The reports below  have been written for Socitm by Dan Jellinek, Editor of E-Government Bulletin.

Index:

Speakers
Sir Michael Bichard - IT profession: progress report
Peter Court - Converging networks - multiple business challenges
Richard Gerver
Peter Gilroy - e-care, technology and change
Bill McCcluggage - Northern Ireland modernisation agenda and perspectives
David Taylor

Parallel sessions
Tim Dawes and Andrea Claire Smith - Greening IT
Alastair Gilchrist - Take up of online services
Dan Jellinek and David Wilde - Web 2.0 - what are the implications for local authorities
Ian Lowrie - Extreme shared services: case study from Adur and Worthing DCs

SPEAKERS

Sir Michael Bichard - IT profession: progress report

The IT profession needs to drastically improve its communications skills if it is to continue to make progress towards influence at the top table of council management, Sir Michael Bichard told delegates.

In a review of progress made by the profession since he last addressed Socitm in Edinburgh in 2004, Sir Michael said that a new survey he had made of the profession in 2007 had found improvement across most areas examined. The IT profession has a better understanding of how their wider organisations work, and is better able to engage with those in power, he said.

One of the key ongoing problems in making further improvements in this area, however, is a gap in communications skills, Sir Michael said.

“There is a big training and skills deficit. Just 25% of IT professionals felt their communications skills were adequate.” The gap was perceived as even worse by those at the top of the profession, he said – only 2% of heads of IT felt their department had the communications skills they need to explain why their work was important, and how it fitted in with council priorities, to other senior managers.

It was now up to bodies like Socitm and the Local government Leadership centre to continue to develop training programmes to fill the skills gap, Sir Michael said.

Sir Michael said the recommendations he had made to the IT profession in local government three years ago still held good today. These were, broadly, to focus on the business needs of your organisation, not the latest fashions in technology; to be strategic, providing a compelling business case as well as a technical vision; to be positive; and to be political with a small ‘p’.

“In my view, you still hold the key to transformation of public services, and there has been improvement, but IT continues to punch below its weight,” he said.

Interestingly, Sir Michael said the latest survey results had found that local e-government funding has held up over the past few years, despite the ending of central government funding with the closure of the national programmes for local e-government. “It looks like local authorities have stepped into fill the gap left by the withdrawal of central funding, though there is still a question over whether council can meet demand.”

Looking ahead, the key area where attention would have to be focused across the public sector, including the IT profession, was service redesign, Sir Michael said.

“Why have we failed so far on service transformation? It is because pouring money into services that are badly designed will achieve small improvements, but the money will run out,” he said. “Service design will generate a huge amount of savings, more than shared services, but how much attention is being paid to it at the moment? We need to look at how to integrate IT at the beginning of the service design process.”

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Peter Court - Converging networks - multiple business challenges

Councils ought not to rely on the Cabinet Office to make their business case for joining the shared public sector ICT network Government Connect: they must work it out for themselves, Cabinet Office CIO Peter Court told delegates.

Court is the civil servant with overall responsibility for the Government Secure Intranet, the network at the heart of the Government Connect family of ICT infrastructure elements.

Asked by delegates to justify the annual costs of joining the system –in the region of £40,000 a year for many authorities – Court said: “I can’t give you the benefits because I’m not you – it’s your business case.

“Of course you’ve got to be persuaded it’s a good thing, and some are saying it’s not worth the money. Email security might be a reason.” Other reasons could include access to cross-government services such as the Joint Access Recovery Database (JARD) to help track and seize the assets of criminals; and a centralised system for checking children’s eligibility for free school meals.

There was also the issue of shared procurement, and economies of scale, in moving towards a single network for voice and data information: “We’re all going to end up on one network anyway. Commercially we’re being ripped to shreds: we’re not acting as an effective buying community.”

Ultimately, network convergence matters because it is “another name for shared services,” Court said.

