The reports below (excluding the Chair's introduction) have been written for Socitm by Dan Jellinek, Editor of E-Government Bulletin.

Index
Sarah Coburn - Chair's introduction
Tony Travers
John Nutley
David Varney
Andrew Moulton and David Lewis
Martin Greenwood
Steve Scott and Shilpa Arya

Sarah Coburn - Chair's introduction

Welcome to the Socitm Spring Seminar, and to many of you, welcome back to Stoneleigh!

Back in the Autumn of 2004 at the Annual Conference in Edinburgh, Sir Michael Bichard laid down a challenge to the Society and its members. He said that is was time for the ICT profession to come of age. His point was that it was time to break away from simply managing the ICT service, and start to lead ICT-enabled change in your organisations.  This ‘coming of age’ is not just a change in emphasis. Nor is it a career change. It is about adopting a new role in the leadership of organisations, and particularly about getting colleagues to accept that ICT should adopt that role. 

Two and a half years later, you have come together again to network, to hear presentations from colleagues, industry speakers and suppliers with the aim of learning about alternative approaches and to identify best practice.  But overall, you should be talking about your role, and putting some flesh on the skeleton of what being the leader of ICT enabled change means.

At some point in the recent past, we passed a milestone in technology.  It wasn’t one of those landmark milestones that you immediately recognise as you pass it like the Blackpool Tower or the Severn Bridge. It is more like the sort that you only recognise some time afterwards. Perhaps it is a bit like sailing out of the bay of Biscay, and realising some time later that the sea has calmed down a bit! The milestone I’m  referring to is the point when we changed from not having enough technology to do everything that we want to do, to where we have so much that we are looking for ways to exploit it.

So what does passing this milestone mean for the ICT profession?

There are five main themes

• professional skills
• Leading ICT-enabled transformation
• valuing information
• shared services
• environmentally friendly ICT

When ICT simply automated office processes, we knew what the job was about. There were skills concerning procuring the infrastructure: getting the best possible deal on expensive hardware. Project management ensured delivery of business benefits on time and within budget.  Then there was the need to keep the ‘business as usual’ service running with the minimum disruption to service.  All this demanded an understanding of the underlying technology. Taken together, ICT professionals had a set of skills drawn from the technology and engineering disciplines. There were many purely right and purely wrong answers.

Passing the milestone means that services need ICT professionals to lead strategic change enabled by technology. Leadership requires high levels of credibility amongst peers.  Finding applications is no longer a matter of automating what is there. To exploit the possibilities requires vision, innovation and imagination. Engaging with partner organisations and changing approaches amongst politicians and senior colleagues demand inter-personal and political skills. There are few purely right or purely wrong answers.

So we are trying to define a new professional role in a domain where there is a high degree of uncertainty.  Yet your vocational upbringing leads you to seek clarity and precision.  Part of the coming of age is to recognise and accept a foggy and ambiguous working environment.  The defining skills are soft, not hard.

One of the candidates for the vice presidency said that “we’ve only just blown the froth off the transformation agenda.” Certainly, ICT has already made a tremendous contribution. It has made processes cheaper. It has accelerated service delivery. Services are now available at times and locations that are far more convenient to customers.  Most of this would be impossible without the contribution of ICT. However, it is also true that there are relatively few examples where ICT results in doing things completely differently from before. The processes are fundamentally the same as they were, just delivered electronically. The challenge of transformation is to change radically the way we do things. There should be an element of novelty. For example, computers in cars monitor conditions and change settings such as ignition timing and fuel flow in ways that were unimaginable using mechanical technology. Only through a creative dialogue between the business and ICT can we uncover the innovative solutions that will really make a difference.

There is still a need for organisations to value information, and to manage it accordingly. Just think about Tesco. They exploit information in order to maximise profits through customer service. They effectively pay for information by offering discounts through their loyalty cards. They use information about buying habits, weather, seasons and population to ensure that the goods people will want on a day-by-day basis are on the shelves ready to buy. They measure the performance of their buying teams through the revenue they earn per foot of shelf space. In short, information drives the business. Public sector organisations rely on information too. However, compare the effort that goes into collecting information for performance measures – the government KPIs, with that used to distil service demand information from citizens. How many employees actually take action upon finding an error in a system owned by another department or arm of government? Why is it so difficult to engage interest in developing information management standards?  Is there a case for adopting a Tesco approach to caring about exploiting information and managing it properly?

