Issues

Enabling change

Capita Managed IT Solutions’ Client Services Director James Devlin and Public Sector Sales Manager Stewart Ellison talk to eolas about the IT giant’s future plans for its business in Ireland.

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Capita is the largest provider of business processing and IT outsourcing in the UK with 75,000 employees and a turnover of £4.8 billion. In Ireland, it has five business units which reflect the range of services provided: Capita Managed IT Solutions; Capita Asset Services; Capita Customer Solutions; Capita Life and Services Pensions; and Capita Integrated Business Solutions.

Capita Manged IT Solutions (MITS) provides complex managed IT services that are mainly cloud based and it also provides IT infrastructure services and solutions. In addition, it provides field based IT solutions for a wide range of customers in both the public and private sectors, from very large organisations to SMEs.

In essence the managed IT solutions business provides infrastructure solutions and services to organisations. “We first get to understand customers’ business requirements, their challenges and what they are trying to do to make their business more effective and efficient. Then design a solution that will take them from wherever they are on their IT journey to where they need to be. It is also important to future proof any solution,” emphasises James Devlin, who is Capita Managed IT Solutions’ Client Services Director for the island of Ireland.

“We have a strong track record in providing infrastructure solutions. We can provide the full range of services from design through to computing services, storage and network services and support of applications and end user devices such as desktop, laptop and mobile devices,” adds Devlin. “We have a large shared services office and a large field services team to support customers on the island of Ireland. We also have technical and support staff on customer sites.”

With the ever increasing speed of technological change it is an increasing challenge to meet customers’ needs in such a fluid environment. “We have in depth expertise in managing both complexity and speed of change. Our strength is our people. We invest in the best people we can recruit and then train them to be even better,” says Devlin. Capita MITS helps clients meet the complex challenges of today’s IT environment. Cloud services are a core part of the company’s strategy. It has its own Capita private cloud-based solutions and also helps customers adopt public cloud solutions, if they want to use something like Microsoft’s Office 365 or Azure services. Most clients look for a hybrid solution, often using their own data centre whilst putting other services into a cloud model.

Data management supports the company’s cloud services. “Customers have more data than ever before and we help them not just to manage it, store it and be able to recover it but we also help them harness the benefit of it by understanding the value of the data they have,” highlights Devlin.

Mobility and wireless gives clients access to their data wherever they need it and is another strong part of Capita’s offering. In its education business it manages 9,000 wireless end points, which also gives an idea of the scale of the company’s operations. “We are a big scale business, with over 2,000 customers. We manage 115,000 end user devices, 9,000 servers and process 400,000 service desk interactions each year.”

“We are a high volume business but when you are an individual Capita customer, my ambition as Client Services Director is that you are treated as an individual customer and receive excellent customer service,” he adds.

Public sector

Public Sector Sales Manager Stewart Ellison sees the challenge across the public sector as restructuring services to deliver efficiency and effectiveness “and that is the case everywhere, not just in Ireland”. He acknowledges that the public sector in Ireland now sees the value in adopting the shared services model and he sees Capita playing a key role in these changes. The consolidation of services amongst public bodies in sharing services inevitably leads to business change: “What we essentially do is to enable that change by providing ICT services that make it happen. At one level we are integrating businesses and at the lower level we are changing individual business processes.”

“For example, in our engagement with the Department of Justice and Equality (DJE) we have developed a new solution over the past year and we are now looking at extending its use to other parts of the justice system. It is a good example of building something that is designed to grow and integrate other organisations into it, which reflects the Government ‘share and reuse’ approach.”

Ellison highlights that the way IT companies interact with the public sector has fundamentally changed with the introduction of the new Government framework contracts for IT services. “Before we would have pitched our capabilities, then they would have gone out to tender and got numerous responses.”

Capita MITS has recently qualified for the Office of Government Procurement/Department of Public Expenditure and Reform framework for storage and servers which is core business for the company. Ellison says that by getting onto the framework “we now have a vehicle for delivering services to public sector customers”.

