The reports below  have been written for Socitm by Dan Jellinek, Editor of E-Government Bulletin. Further reports will be published on Tuesday 3 May.

E-government in the brave new world  Sir Nicholas Montagu
ICT and the Efficiency Review: Mary Wintershausen
Information Sharing for Service Integration Jos Creese
Manifesto for a Digital Britain Will Davies
IO, IO, Here Comes the CIO?: Glyn Evans
Future of Local Authority Outsourcing: Paul Smith

E-government in the brave new world: Sir Nicholas Montagu

The public sector should return to the policy vision of joined-up government that emerged in the late 1990s but has now all but disappeared from view, Sir Nicholas Montagu, former chairman of the Inland Revenue, told the Socitm Spring conference.

"My worry is that joined-up government has slipped from not just the rhetoric but from the priorities [of government]," he said. "We haven't heard a lot about it in the second term. It's a complicated business, about changing attitudes of ministers, officials at both local and central levels and most importantly the citizen, but it is a battle well worth waging to win."

There are some good examples of one-stop shops joining up central and local services, Sir Nicholas said, but the approach is far from being the norm. He said that the DirectGov portal for public services on the web was failing to enthuse citizens in the use of online services because it was essentially still just a list of separate services.

"There's no real hint of bringing them together. And I have a nasty suspicion that if you went through the transactions you'd find yourself keying in a lot of the information time and again and getting a whole series of different reference numbers. That can't be sensible."

The arrival of the web had made a different approach possible, with true online service customisation and automation, he said. "But what's really needed is a reinvention of government which, I believe could dwarf [Sir Peter] Gershon's £35 billion [in his efficiency review for the government] or [David] James' £35 billion [in his efficiency review for the Conservative party].

"Think what life would be like if everyone had a single account with government and all those transactions were netted off against each other and the net sum automatically credited or debited to the bank account. The savings would be massive, in terms both of the transactions themselves and of the prevention of fraud."

Such an approach could be combined with compulsion of people and businesses to use at least some services electronically.

He acknowledged that such a radical vision was not likely to be realised other than in the very long term, not least because of the strength of the civil liberties lobby in the UK. But with a mature discussion of the civil liberties and privacy issues, set against the potential benefits of greater joining up, progress would be possible.

What is also needed is greater political leadership nationally. "It's quite worrying that if you look at the present Cabinet, the level of e-literacy is pretty small. Thought leadership should come from government."

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ICT and the Efficiency Review: Mary Wintershausen

Efficiency is not a new initiative for local government, and it should not be seen as a separate initiative in a new silo, Mary Wintershausen, E-Government consultant, told conference.

"It should build on the e-government programme. Efficiency, take-up and information sharing are all interwoven", she said, picking up the main theme of this year's Spring event.

IT departments must also take care they practice what they preach about efficiency, Wintershausen said. "Just because we are asking for more IT to be deployed, doesn't mean we shouldn't be delivering efficiency ourselves. In a way, the growth we've enjoyed in IT over the past 10 years makes us ripe for attention, and we need to take on board all the things we've been asking others to do.

"For example, if we provide technical support desks over the phone, should we pass the phone answering to our council call centre? We may decide it's not the most appropriate thing, but we need to be open, to have a look at it."

Other areas to look at include procurement within IT services, and the possibility of moving to thin-client systems or smaller desktop systems, she said.

Wintershausen took the opportunity to unveil the new Socitm Insight report, 'E is for Efficiency: Reaping the benefits of technology', which draws lessons from three case studies. They are Bracknell Forest, which has pioneered new ways of working; East Riding of Yorkshire, which has innovated with customer access to services; and West Lothian, which has pioneered seamless partnership with local health services. All three have realised substantial cash and productivity savings.

In conclusion, she exhorted IT directors to grab the new opportunity to be the driver of business change across their authorities, under the guise of the Gershon efficiency review. "The change agent role is up for grabs within organisations, and you should go and grab it."

Outgoing Socitm president Chris Guest echoed Wintershausen's theme, as he urged Socitm as an organisation to take the lead on service transformation within local government. "We are nearing the end of the electronic government era," he said. "Next comes what we have called the e2 agenda, efficient and effective local government. IT has a crucial part to play."

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Information Sharing for Service Integration:Jos Creese

"I have a dream," Socitm Insight Chair and Hampshire County Council Head of IT Jos Creese told Spring Conference delegates.

"Of information widely shared between public agencies, not on a 'need to know' basis, but in a culture of openness. Of information management tools universally available and usable by everyone. And that branding [of who owns information] will be less important than content."

Echoing Sir Nicholas Montagu's keynote speech earlier that morning, Creese said that people often talked about information management, efficiency and joined-up government, but not enough about the links between them, and how they link to service performance. The key is information sharing.

"Information sharing can take place across many tiers, but there are four main issues: branding; technical issues; security issues including privacy issues and content issues such as information quality.