If we simply looked at the economies of scale, there would be a compelling case for sharing many services across local government if not the wider public sector. For example, why do we have so many payroll systems? Of course, we have local government for a good reason. It is local because there are local differences. But, we know that there are many times more proposals for sharing than examples that come to fruition. Is the astonishingly high failure rate really due to differences in local need, or an anxiety to protect local turf?

Will ICT be the hero or villain? As professional agents of change, you might like to think of ICT reducing business travel. You enable customer self-service locally, provide flexible and home working, apply technology to reduce congestion, and bring people together through tele- and video-conferencing. But is ICT really going to save the planet. How much energy does your server farm use in wasted heat? How long do your computers last compared to industrial age machines like white goods and trains?  Information age infrastructure has about one third the life of industrial machines, and by weight consumes many times the energy to make. The industry isn’t good at recycling printer toner cartridges, and how many people leave their computers on whilst away from their desk, and probably overnight too! The final challenge for the heads of ICT is to ensure their organisation sees them as a hero, and not as a villain.

So today is a chance to reflect on these issues.  You can hear opinion from leading speakers and practitioners. You can network with peers and check your opinion against theirs. You can visit the suppliers in the exhibition to see their offerings to help you to deliver success to your organisation. We rely upon our suppliers not just for the solutions they offer, but also for their support for our conferences.

Who better to start our agenda today than Tony Travers, director of LSE London, a research centre at the London School of Economics. His key research interests include local and regional government and public service reform.

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Tony Travers

We will know by November if local government is to undergo radical reforms or if the expected Gordon Brown premiership will avoid significant change, the political and social analyst Tony Travers told Spring conference in his keynote speech, ‘Local government and the politics of public service improvement’.

There is consensus among Westminster insiders that Tony Blair will resign on 9 May and Brown will succeed him in July, said Travers, who is director of the London School of Economics’ ‘LSE London’ research unit. After that there will be a short window of opportunity – around three months – for a set of radical new policies to be introduced so Brown can distance himself from the past and make a strong new impression, he said.

Under the guise of an autumn white paper on local government and the government’s official response to the recent Lyons review, these changes could include further local government restructure; new changes to the powers of regional bodies; and new powers for local taxation such as add-ons to the business rate and new forms of charging for services, Travers said.

Whatever happens, local government can expect continued pressure for public service improvement with no extra money for the foreseeable future, he said.  “The Comprehensive Spending Review will start a long period of zero growth in real local government spending,” he said. “This will mean growth of between 0% and 1% for most local government services, ands maybe even cuts in some areas. And it will go on for some time: it will be the new reality for several years, under any political party.”

Technology would be a key element in the delivery of service improvement in the years to come, he said. “ICT has a significant potential role in allowing many of the things government wants to reform, such as more collaboration between counties and districts, and shared services,” he said.

“It is undoubtedly a way of helping bring services together, but there is also a need to understand the psychology of colleagues elsewhere in local government and Whitehall.”

And he said ICT could play an even greater role in policy implementation if policymakers understood it better. “Politicians need to get beyond their fear and suspicion of technology,” he said. “Could IT drive strategy? It could, if the people who drive strategy knew more about it. They often seem to be wilfully ignorant.”

Despite this, he said many successes had already been achieved in what has already become a service improvement drive spanning several decades. Recent Audit Commission CPA scores suggest that local government services have been improving to a remarkable extent, he said, with all councils now receiving 3 or 4 star scores. And after 30 years of efforts to improve them, British public services were now among the best in the world, he said.

“Town halls used to be dusty, forbidding places,” he said. “But local government is one of the most open and accessible parts of the public or private sector these days. Just go online and look how hard councils try to make themselves accessible: all their websites have clear information saying ‘Contact us’, and so on. Then look at the website of a Whitehall department or a large corporation – it’s as if they are preventing the public from contacting them. But even despite this, they will face continuous and significant pressure to improve further.”