“In the future, there will be no choice: there is going to be one network for voice and data, an IP network. Everyone is going to go down that route. The technology is already there. Getting there is not a technical challenge, it is a business challenge.”

Court is also responsible for another new cross-public sector ICT project, ‘Public sector flex, a framework agreement managed by the Cabinet Office with a group of companies led by Fujitsu.

Public sector flex – currently in use in two central government bodies but intended to be made available across local government as well – ranges from a group of core services such as datacentre and disaster recovery services through optional call-off services such as mobile IT and additional services such as business consultancy and videoconferencing.

“The benefits include environmental sustainability; greater flexibility; and access to a capacity most public services do not have,” Court said.

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Richard Gerver

A tale of a fly buzzing against a window-pane was used by Socitm 07 opening speaker Richard Gerver to illustrate how not to go about solving your problems in the workplace.

“It tries harder and harder to force its way through the glass, expending all its energy. It is doomed. But there is an open door twenty paces away, and if it did something different it would be free.”

The message to IT managers is to be creative in problem solving and try new ways of working, Gerver said.

He has applied his own message to Grange Primary School in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, where he is head teacher. A failing school when he joined six years ago, he revolutionised children’s attitudes and academic results with an innovative combination of role-playing and trust: he turned the school into a miniature town where the children are in control.

‘Grange Town’ has its own shop, run by children using their mental maths; a museum, curated by the kids; a language café; even a radio station where the children devise and present programmes. Everyone has a wonderful time, feels trusted and valued, and they don’t even realise how much they are learning.

“The next generation of children will have up to 25 jobs in a lifetime, so the skills they need will include taking initiative, communications, and these are not being taught in most schools. We need to do things differently.”

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Peter Gilroy - e-care, technology and change

An impressive series of futuristic projects which are already underway at Kent County Council, applying technology to transform public services and put citizens in control, were outlined to delegates by the county’s chief executive Peter Gilroy.

The first, Kent’s Direct Payment Scheme (http://www.kentdp.co.uk), is a project which adapted ordinary Visa credit cards from the Royal Bank of Scotland into the ‘Kent Card’, effectively an electronic purse pre-loaded with money that is sent out to users of adult social care to allow them to buy services directly.

“There was no product in the UK or US that dealt with the complexities of social care: this card does. In fact it could be used in any part of local government. I think it’s profoundly significant,” Gilroy said.

The county used to order all social services on behalf of citizens electronically, and then receive thousands of paper invoices from suppliers which they then had to reconcile within the system. The new system – which took just 14 weeks from tender to implementation – has generated £2m worth of cashable savings, he said, and has many other benefits for citizens.

“It starts to shift the whole concept of how you deliver public services. Members of the public are already using the card to buy services in Spain, and buying meals from pubs, or neighbours rather than traditional social services suppliers. There is no need to apply for or manage a bank account or keep detailed records.

“It puts people in charge: supporting independence. That’s our pledge across all services: and once you start asking how you do it, applied technology comes in.”

Most resistance to the concept of the card came not from citizens but from managers and staff, Gilroy said. “They said ‘people won’t use it, it’s too complex,’ but we pursued it.”

Kent’s second initiative is to create a new style of one-stop shop for public access to all local public services called ‘Gateways’, modelled on modern retail outlets rather than traditional counter-based services. The Gateway centres have islands of self-service information as well as assistance from staff. “The Gateway centres have achieved the highest satisfaction ratings of any service I’ve seen in my career – 98%,” Gilroy said.

The county’s third new project is a first for local government, and has received a lot of national media coverage in recent weeks: Kent TV (http://www.kenttv.com), an internet-based TV station combining local content with user interactivity.

Programmes range from local news to tourism, economic development and other public service information, and content for schools. Following its launch it received 100,000 viewers within three days, Gilroy said.

“It gives the county’s 600 schools a way of interacting with the place and shape of Kent, and we’ve got people across Kent sending material in. We’re also thinking of developing a sub-section navigating people into council services.

