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Hammersmith & Fulham

CDW empowers Modern Workplace digital transformation at London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham

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London Council streamlines deployment of new devices to over 2800 users with minimal downtime, boosting productivity through enhanced IT services

Hammersmith & Fulham’s Council is a local authority in Greater London, England. It delivers services across a population of 188,687 in 82,451 households. The Council employs skilled staff responsible for delivering a wide range of services to its community, including education, transport, housing, waste management, social services, community services and public amenities as well as planning and development.

The Challenge

Hammersmith & Fulham’s Council staff work across the organisation delivering services to its community. However, its IT estate was fragmented across multiple vendors, leading to service continuity issues and hardware incompatibilities. It had inaccurate asset tracking with inventory gaps as well as high IT support workload.

With the Council’s major support contract due to expire, it sought to consolidate all IT hardware services under one provider for consistency and robustness. The Council embarked on an IT project, “Tech-tonic 2,” a comprehensive refresh of its end-user computing environment. It focused on modernising the Council’s devices to Windows 11 and streamlining IT operations, with extensive, cost-efficient asset management from purchase through to deployment

By partnering with CDW, we've not only refreshed our entire device estate with minimal disruption, we've also transformed how we manage IT assets day-to-day. The Tech-tonic 2 project has noticeably reduced our IT overhead - our teams can focus on serving residents rather than fixing laptops. It's been a game changer for our digital workplace.

Quentin Books

Head of Service Management at Hammersmith and Fulham Council

The Solution

The Council chose CDW as a trusted partner for its proven public sector expertise. CDW had successfully worked on IT initiatives for other Councils, demonstrating understanding of local government IT challenges and requirements.

CDW proposed an end-to-end Modern Workspace solution addressing the Council’s needs for new hardware, a modern operating system, and ongoing support. Approximately 2,800 new HP laptops and desktops were provided to replace the Council’s old devices. All units came pre-configured with Windows 11 and the required applications to ensure a smooth transition and easy out-of-the-box experience for the end-user.

Following a pilot, a phased rollout enabled adjustments and minimised disruption to council operations. CDW’s Adoption and Change Management team provided training materials and guides to support a smooth transition, avoiding productivity dips.

CDW provided consultancy services working with the Council’s team to deliver the project, working collaboratively throughout and ensuring its success. This included workshops to understand the Council’s requirements, an onsite Tech Hub to provide walk-in immediate support to employees, Asset Management services to provide traceability for all equipment and software, and weekly governance meetings to keep the project on track.

CDW’s Logistics and Technology Centre (LTC) ensured each device was tested and pre-provisioned, providing an out-of-the-box experience to the Council’s employees. Users were able to experience their first time login with all their previously assigned software, security policies, and settings in place, drastically reducing the strain,

CDW made the distribution of the 2,800 devices simple and easy to manage. The mechanisms they have in place to build large numbers of machines quickly and then store them ready for delivery solved many of the problems we have had with this kind of project in the past.

David Wadham

Programmer Manager for Tech-tonic 2

Why CDW?


The success of the modern workspace digital transformation project was underpinned by several key factors:

  1. CDW’s proven track record in delivering largescale projects to the public sector demonstrated its ability to operate efficiently and deliver end-to end IT solutions, critical to meet Hammersmith & Fulham Council’s requirements. CDW’s collaborative approach ensured that the project was deployed successfully, with any risks mitigated and problems addressed in an open, transparent way.
  2. A dedicated on-site technical presence in a local Tech Hub for the project and beyond, helps handle support needs with the new devices, minimising end-user downtime, contributing to the overall positive user experience.
  3. CDW’s five-year managed service contract helps the Council to budget and manage IT assets and costs. CDW’s asset management solution addresses the Council’s challenge of tracking devices once deployed to end users, improves visibility and control over the device estate and enables better lifecycle management.
  4. CDW was able to provide end-to-end logistics, consolidating the procurement journey into a single streamlined process, managing secure warehousing, imaging, packaging, and delivery of new devices to each user. Arranging collection of old devices for recycling or certified disposal, minimised downtime and supported the Council’s digital inclusion and sustainability goals.
  5. By managing the entire transactional, implementation, and configuration journey, CDW provided full oversight and control, avoiding the need to coordinate multiple vendors.