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Qualifying in the Cloud City & Guilds CIO Ian Turfrey is taking a great training institution global with IT Written By: John O’Hanlon Produced By: Kiron Chavda
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THE CITY & GUILDS GROUP
Though a product of the late 19th Century when the City and Guilds of London Institute (the City & Guilds Group) was founded by a group of ancient livery companies, if you think there is anything quaint about it, look again!
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n reality the guilds of London were well ahead of their time when they came into being in mediaeval times, overseeing skills training, wage control, labour conditions and industry standards. When the Institute came into being it quickly established itself as the UK’s leading provider of vocational examinations and qualifications. Today, while still run as a not-for-profit and embedded in the UK’s national consciousness the City & Guilds Group has grown its global presence to 80 countries serving two million students every year in more than 8,000 learning establishments. It employs some 1,300 people globally, and works with more than 10,000 training providers around the world. Its credentials are respected in the leading economies of the world and developing countries alike. As an example, it has recently entered an agreement with Saudi Arabia to increase participation in vocational education from 10 percent to 40 percent by 2023. Some 400,000 students will benefit, helping the kingdom to diversify its oil-based economy and reduce its dependence on foreign labour. But ten years ago, with monolithic and underinvested back office IT systems and a plethora of customer-facing software in place, the City & Guilds Group would have struggled to maintain its strong brand advantage much further into the 21st century. The City & Guilds Group’s IT Director Ian Turfrey was appointed to his present job in 2012. However he has been with the organisation since 2005, progressively
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IT training is taught through over 10,000 providers
updating its software systems and implementing a company-wide SAP ERP system. It hardly needs to be said that IT has evolved exponentially in the last decade, and the path he has set since over the last three years is radically different – and, he hopes future proof, in that business critical IT can be kept up to date by third party specialists. His IT team will not be concerned, in other words, with keeping the lights on, but rather with delivering the applications and services that are core to the City & Guilds Group. The IT transformation started some four years ago with the desktop systems. Till then the organisation ran on tightly coupled back-office systems and old-fashioned fixed desktops and telecoms, with SAP systems implemented in the 2000s. “At that time we couldn’t even
1,300 Number of staff employed by City & Guilds
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A Trusted IT Partnership delivering City & Guilds £ saving through consolida Managed services for critical applications Cost and operating efficiencies through consolidation Consulting engagement for SAP review and transition Guiding the journey to Hybrid IT A Long-term Business Relationship City & Guilds appointed Attenda as its single strategic IT services partner to operate and manage its critical IT applications; and to provide consulting services to help to evolve and deliver its IT transformation strategy. It looked to Attenda as a long-term strategic partner, with the right skill set, people and capabilities to accompany City & Guilds on its journey. As Ian Turfrey, IT Director, explains: “The partnership with Attenda has enabled us to consolidate all our critical applications to a single hosting environment, achieving cost savings, gaining operating efficiencies and ensuring that the different technologies all work together.”
Attenda Consulting Services were engaged to review and assess the current SAP environment, make recommendations, and then undertake the SAP transition to the Attenda managed platform. This engagement facilitated a re-design of the platform to reduce cost and improve performance; and minimised the risk usually associated with the transfer of datacentres.
Call us today to book your no-obligation ‘Hybrid IT Readiness Asse
£2.5m ation Critical Applications City & Guilds’ core applications are critical to its users; from initial engagement via the corporate website, through to the core ERP system and e-assessment platform, with real-time transaction processing to ensure that all learners that are using online assessment can get their certificates. Attenda is monitoring and managing these business critical applications 24 x 7, ensuring that it keeps the business transactions flowing.
Cloud Services As City & Guilds look to put in new applications and engines, it is not all on premise. It is working with Attenda to look at cloudbased technologies and hybrid IT. Attenda’s location and platform independent approach can ensure that City & Guilds adopts the right mix of on premise, public and private cloud services to deliver the optimum hybrid IT environment, to meet its business needs both now and in the future.
Consulting & Professional Services Today’s business survival depends upon IT innovation. Our consulting services are helping to guide City & Guilds on their Hybrid IT journey; advising on their strategy and roadmap development, ensuring that they make the right choices. This is enabling City & Guilds to transform legacy applications, build on-demand services, consume new cloud capabilities; managing their services portfolio across a flexible hybrid delivery model.
Ian Turfrey continues “Attenda consulting and design experts took the time to work with our internal team to understand our coÜlex environment and to provide a coÜrehensive solution for all of our managed systeÙ.”