“In my view this is part of the future, and many other councils are likely to follow.”

With these three revolutionary ‘applied technology’ projects – plus a fourth, a telehealth project including videoconferencing to help care for people in their homes – Gilroy says the council has established a pattern of “serious transformational change” across all its services.

It’s not necessarily easy to pursue such profound change, but it can be done if those driving the change focus on the benefits to the citizen, Gilroy said.

“If you want to change things, you have to start from the point of view that people will resist. The way to do it is to keep asking them: why are we doing this? And keep talking about the customer, and what you can do for them in terms of applied technology. This approach is so convincing, even for the Luddites.”

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Bill McCluggage - Northern Ireland modernisation agenda and perspectives

The Northern Ireland civil service and its politicians are making the most of the peace dividend and the renewed devolution of powers from the UK to implement a series of shared services and efficiency initiatives, delegates heard in one of the closing sessions from Belfast.

Technology is duly transforming back-office services in the region, though it is the use of new communications systems to join up services to the citizen that is really getting the interest of politicians, said Bill McCluggage, Director of Delivery and Innovation at the Northern Ireland Department of Finance and Personnel.

McCluggage outlined a range of joined-up initiatives that were moving Northern Ireland towards best practice in the rest of the UK. They included ‘HR Connect’, an outsourcing of all core transactional jobs of the service’s human resources function to Fujitsu and Capita; Records NI, a single repository for all official records across the civil service, which is three-quarters of the way to full implementation; Account NI, a single suite of financial software across the service; and IT Assist, a centralised IT support system.

“These are all back-office systems that delve into efficiency, but that in itself doesn’t excite the politicians,” McCluggage said. “NI Direct is the one in which politicians take an interest.”

NI Direct is a combined web and telephone service allowing citizens to access public services and information using a channel of their choice and at a time of their choice.

Historically, it has not been so easy in the region: there have been more than 800 separate public service telephone numbers, with a total cost for the taxpayer of a quarter of a million pounds for advertising them all in telephone directories, McCluggage said. And even if you find the right number, you are not home and dry: “Currently if you call a NI public body, your chances of getting through are less than even,” he said.

The new vision is to use the number ‘101’, widely used in the UK as a single non-emergency number, and secured in Northern Ireland now for use as a single public service number.

Alongside the unification of telephone services, the consolidation is taking place of more than 80 websites under the single ‘NI DirectGov’ banner, and the region’s government is also looking at installing a network of kiosks and developing internet TV services.

“Together they will allow the citizen to interact on their terms,” he said, reinforcing one of the central themes that has emerged from Socitm 2007 in Belfast.

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David Taylor

Clarity of purpose and good communication skills are among the most vital weapons in a leader’s armoury, leadership coach David Taylor told delegates

With IT, good communication with the rest of your organisation is essential, he said. “You need to talk the language of what technology does, not what it is.”

He said trust and openness are the key to strong partnerships both within teams and within organisations. “With teams, sit down and agree to never say anything behind people’s backs that you wouldn’t say to their faces. You will find you achieve a greater level of openness and trust than ever before.”

With services provided to other departments and organisations, trust was also the key, he said. If you need to adhere to the letter of contracts or service agreements, you are already sunk. “Service Level Agreements have their place – in the bin.

“When someone has cooked you a meal, would you say to them afterwards: ‘it was satisfactory, it met my expectations?’ Or do you say, ‘I went to this great Chinese restaurant last week.’”

Above all, teams and individuals must have clarity or purpose, Taylor said. “You must know what you want to do, and where you want to be. Then you must know where you are; know what you have to do; and do it.

“It doesn’t sound all that inspirational, it’s just logical. But to achieve anything as a team within your organisation it is essential to have absolute clarity about where you want to go.”

Sometimes teams are successful in what they do, but do not gain the recognition they deserve within an organisation, because it is perception that counts, Taylor said. “We are not judged by what we do, but what people think we do.”

