Monday 10:00 repeated Monday 12:00
Monday 14:55 repeated Tuesday 10:00
Return to Socitm 2007 full programme
Extreme shared services: case study from Adur and Worthing DCs
Presented by: Ian Lowrie, chief executive Adur Council
This case study will describe what might be thought of as ‘extreme shared services’ – where two councils have agreed to have just one workforce. Adur and Worthing district councils struck just such a deal in July this year, the first time anything quite like this has been attempted in the UK. Full integration of services is expected to take up to three years with savings of more than £0.5 million a year being made just by rationalising the senior officer structure in that time. Further savings can be anticipated from changing business systems and working more economically. The move has been positioned as a response to both councils’ needs to deal with ‘severe financial pressures ahead’ which would otherwise require cuts in frontline services, by reducing fixed overheads.
Computer Forensics and the identification of computer misuse
Presented by Bruce Thomson, Security & Compliance Manager, LB Hillingdon
If you enjoy CSI on Channel Five, you’ll probably enjoy this session, notwithstanding the switch of location from New York and Miami. Forensics in this context relates to the recovery of data from computers misused by people (in a broad range of ways including conducting private business, viewing pornography and bullying), and the session will also cover the return on investment of having a capability to do this on an "in house" basis. LB Hillingdon deals with cases each year where the in-house service has helped its own, and other external, organisations provide evidence in support of HR and criminal evidence procedures. Hillingdon staff have been trained to provide evidence to an admissable standard for use by the police where criminal offences are concerned. As part of this work fellow local authorities have also recently been supported with recovery of forensic artifacts.
If you like a challenge, you'll love Customer Data Integration (CDI)
Presented by Tony Ellis, Head of ICT, London Borough of Brent
The starting point for this workshop is that councils really need to know who their customers are, and to improve the quality of the information they hold about them. Tony Ellis is a veteran of CDI who has built and implemented two council-wide master customer databases (for Brent and Hammersmith and Fulham). Tony also chairs London’s Data Connects group for councils involved in or just starting CDI projects. He is excellently placed to show how the adoption of CDI technology and information management principles can help councils build one single source of accurate customer information, and how, once built, the data source can be kept up to date by building a self cleansing virtuous data management circle. The workshop will feedback on best practice and the experience of councils who have started down this lonely road; highlight how service delivery can be truly transformed by exploiting the power of information assets; and outline the shared service potential of CDI.
Business continuity management
Presented by James Royds, Socitm Consulting
Public sector organisations have a difficult task managing the risks created by rising threats, dependencies and expectations. When problems arise the outcomes are often organisational uncertainty, anxiety and tension resulting in poor decision making. But it’s not all doom and gloom: for every weakness there is opportunity to improve and the key to improvement is Business continuity management (BCM). It provides the process needed to sustain today’s increasingly complex service delivery matrix. BCM is an holistic management process that identifies potential threats to an organisation and the impacts to business operations that those threats, if realised, might cause. It provides a framework for building organisational resilience and the capability for an effective response that safeguards the interests of key stakeholders, corporate reputation and value added activities. This workshop is for anyone looking to create or improve a business continuity plan, share experience, or discuss how BCM can be used to make significant improvements to the way you run day to day operations.
Take up of online services/channel migration
Presenters: Alastair Gilchrist, Westminster City Council and Vicky Sargent, Boilerhouse
This June's Socitm Insight report Better marketed: achieving success with take-up of online services, written by Vicky Sargent, emphasised the pivotal role of the service manager in developing e-services that customers will be happy to switch to from traditional (and more costly) methods of interacting with their council. Alastair Gilchrist, Director of Parking at Westminster City Council, has been developing a range of 'e-parking' services in the borough that are transforming the customer experience and achieving good levels of take up - and consequently starting to deliver anticipated efficiency gains. Alastair joined Westminster following a career in e-business that included running Europe’s largest dotcom website (for EasyJet).