Ian Turfrey adds, “By working closely with Attenda, as a partner, and letting them know what our strategies are, they have helped us to come up with the right solutions for our business.”
The Business Outcomes
City & Guilds has been able to make a £2.5m saving through consolidating its different hosting environments. Not only does the business now have the capacity for growth, it also has a much better SLA in terms of disaster recovery time.
City & Guilds believes that it is the open engagement that has made its relationship with Attenda so successful. It is already benefiting from the Attenda added value as it moves toward a Hybrid IT model for service delivery.
Supported by HP technologies
essment’ t: 01784 211100 e:info@attenda.com www.attenda.com
SUPPLIER PROFILE
ATTENDA LIMITED Attenda is one of the UK‘s leading managed service and cloud platform providers, specialising in running business critical applications. Our Business Critical IT approach combines business outcome focus with a structured engagement methodology and supporting services and infrastructure. With our structured Review, Design & Change engagement methodology, we help our clients to transform their business services to a hybrid IT model, offering impartial advice to facilitate the right choices. Our clients benefit from our extensive expertise in consulting, designing, deploying and managing business critical applications. We have built our commanding market reputation based upon the delivery of premium client experiences. Through the delivery of platform and location independent services, we can ensure better business outcomes, without compromising security and governance; supporting business innovation and IT optimisation. With the industry’s leading accreditations, ISO9001, ISO27001, ISO20000 and ISO22301, Attenda is a Microsoft Gold Hosting Partner, VMware Premier Service Provider, a SAP Partner, SAP Certified in Cloud Services, HP Gold Service Provider Partner and a G-Cloud certified service provider. Attenda is positioned in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, 2015.
Tel: 01784 211100 Fax: 01784 211200 Email: info@attenda.com
THE CITY & GUILDS GROUP
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deploy a screensaver to people’s desktops without something breaking! And our contact centres were all located in central London where space is at a premium,” Ian said. With the vision in mind of a workplace in which people could work from anywhere using a variety of devices, the first thing he did was to put in place Citrix to allow the City & Guilds Group to virtualise its desktop functions, centralise them and deliver them to users on demand, to any device, anytime, anywhere. “Work,” Ian says, “should be something you do, not a place you go!” Now the traditional model – employees working at the office on corporate devices – has undergone a dramatic transformation, and when people (yes, even at board level) come into the office they hotdesk – or use their own device. If they want to work at home, that is fine, and a virtual private network (VPN) gives them access to the information and series they need. Citrix improved global connectivity a lot but there remained the constraint that information and people had to come through the London office – for a global business operating from Hong Kong to Chicago this was neither fast nor reliable enough. It was time to start moving the IT to the cloud. So Turfrey turned his attention to the telephones, fixed, mobile and internet based. “We started looking at telephony in terms of the devices people need, so as we started moving over towards a more MS based ecosystem we replaced all the
“Work should be something you do, not a place you go!” – Ian Turfrey, IT Director
City And Guilds London Office
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Helping the City & Guilds Group communicate more effectively and flexibly, wherever they are. The City & Guilds Group selected Azzurri as their strategic telecoms and unified communications partner over three years ago. The goal was to transform their legacy telecoms infrastructure to become more agile, more innovative and make their staff more productive. An award-winning solution. We’re proud to partner with and support the City & Guilds Group on this journey by delivering a pioneering and award-winning* managed communications service. * Winner ‘Best Enterprise Hosted Solutions’, Comms National Awards 2014.
My strategic goal was to remove all of our communications systems and servers from our physical sites. ICON Communicate has enabled me to take a major step forward in delivering on my vision of an unburdened IT team where all IT and telecoms are delivered as a service from external suppliers. Ian Turfrey, IT Director, the City & Guilds Group
By deploying ICON Communicate, our flexible, cloud-based UC service, the City & Guilds Group’s people can work anywhere, whether in the office, on the move or on clients’ premises.
A simpler solution. ICON Communicate integrates IP telephony, UC, mobility contact centre and audio and video conferencing into a single, seamless managed service.
Cost effective communications. The City & Guilds Group has been able to drive down its direct communication costs by 33% on its fixed voice and 41% on its mobile estate over three years.
Find out how we can help your organisation become faster, more connected and more competitive through our unrivalled expertise and award-winning communications services. www.azzurricommunications.co.uk
0844 324 0000
Greater peace of mind. Key SLAs and a guaranteed up-time of 99.99% ensure the City & Guilds Group receives a quality, reliable service.