"One major obstacle in the area of privacy is the Date Protection Act, which means sharing can only take place on a 'need to know' basis. But if you are freer, you find information can be used by different agencies in many different ways, in ways not anticipated."

Current performance systems were prejudiced against information sharing, he said, and there was a lack of clarity about how it should be handled nationally, regionally and locally. Creese said he wanted to convene a group of council chief executives to being to realise his vision of free information sharing on a localised scale, to set an example for national progress.

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Manifesto for a Digital Britain:Will Davies

The government and politicians in general need to move away from setting e-government policy in fits and starts, as technologies or approaches capture the public imagination or fall out of favour, Will Davies, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Policy Research, told conference.

"We need to get away from the boom and bust mentality for technology policy, and different approaches swing in and out of fashion," he said. "We need to understand the mechanisms [of e-government] properly, and identify and measure the goals properly."

Part of this meant establishing a better evidence base about what e-government is achieving, not least because lawmakers and the people in the Treasury need numbers to go on, he said.

"But the cult of evidence-based policy-making can go too far: at a certain point one needs moral and political guidance. All the evidence shows that technological failings – be it in e-government, business or e-learning – are at root social and managerial failings."

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IO, IO, Here Comes the CIO?: Glyn Evans

The time has come for organisations to take a serious look at how new technologies can transform their business processes, in a manner often talked about but rarely achieved so far, according to Glyn Evans, Director of Business Solutions and IT at Birmingham City Council.

The best way to start thinking about how to transform a service was to start with a blank sheet of paper, he said. "Imagine you are a new organisation. If you wanted to set up a bookshop today, for example, you would be Amazon, not W H Smith's."

For this reason, it was a mistake to begin by mapping your existing processes, he said. "I think I'm going to take the next consultant who comes to me and says process mapping is a transformational tool, and hang them outside the window," he said.

Process mapping could be useful in looking at the current picture, but not at the outset of a transformation process, he said. You can't make a leap of concept using process mapping, for example to move from rounds-based to on-demand refuse collection."

It is vital to remember that any change process is not just for the sake of it, but to meet organisational objectives, Evans said. "These objectives are usually political and social. So we need as an organisation to be more politically savvy."

Part of being politically savvy is not to mention technology to politicians, he said. "I've never knowingly used the word e-government in Birmingham, because as soon as you do, anyone in a position to change anything turns their back and walks away. It is perceived as a technical issue. So you need to talk about business transformation. This is not about technology, it is about managing information as a resource."

The equivalent in the days of the railway revolution would have been to talk to people all the time about the engines and the gauge of the track, instead of talking about what the railways could mean to them, he said, such as the ability for businesses to transport food goods around while they are still fresh.

True to the title of his talk - 'IO, IO, here comes the CIO' – Evans said transformation ideally needed to be driven by someone taking up a unique organisational role: the Chief Information Officer or CIO. This could be defined as a board level role that combines ICT and business skills, with the main objectives of leading and enabling business process change, he said.

"We don't run IT projects any more in Birmingham, we run business transformation projects," he said. "I have created some new posts of change managers, and a central Project Management Office to support IT people who are out in the departments."

Once you start to work up a process of service transformation in more detail, it is vital to develop a business case from a service improvement and an efficiency point of view, he said. And you need to say how you are going to measure it.

Furthermore, service transformation should never be seen as a one-off event, he said. "Step change is not a one-off. When a service has been transformed, that is not the last time you'll see it – return to it every five years or so."

There are many challenges to overcome, he said. "In reality, we have only just left the starting gate. It is a challenge to ensure acceptance of a change support role, by business managers and IT staff. There is also the inherent conservatism and short-termism of the public sector to overcome, partly because of teh perverse nature of some of the KPIs."

But the stakes are high: true transformation of a business process should result in performance and productivity gains of 10% or more, he said.

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Future of Local Authority Outsourcing:Paul Smith

There is a trend back towards outsourcing of IT services in the public sector, focused on business transformation, Paul Smith, Research Director at Kable, told the conference.

Picking up the theme expounded by Glyn Evans in the previous session, he said many of the outsourcing companies were traditional IT companies, "but they have realised the power of what they have in terms of transformation."

One problem for councils, however, might be that the biggest IT outsourcing companies are tied up with chasing and delivering a small number of very high value central government or centralised IT contracts, Smith said.

"The major trend for outsourcing of IT contracts is of centralisation, generating massive buying power.

"This is evidenced by the pattern of leading contractors. The market leader is BT/Syntegra, with £1.3 billion pounds worth of outsourcing contracts, or 21% of the total. But it is spread across just seven contracts." Other big players such as HBS and Vertex have just two or three contracts each, he said. These are big central contracts like the Defence Information Infrastructure worth 4 billion or Connecting for Health – formally the NHS National Programme for IT – worth 30 billion over its lifetime.

"How will companies also be able to provide services locally, when most of their focus is on significantly larger centralised projects?"

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