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John Nutley

The harrowing account of a council’s ICT services snatched back from the jaws of disaster was related to delegates by John Nutley, head of customer and information services at Carlisle City Council.

In a session entitled ‘a survivor’s tale’, Nutley related the sobering story of an extraordinary few weeks in the life of his city following the sudden and huge floods of January 2005.

At the time, most of the council’s services were sited in the Civic Centre, a 10-storey block in the centre of town. The council’s IT suite was here, sited on the second floor, which as it turned out was fortunate as the water did not rise that far. Not so fortunate, however, was the fact that all the cables were routed in to the suite through the building’s basement.

On Friday 7 January 2005, the team underwent a normal close to the week, Nutley said, with no inkling in the weather forecasts that anything out of the ordinary was going to happen. But something did: over the next 24 hours, some 47 millimetres of rain fell, equivalent to a month’s rain in a day. The city, with its population of 100,000, sits at the junction of three rivers, and by Saturday night was largely covered with water at a height higher than the roofs of most cars.

“I was on leave at the time, but I starting receiving calls from my staff on weekend overtime saying that the river was rising, and it was coming up the road towards the civic centre and there could be a problem.”

In the immediate aftermath of such a major disaster, there is nothing anyone can do but wait for the emergency services to finish their work, Nutley said. “To start with, there is actually nothing you can do. Use the time to clear your diary, arrange meetings, do your thinking. Because you know you are heading into a few weeks of frantic activity, and there will be little time to stop and think.”

By the Monday, however, formal disaster recovery and business continuity plans began to swing into action. The city was in chaos: there was no power, no heat, council vans bobbing were about in car parks, and the electricity sub-station to the civic centre destroyed. “Carlisle was in darkness.”

Accordingly, Nutley took his senior ICT staff across the border to Scotland for their initial meetings, which were based around a pre-existing disaster recovery plan for which Nutley was enormously grateful.

“When something like this happens, to be able to take down a plan, you see the value of a document that tells you how to put everything together again. Make sure it includes checklists, so nothing gets forgotten in the moment.

“You plan is then a basis for setting your priorities, and it’s a tool for briefing staff. It’s very useful because some key decisions have already been made, and you just need to carry them out.”

The team’s first priorities included setting up an office somewhere in the city, and advising other council departments on ICT arrangements for new temporary accommodation. Then the decision was taken to try to enter the Civic Centre and see what could be salvaged form the second floor IT suite.

The team was lucky: despite having to battle cold, damp, glass, asbestos, contaminated water and rats, and having to replace much of the cabling up from the basement to avoid water rising up into the machines through capillary action, they were able to use generators to power up the servers and discover that they still worked fine, and no data had been lost. Furthermore, using some of the existing fibre-optic cables running through the flooded basement, they found they could still connect with the outside world.

A decision was taken to reinstate for the time being rather than relocate, and they were able to run payroll and benefits in situ on 12 January. And so – thanks to IT staff in environmental suits, working without heat or light, everyone got paid.

Beyond that there were still huge amounts of work to complete in setting up a new customer centre and call centre, in conditions of huge public demand for advice and assistance, but by week two, thanks partly to the existence of a robust disaster recovery plan, most IT services were running as normal, Nutley said.

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David Varney

One of the biggest potential barriers to sharing services between public sector bodies is psychological, Sir David Varney, the Chancellor’s former senior adviser on service transformation, told delegates in a high-level comparison of public and private sector management practice.

“Last year five major SAP systems were procured across government, which does not seem like a very effective use of money. And when I was tasked with merging HM Customs with Inland Revenue to form HM Revenue and Customs, I was amazed at how difficult it was to bring all their systems together, even though they were operating in the same areas.”

The issues are partly practical, but partly cultural and psychological, Sir David said. Rehearsing the themes of his December 2006 report ‘Service transformation: A better service for citizens and businesses, a better deal for the taxpayer’, he contrasted the protectionist culture in the UK public sector with the open culture that prevailed in the private sector in Sweden, where he worked for several years with Shell. “We shared our disaster recovery systems between six firms, and our staff healthcare plans between two firms. And when we were looking at changing our payroll system, one of our staff suggesting using Volvo’s payroll because it was the cheapest.”

