Wiring London's flagship
Published: 25 Nov 2002 12:04 GMT
Keith Beddard had an IT manager's nightmare. With 500 users in one office, he had to move them to another building in eight weeks' time. The new building was not completed, and he had to install the network. When the time came, he would have one weekend to make the move.
What made it a nightmare was one fact. The deadline was absolutely fixed - as fixed as any deadline in the world. Because it was in the Queen's diary. She was due to open the new building.
If he failed - and public sector IT in the UK is littered with failures -- it would be a very public failure, and would affect the fate of the most controversial arm of government in the UK. Because the new building is none other than City Hall, the office of the Greater London Authority (GLA), the elected body headed by the first elected Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.
ZDNet is willing to bet that on at least one occasion, Mr Beddard dreamt that he was in the wiring closet in his pyjamas, trying to untangle the network when Her Majesty arrived.
Most new government bodies have a year of running in "shadow running", where the systems are in place, but no live work is done, to make sure they work properly. Mr Beddard had no such luxury. As one of the GLA's first employees when it was set up in 1999, he had to provide IT systems for the office in its first temporary home, in an office block near the Houses of Parliament, and then plan and supervise the move to the new building, created specially for the GLA next to Tower Bridge.
Given these requirements, the GLA's IT strategy is one of taking safe options, but making sure there is room to adopt newer ideas. For instance, while many green-field sites set out with IP telephony converged onto the same LAN as data, this was too ambitious and risky for the GLA - but it is important to make sure the infrastructure was ready for IP voice when the time comes.
Evolution of IT
In July 1999, the GLA moved into the top floor of its temporary home. In May 2000 there were elections, and the Authority's work started in earnest. While that continued, however, the new building was being constructed, and it finally opened on July 23, 2002.
"The Mayor and assembly had to start work immediately, even though they would have to move in two years," says Beddard. The major challenge was to get best value from IT in one setting - a traditional office block -- for one year, then move what assets could be used to a new building whose requirements are very different. The network in the new building cost £500,000, and the Authority moved about £1 million of IT equipment with it.
The new building, by architect Norman Foster, is a challenge in itself, its curved shape designed to absorb minimum heat from the sun, to allow natural cooling using ground water pumped up from the earth through boreholes, and run through hollow beams. The whole building is intended to be environmentally friendly, and give the public maximum access, two requirements which made demands on the IT infrastructure.
In its temporary home, a Layer 2 network was enough for the nascent GLA, and the body inherited a managed voice service run by the government. In the new building, it now has a Layer 3 network, as well as an IP-ready voice system.
In Romney House, our managed voice service was not user friendly," says Beddard. It made sense to pick up the readymade service and run with it, despite its shortcomings, but to change it when possible. It provided a call-centre based in Glasgow, to answer specific queries from Londoners about services, he says.
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