A key focus for the company is the sharing and reusing of services, which has been demonstrated in its work with the Department of Justice and Equality. Capita has a strong track record in the justice sector and also in health care. It offers a wide range of services to health and social care organisations in Northern Ireland from help desk support through infrastructure managed solutions to the roll out of changing and upgrading laptops. It is looking at the health sector south of the border which is also seeing significant change.

Energy and utilities

Capita MITS has its origins in the energy and utilities sector. It has a 18-year relationship with NIE Networks, which is owned by ESB, and provides the energy utility with a full managed service together with some separate solutions to the parent company. Capita MITS is supporting the launch of a new messaging system which will be used by the energy utilities sector in Ireland. It also provides a full managed service to the Viridian Group, which makes it a significant player in the utilities sector.

Ellison highlights the role Capita MITS has as an ‘integrator’ of not just third party services but of the expertise in the wider Capita Group. This internal expertise includes smart metering, with AMT-Cybex as part of the Capita Group and a recognised innovator in smart metering technology. There is a similar opportunity in brokering Capita’s data analytics expertise into Ireland. Ellison sees this as an increasingly important area for the public sector with projects such as Dublinked, where the four Dublin local authorities have come together on an open data initiative.

Although much of the focus for the company will be about the delivery of such new services, Devlin brings it back to the importance of meeting customers’ needs. “A key focus for us is not just delivering an excellent service to our customers but also ensuring that their customers get the same level of service.

“If you are a health service user you are looking for a faster appointment and for that appointment to be managed in an efficient way. Some of our health care experience in Northern Ireland is transferable here. For example, we provide a single sign-on application to 16,000 health care staff which saves doctors and nurses time; time that can be better spent at the patient’s bedside,” he adds.

Education

Education is a particular strength of Capita’s business. In Northern Ireland it is delivering the first private education cloud in Europe for over 1,100 schools under the Classroom 2000 (C2k) initiative. The Capita Group as a whole works with over 21,000 schools in the UK delivering services within IT and software, HR and Resourcing, Property, leasing and asset financing.

For Capita MITS our focus is on working in partnership with schools to deliver and support an ICT infrastructure which will help them to achieve their teaching and learning objectives as well as education solutions and services such as wireless and broadband connectivity, Google and Office 365 platforms and training and consultancy. We are doing this with over 2,500 schools, managing 6,000 servers in the education sector and 80,000 end user devices. Capita’s MySchool application has 380,000 users delivered via a private cloud.

Another example of Capita’s depth of experience in delivering public services is the large scale, long-term contract with the Driver & Vehicle Agency (DVA) in Northern Ireland to manage its MOT [equivalent of NCT scheme].

“We provide a contact centre, both telephone and online, to take bookings for the tests and we manage all the back end processing for the bookings. We also provide all the printers and servers in each of the 15 test centres. We manage the process from the initial booking right through to the customer getting the final MOT certificate in their hand,” explains Devlin.

Future

Capita MITS plans further expansion of its Dublin base. The DJE contract has created a new infrastructure asset service which is hosted in the Revenue Commissioners data centre. “We have a team of people on site in the DJE building in St Stephen’s Green in Dublin and a separate help desk operation in Dublin. We have the capability to expand our Dublin operation and are now looking for opportunities to do that,” concludes Ellison.

“We’re delighted with the work Capita have completed to date with regards to the service desk, networking and storage; supported by an on-site technical team. This is a major success and a significant step forward for the Department over all. Capita’s model for delivering this comprehensive service will provide the Department and other public bodies a new, robust and scalable solution adhering to the principles of sharing and reuse as defined in the Public Sector ICT Strategy”.

John Kennedy, Head of ICT

Contact            

James Devlin, Client Services Director

james.devlin@capita.co.uk      

Stewart Ellison, Public Sector Sales Manager

stewart.ellison@capita.ie    

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