More flexible, more productive, more satisfied. Moving to the cloud allows employees to access standardised telephony features and work anytime, from anywhere. 65% of employees surveyed now claimed they had “the right tools for the job,” a rise of 8%.
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BlackBerrys with Windows phones and started to manage all that in the cloud. We then put in our own VOIP internal telephony system.” This was an Azzurri solution designed to consolidate the existing telecoms suppliers (covering mobility, IP telephony, audio and video conferencing, calls and lines and support) into one managed service giving all City & Guilds Group staff standardised telephony features and the ability to hotdesk from any location, as well as access to a single global directory. “All the phone numbers are now in the cloud so you can access your mailbox, or your voicemail any time, any place, anywhere,” he says. “Then we put in
Business Support Skills, City & Guilds is a global provider of vocational qualifications
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THE CITY & GUILDS GROUP
“We have moved from traditional infrastructure that we own, to a situation where up to 30 percent of our business is on the public cloud” – Ian Turfrey, IT Director
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SharePoint Online as we moved to Office 365.” SharePoint Online delivers the content and document management features of MS SharePoint without the associated overhead of managing the infrastructure on your own, he points out. Just over a year ago now, he added the video conferencing element of the Office 365, Skype for Business, which can cope with up to 250 participants at a time. He estimates that before the implementation the City & Guilds Group conducted about one hour of video conferencing a month. Now it is running at more than 200 hours a month, saving correspondingly significant amounts in time and travel. “This is commoditised IT – any time, any place, anywhere,” he says. “It does not differentiate us as such. I use a set of partners, so I have all the internet capacity I need, am able to leverage the cloud, and the desktop transformation over the last three years has been enabling me to do new things going forward!” It also means that he does not have to lie awake at night worrying whether the software will work or how he can fix it if not; all that is in capable hands, with redundancy and security aplenty. “We have moved from traditional infrastructure that we own, to a situation where up to 30 percent of our business is on the public cloud. We are a big user of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure as well as Office 365. We have consolidated Amazon Web Services and Google. And for my business critical IT which is now run by a company called
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Attenda, I am freed from operational concerns about whether the system is up or down. We can focus on the strategy of the City & Guilds Group.” Ian Turfrey calculates that his department has saved the City & Guilds Group £1 million a year over the last four years. That £1 million has been reinvested back into the business. The board and the entire staff have started to embrace a new way of thinking, and have begun to lose their suspicion of the cloud. This has huge implications for the future of the City & Guilds Group. IT is now able to focus on doing the traditional jobs better, like creating an engine to convert marks into grades, and another to streamline marking; or introducing
The group serves two million students a year
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THE CITY & GUILDS GROUP
ABOUT Ian Turfrey IT Director Having personally saved City & Guild’s IT function from being outsourced as a mere non-core utility, Ian Turfrey has subsequently demonstrated to the company how IT can not only cut costs but deliver strategic advantage too. He has leveraged cloud, integration and SAP streamlining to unburden the business to do bigger and better things.
“IT used to be the last port of call, but now it is the first” – Ian Turfrey
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e-certificates that are impossible to counterfeit unlike the old paper ones (though students can still get a certificate to frame – something of great importance in some parts of the world.) Bigger things are in hand. Control of its data enables the City & Guilds Group to innovate and explore new ways of delivering excellent products and services to its customers. One example is through its e-Learning arm, City & Guilds Kineo. The company developed an award-winning game for McDonald’s when it wanted to introduce a new till system. City & Guilds Kineo created the game, which was placed on the crew website with no advertising or direction. The crew found it, played it, and then competed against each other to be at the top of the leader board. The creative use of technology completely surpassed all expectations, and the crew members were already well-trained by the time the till system was introduced. From employee relationships of this quality – and there are many - The City & Guilds Group is uniquely placed to moving on to matching qualifications with vacancies. What we have been discussing is not just a transformation within The City & Guilds Group. Today’s businesses need to have their CIO on the board, since IT now leads strategy. “IT used to be the last port of call, but now it is the first.” said Turfrey, and there can’t be many CEOs that would disagree with these words, which are, after all, those of a qualified accountant.
Company Information INDUSTRY
Education & training HEADQUARTERS
London FOUNDED
1878 EMPLOYEES
1,300 REVENUE
£129.85 million PRODUCTS/ SERVICES
Enabling people and organisations to develop their skills for personal and economic growth.
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CITY & GUILDS GROUP 1 Giltspur Street London EC1A 9DD United Kingdom Tel. +44 (0) 207 294 2468 ian.turfrey@cityandguilds.com www.cityandguilds.com