A continuing lack of true joined-up government, including sharing of data, was hampering improvement of customer service in the public sector, Sir David said.

“Everyone says they are consumer-centric, but you still have the position where, for example, when someone suffers a bereavement they have to contact so many agencies,” he said. “One son in our research, when his father died he had to make 44 different contacts, and each one asked the same details. At the end of six months he still had not been able to return his father’s passport, and his case was not even the worst. But each of those departments individually will report higher levels of customer service.”

As well as more joining up, the public sector needs systems that respond more quickly to people’s changes in circumstances, for example when they shift between employment and benefits and back again, Sir David said. There was also a need to respond more quickly to the appearance of new technologies, despite security fears that may arise. The former chairman of mobile phone operator O2, he said when he arrived in government he was surprised to find there was no overarching mobile phone or wireless strategy. “People said there were security issues, so there was no wireless. So it took ages to move a printer around an office, as it was all wired in. But these technologies aren’t going to go away – the government needs to find a way to adapt to them.”

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Andrew Moulton and David Lewis

The journey from a standard outsourcing contract to the development of a close working partnership on service delivery was charted by Wokingham Borough Council and private sector partner Digica.

In 2000 Wokingham, a unitary council, decided to outsource all core IT services, the council’s corporate head of IT Andrew Moulton told Socitm’s spring conference.

“Why did we decide to outsource? There was a skills gap - staff were hard to recruit and retain. There was also internal customer dissatisfaction with the IT service, and investment in IT was difficult.”

The Digica contract is worth £2.5m a year, making it a significant contract for both sides, and the two partners estimate that it has returned more than £0.5m in savings over three years in terms of previous operational spend on IT.

But they soon found out that the focus of their work had to be about much more than money, or the detailed terms of the contract: it had to change with the council’s changing policy environment, and focus on improving the council’s services to the public. This is where outsourcing moves towards proper partnership, delegates heard.

In the early days, when a contract is formed, there are often initial ideas and ideals that change later on,” said David Lewis account director at Digica.

“Two years in, we were delivering high value, but we were not agile and flexible, and everyone was focused on the contract rather than the outcome for the council. We realised we had to be agile enough to deliver on the council’s changing agenda, so between the two organisations we put together a framework – which was long, hard work – allowing a cultural shift. Both sides had to change.

“Service improvements were not actually documented in the contract, so we virtually threw it away. We brought together teams from both organisations and formed a new team within the structures at Digica and the council – so we had one structure, one voice.”

Engagement right at the top of the two organisations was key, Lewis said. “My chief executive and David’s chief executive have quarterly meeting to see how the partnership is developing, and the company announces to the council quarterly what it is going to deliver in the next 90 days.”

The company now considers itself a public service provider, Lewis said. “We face the public, not the council – that’s very important. It’s the foundation for shared services.”

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Martin Greenwood

A single senior manager in all councils should be responsible for bringing together all the key issues about integrating web services with other council communications and service channels, Martin Greenwood, Socitm Insight programme manager, told Spring conference.

Highlighting four key areas of activity for effective and integrated use of the web- managing web and phone services; promoting online services; measuring take-up of online services; and ensuring a really usable website, Greenwood asked: “Which person in your organisation is responsible for bringing these issues together?

“There is a need to ensure accountability for take-up of online services is clear and with the right person; to develop a plan to maximise efficiency and customer satisfaction; and to engage service managers.”

The potential rewards from an integrated channel policy are large, Greenwood said. Figures from Tameside MBC that have been widely circulated in the past year have found that the comparative cost of face-to-face, customer call centre and website communication is in the ratio 50:5:1 (£14.65, £1.65; and 25p respectively).

Clearly the answer is to maximise take-up of web services, but few councils are launching demonstrably effective web take-up campaigns, Greenwood said.

To ensure service managers understand customer needs, and any barriers to online services, a council’s ICT team should provide data about website usage that can be used as basis for assessing impact of any take-up initiative, he said.

“Statistics need to be expressed in terms customers understand such as unique visitors, and this is much more useful if related to size of local population and to visitors who are local residents than just the raw data.”