Greening IT
Presented by: Tim Dawes, Director, and Andrea Claire Smith, consultant, Nineveh Consulting
Those of us working in IT have a guilty secret - we are a major cause of climate change with emissions from the manufacture and use of IT kit spiralling out of control. So what can be done? The answer is a great deal - but expect this workshop to challenge many of your long cherished ideas about how IT infrastructure should be designed and managed. We will look at how strategies can be changed to make IT more sustainable with examples from those who have already begun to succeed in reducing their IT-related carbon emissions. Presenter Tim Dawes and his colleague Andrea Claire Smith of Nineveh have been working with Socitm Insight to prepare a major report on Greening IT which will be made available to subscribers in the Autumn.
Death by Powerpoint
Written and directed by Paul Levy
The Rational Madness Theatre Company and their CATS3000 initiative brings together people and organisations to be creative about change and transformation. Back by popular demand following the tremendous reception for their Socitm 2006 production The Collusion Of Mediocrity, Paul Levy and fellow players present Death by Powerpoint, a darkly humorous tale of wretched contentment starring Alastair Kerr (Radio 4's Count Arthur Strong), Mark Katz (The Treason Show), Melanie Page (the face of fruit pastilles!) and Tamsin Shasha (Actors of Dionysus). This is a story of death - the death of an organisation and the death of a man who died trying to save it. It is also a tale of life, of the half-life of wretched contentment, of real life and of life in Second Life. It tells the story of what happens when we work to live and end up living to die.
Transitioning ICT to provide real value to customers
Workshop led by Martin Wright, Consulting Director, The Infrassistance Company
What can be done to make IT a valuable contributor to the business - and be seen as such - rather than as a tiresome cost that can be reduced through outsourcing? This session provides a condensed version of a series of successful masterclasses Martin has given to Corporate IT Forum members, and is based on his real life experience of balancing the components of value for both public and private sector organisations. Starting from the definition of IT value as the product of business requirements, IT delivery and customer perception, the session will explain IT value in more detail and show how it can be measured. It will also explain how IT value can be increased - sometimes by doing less – and what IT managers need to do in order to achieve this.
Improving user satisfaction through participation, involvement and communication
Workshop led by Professor Les Worrall, University of Wolverhampton
Most local authorities underperform when it comes to getting users involved in the development of new systems and the delivery of ICT services, says evidence from Socitm Insight’s long-running Benchmarking User Satisfaction Survey. However the survey also shows that councils that communicate well with users, and are accessible to them, tend to score well on overall user satisfaction. So what makes for an effective user-provider relationship? This workshop will start with some insights into participation, involvement and communication from Professor Les Worrall, who was instrumental in developing Socitm Insight’s user satisfaction survey and has worked continuously on its improvement since 1998/9. Most of the time available for the workshop will be set aside for discussion on how to generate effective user participation and involvement and how to improve the user-provider relationship.
Website usability and the integration of third party software
Workshop led by: John Fox, Web Development Manager, and Antony Golding, Principal Website Developer, Salford City Council
Usable websites are absolutely critical for service transformation facilitated by the internet. One important element for local authorities, highlighted in Better connected 2007, is the way third party software is integrated. In this workshop, Better connected reviewer John Fox will present examples of good and poor practice and his experience at Salford on integration issues including the overall ‘customer journey’, accessibility standards, and corporate identity requirements. Examples to be discussed from the Salford website will include the "as good as it gets" seamless integration; the "compromise" (limited flexibility around branding); and the "altogether pretty hopeless” where there is a complete breakdown from proper integration with the main website (or a council's corporate identity) and the user is thrown into a dark room and expected to find their own way out!.
The well informed organisation
Presented by: Roger Williams, PA Consulting Group and Socitm Insight
How ready is your council to take on major ICT enabled transformation? The starting point for this discussion will be a pre-conference survey of Socitm members to capture their perceptions of how information and knowledge is used in their own organisations. The survey results will allow delegates to benchmark their own organisation against those of their peers, leading to debate around the hot topic of harvesting and applying real knowledge in the wider information age. Knowledge management is pertinent not only to the agendas of efficiency and shared services but also to the role of IT professionals in light of the emergence of the Chief Information Officer. The workshop will focus on the challenges and potential value that can be derived from making good use of organisational knowledge and will highlight the six interdependent components crucial to success – information and data, expertise and skills, business process, technology and people, culture and leadership.
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