His tip was to employ a technique termed ‘hidden account management’. “List the 12 most powerful influencers in your organisation. Then match your people off with them, and ask them to form trusted relationships. For gaining recognition, it will work within a month.”

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PARALLEL SESSIONS

Tim Dawes and Andrea Claire Smith - Greening IT

According to recent research by the Carbon Trust in the UK, ‘office machinery’ – which includes ICT - is the fastest-growing source of carbon emissions. Other research shows that globally, IT is responsible for as much C02 as aviation.

The environmental agenda has arrived squarely on the desks of ICT managers, delegates heard at the ‘Greening ICT’ workshop hosted by Ninevah Consulting managing director Tim Dawes and the environmental researcher and author Claire Smith.

Once plans contained in the government’s draft Climate Change Bill are passed into law, all public sector bodies with an electricity bill of more than £0.5 million a year will have to get involved in carbon trading, Smith said.

“Yes, good IT can cut the need to use energy in light, heat, travel and so on, but you will have to balance ability of IT to improve efficiency of front-line services and reduce their environmental impact against the impact of the ICT itself,” she said.

There are four phases in the life-cycle of a piece of ICT equipment such as a desktop PC, Smith said: manufacture, distribution, use and disposal.

Manufacture is environmentally costly: to make one desktop PC some 240kg fossil fuels, 22kg chemicals and 1,500 kg water are used, she said. This represents five times as much energy as is needed to make a fridge, for example.

The distribution phase is not so harmful; but the use phase has another major impact: the average desktop runs in an office for 6.5 years and uses 16,000 Megajoules of energy, Smith said. This figure can be more than halved by taking a series of measures of which most powerful is power management: for example changing PC energy savings settings and switching the power off a the plug every night.

The final phase is disposal, and this is an area currently undergoing improvements due to the newly passed European ‘WEEE’ directive on the disposal of electronic waste, Dawes said. “WEEE still new but it gives manufacturers incentive to make more recyclable goods, since they are now responsible for disposal. But if public sector bodies specified what materials should be used at purchase, it would do even more.”

Overall levels of awareness of environmental issues in the ICT sector is not high, Dawes said.

“A recent Economist/IBM survey showed that less than half of all organisations measure IT-related energy consumption. And ICT procurement decisions still made primarily on reliability, price and after-sales support. Only 12% of those surveyed rated energy efficiency as a critical purchasing criterion.”

So what should public sector bodies be doing to reduce their ICT footprints?
Progressive activities include monitoring power use by your datacentre; not having PC replacements policies of less than three years; using teleworking as part of a carbon emissions plan; and assessing all new IT projects for their carbon impact, Dawes said.

“This is a long-term strategic issue: you need to understand how greening fits into the overall council strategy to reduce carbon emissions.

“Start by measuring the situation as it is: if you’re looking at measuring something, you have to determine where you are at the moment. Then set targets for reductions, and revise strategy and procurement practices so you can meet those targets.”

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Alastair Gilchrist - Take up of online services

The need to boost take-up of online services is set to become ever more important for councils following the Treasury’s new exhortation to public service bodies to halve ‘avoidable contact’ with citizens by 2011. The target forms part of a new ‘Service Transformation Agreement’ published this month as part of the government’s spending review.

“Get the service right, and take-up will follow,” Alastair Gilchrist, Director of Parking at Westminster City Council and former e-business manager at budget airline EasyJet, told delegates at a workshop on take-up.

Gilchrist said councils could learn much from the approach of budget airlines about shifting large volumes of transactions onto the web, an approach he is now transferring to local government at Westminster. The council has implemented a new system of live parking payments using mobile phones; and has transferred other previously lengthy bureaucratic services such as application for a residents’ parking permit onto the web as well.

“When EasyJet started on web in 1998, the cost of a call centre transaction was around £2.60 a flight, and the web cost was 5p. The key to shifting transactions over the to the web was initially to give some of that money back, as discounts for online booking. But now, you can pretty much only buy online – it is the only option.”