Usability and accessibility of websites are also of vital importance for good take-up, Greenwood said. “Usable websites lead to higher take-up, and accessible websites are more usable for all. We have discovered from our research into website usage that councils conforming with Level A [accessibility standards] have much higher levels of visitor satisfaction than those councils that do not when it comes to finding information easily.”

Another key to effective web take-up is to ensure web and phone channels are properly joined up, Greenwood said. However recent Socitm research ( ‘Better answered: : a snapshot of local  authority telephone responses) found just eight councils out of 468 fully matched a relatively straightforward model of best practice model including promoting telephone services on the website and referring telephone callers out of hours to the website.

And while the initial contact person by telephone was rated as 'very good' or ‘satisfactory’ in 33 of 50 councils contacted, callers were often passed on to other individuals or organisations, or called back, when information being sought was actually available on the website.

“There is little evidence of a fully integrated view of customer service across activities, and a dangers of new silos emerging based on channels of delivery,” he said.

Of course, not everyone will be happy with a smoothly efficient, integrated service from their council, Greenwood warned. As one visitor to the Rushcliffe BC website complained, as reported in Socitm’s ‘Better connected’ report last year: “I requested copies of building regulation documents earlier in the week. These turned up this morning, 2 to 3 days after the request. All very well, but I am now denied a prolonged whinge in the pub tonight at your expense. In future, kindly fulfil the local authority stereotype of unhelpful delay and bureaucracy. Making the process polite, effortless and near instantaneous has left me feeling disoriented.”

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Steve Scott and Shilpa Arya

A switch to online staff recruitment, away from traditional job advertising media, has saved Leicester City Council more than a million pounds, the conference heard in the final session of the afternoon. It has also generated other benefits including environmental gains and an improved service to people seeking jobs at the council.

Leicester City has a staff of 14,000 of which 5,000 are teachers. As annual turnover among the other 9,000 non-teaching workforce is about 11%, there is a need to recruit around 900 people a year.

Jobs have been advertised on the council website since 1999 and the facility has proved popular. The jobs page has consistently been the top visitor destination (as it is for most councils) and by the end of 2004, before the online Job Shop was launched, was receiving 9909 visitors a month. However, despite the existence of a rudimentary online service, key elements of the job application process were still offline.

“Before the online recruitment drive, people could only apply by paper form and packs took three days to arrive in the post,” Steve Scott of Leicester told delegates in a joint presentation with his colleague Shilpa Arya. “There was a single point of access only open during office hours, and no chance to register for future vacancies.”

Taking up the theme of service transformation, the council developed a joint strategy to create an online ‘Job Shop’ and at the same time using the opportunity to improve all the back-room business processes relating to recruitment.

“We mapped and refined the business process, produced a specification and selected a supplier,” Arya said. “Our supplier Abacus then spent time with our personnel staff to refine the site. We trialled our new website by role-playing with staff, and used this process to improve the usability of the site and also to carry on refining the business processes.”

The council went live with the service one department at a time to ensure it was running smoothly, and continued to run the paper process in parallel until managers were confident the new system was robust. Job Shop users can register for alerts for jobs they’re interested in; save their application forms to complete at a later date; and access jobs 24 hours a day. Recruitment staff have a streamlined process for creating and dealing with vacancies on the system. Feedback was encouraged from customers, and a promotional campaign initiated.

One of the last pieces of the puzzle, which fitted in with the transformational government theme to the project, was the integration in March this year of the Job Shop with Leicester’s new Northgate human resources software system. “We now have a seamless flow of data from initial conception of a vacancy through to managing the successful employees,” Scott said.

“The results have far exceeded expectations,” Arya said. “The Job Shop is the most popular part of the website, with 24,000 visitors per month and 22,000 active registered users. It has also doubled the amount of applicants, from 10 applicants per job 2004 to 20 applicants per job in 2006, with 85% of applications now being made online.”

This has meant that spending on job advertising has reduced from £1.7 million in 2004/05 to £700,000 in 2006/07. Other savings include a saving of £40,000 following a reduction of around a third in the number of printed job packs sent out, leading to overall savings of £1,340,000.

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