the infrastructure for the contact centre for Translink, Northern Ireland’s public transport provider. McCloskey said that with such a track record, it is no wonder that eircom is first choice for organisations looking to fully embrace the digital revolution.

“All managed network solutions are not equal and eircom’s service proposition is second to none. We are pro-active in providing fault-finding solutions,” he said.

“At eircom, we know that clients expect excellent service and we make sure we deliver so that they can trust us with their vital communications. We have state-of-the-art monitoring tools and are pro-active in problem-solving, usually identifying and resolving issues before clients even notice them.”

He added: “Our track record demonstrates our experience in connecting central government with links to local government organisations and our ability to deliver high quality collaboration and shared services to make public services better for citizens. eircom helps to create partnerships that work.”

To find out more about eircom’s offer, contact us via:

Forsyth House, Cromac Square, Belfast BT2 8LA

Tel: 0800 039 2000

Web: www.eircom.co.uk