It is easier for a commercial organisation such as an airline to make online transactions compulsory, Gilchrist acknowledged – “they can say if you don’t use the web, don’t buy from us, but for a council it’s not so simple. Social inclusion is an issue.  But these days almost everyone has a mobile phone, and you can get free internet access from a library, so it’s not such a problem.”

As well as the benefits to the council in the form of lower back-office transaction costs, the use of the web for transactions has various benefits for the user, he said.

“At EasyJet we found we had thousands of flights booked on Christmas Day, when you would never keep a call centre open. It is also easier to sell in different languages on the web, with information currently in 17 languages on the EasyJet website – again, not possible at a call centre. The customer can also easily compare costs across different days to fly, and has more time to read terms and conditions, instead of having them gabbled over the phone.”

The council was now forcing people parking in many areas of Westminster to use the new mobile phone payment system by removing the old-fashioned parking meters altogether, having initially tried running the two systems side by side.

“We decided to take them out completely and see what happened, to see how far we could go.”

Registration to pay for parking on your phone is free, and you don’t have to pre-register to use the service. It takes a two minute registration call, which you can make from the roadside. After registration you are texted a code, which you phone back in with your parking location number – displayed on signs in the area - and required duration. Parking attendants use handheld devices connected to a live database to check registration numbers, and the system won’t let them issue a ticket for a paid-up car.

The council has removed meters in three phases, with around half of them – 2,000 meters - now removed, in the areas of highest use. This represents around 70% of former meter parking revenue. People now have to use the phone system to park in these locations, though they can still park in car parks and pay cash, and there are some parking machines around that take credit cards.

Although its use was now largely mandated, because the system was usable and useful it had gained widespread public acceptance and satisfaction, Gilchrist said.

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Dan Jellinek and David Wilde - Web 2.0 - what are the implications for local authorities?

A show of hands at the beginning of the Socitm 2007 plenary debate on the potential use of ‘Web 2.0’ techniques by local government showed very few IT directors – only around 10% - have created their own ‘Facebook’ profile.

This low figure was partially explained by the fact that a slightly larger number of hands went up – around 15%-20% of the audience – when the question was asked: ‘Whose employing council restricts or blocks the use of Facebook in the workplace?

The straw polls illustrate the current concerns which exist in local government towards controlling employee use of social networking.

Leading the session David Wilde, head of information and customer services and chief information officer at the London Borough of Waltham Forest, asked: “Is Web 2.0 about empowerment of the people? In what way should we engage? Do people in local government have the right skills to use it?”

The use of ‘Web 2.0’ sites and techniques by councils breaks down into several categories, the session heard. These include formal and informal use by employees or councils of existing external social networking sites such as Facebook; use of third-party sites which use online interactive or peer-to-peer techniques to try to improve public services, such as the problem-reporting service ‘FixMy Street’, and the use of social networking or online community techniques within councils’ own web services.

The main areas of concern in local government appear to be over employees wasting time in the use of non-work-related social networks or websites; and in related security and organisational image concerns.

“For managers it can be difficult to know -  what exactly are their employees doing?” said Wilde. “But the organisation needs to be outcome-based, and I don’t think we should not use technology to ban such activities. If there are staff performance issues, we should address them directly.”

Sarah Coburn, the BBC television journalist and producer acting as the main conference chair, told the session the BBC itself has an issue with control of employee use of the new wave of social networking sites. “They are impossible to regulate, so you must have an element of trust. Some companies allocate a particular time of day for use of these sites, a compromise which works for them.”

In the open debate session, Tim Dawes of Ninevah Consulting said that attracting young workers was a major challenge for council IT managers, and issues such as flexible working, employee trust and allowing people to use technologies such as instant messaging were key to recruiting younger people. “You can’t lock it down too much: you need to address working practices instead,” Dawes said.

