Council aims for 100% flexible workforce

The London borough of Barnet has started a three year IT overhaul to underpin plans to offer its entire workforce mobile and flexible working.

The £20m infrastructure will cover more than 4,000 staff, from street cleaners to HR services.

All departments across the council are to put together plans for mobile working projects so that staff can access databases from anywhere in the borough.

Nick Walkley, director of resources at Barnet, said the aim is to create a fully flexible workforce.

“A key aim is to support mobile working. Rather than doing projects in bits and pieces we decided to change the entire IT infrastructure in order to achieve this,” he told Government Computing News.

“We want to get the infrastructure in place first and then we will forge ahead with the delivery.”

Supplier Prime Business Solutions is to work on the infrastructure under a £6m contract. It is hoped that new IT systems will be in place by the beginning of 2006.