“We should treat staff as adults, but also as children when it comes to creativity opportunities,” Dawes said. “In certain areas now we have a blurring of distinctions, for example, between work and play. We need to allow creativity to happen and yet be productive.”

Richard Steel, Chief Information Officer at Newham Council, said: “Work is changing and we need to be more flexible. The idea of control is ridiculous – devices are getting smaller and connected in different ways, and convergence of networks needs a different way of thinking.”

Alan Kirkwood, Head of ICT Services at Moray Council, said councils have concerns over control and moderation of online networks where citizens might be encouraged to discuss public service issues. “People could use web 2.0 to have a go at the council.”

David Wilde said councils could use web 2.0 techniques to improve services by empowering the user and generating efficiencies by creating platforms whereby people could help themselves and each other more easily. “There is a place for web 2.0 in areas where it can add value, such as in planning consultations. The public will do it anyway, so we need to ask how can we engage. It is not going away,” Wilde said.

NOTE: This Socitm 2007 open debate session was facilitated by Dan Jellinek, Editor of E-Government Bulletin.

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Ian Lowrie - Extreme shared services: case study from Adur and Worthing DCs

First there was snowboarding, then there was kitesurfing, for those seeking their thrills from extreme sports: now, there is ‘extreme shared services’, Ian Lowrie, chief executive, Adur DC told a packed session at Socitm 07 in Belfast.

His council has taken the sharing of services with one of its neighbours – Worthing District Council – much further than most, by forming fully integrated joint service arms in several service areas including refuse recycling, tourism, foreshore management, census taking, pay and grading and human resources. The joint service now features a joint officer structure.

“Smaller districts struggle with generating cost efficiencies across their 70+ services,” Lowrie said. “It’s difficult to find critical mass. Working together, it’s much easier to find cost efficiencies and transfer knowledge.”

Many relationships start with a kiss – with Adur and Worthing it started with a depot, Lowrie said. “Refuse collections vehicles used a depot near the border of the two authorities, so at first we said why not share the depot, initially keeping the vehicle fleets separate. Then we thought why not share staff, and then moved to purchasing new vehicles together.”

Starting with a partnership on a visible public-facing service like refuse collection was an advantage for winning support for future projects, he said. “You need to ensure people see outcomes.”

The project was so successful that the councils briefly considered merging together completely, Lowrie said, but in the end this course of action would have taken around 5 years and was considered too risky to try to negotiate politically.

So the two authorities moved to the idea of a joint service, with joint management, and this was launched in September 2007. The two are now looking at a fundamental service review of the joint service, to ensure all efficiencies of scale are properly realised.

“Why did we move to having joint officers? The pace of change was inadequate with separate teams,” Lowrie said. “People find it easy to pick holes in a proposal that threatens their way of working.” The key is to remove the option of people carrying on as they are, he said. “Joint service builds in an imperative to change – it ‘destabilises the present’. It is no good running new and old systems in parallel.”

Extreme shared services, as its name might suggest, is not always easy, Lowrie said. Sometimes tricks are needed for councils to meet their own deliberation requirements, for example, such as holding joint committee meetings that may technically be formed of two separate committees, one from each council, but take place in the same room at the same time involving the same people.

And there are issues of liability to examine – what if a refuse truck crashes into somebody? In some cases this does mean that one side needs to be the legal owner or employer – in this case, for example, all the refuse staff are legally employed by Adur, which was an act of trust from Worthing and shows how far the partnership had developed, Lowrie said.

Then there was the need to manage people’s emotional response to such radical change, including often the threat or reality of redundancies.

“The keys are: strong leadership including the politicians; to remove current working practices so people have no choice but to move to the new; to conduct an open dialogue; and to communicate.”

Ultimately, councils would have no choice but to share services with other authorities to generate the efficiencies they need to improve services, Lowrie said. “If we do not seek shared ways forward, we place at risk the objectives we are pursuing.”

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