In Briefing issue 1 (PDF 30KB) we look at the prospects for the future of mobile working.......

We can all imagine a future of pervasive connectivity on the move, and technology continuing to change our lives both at work and elsewhere. However, there are serious limitations with current facilities. How will these be overcome?  Subscribers can download the report to read on....

June 2008 Insight news (PDF 70KB) download the latest Socitm Insight briefing or read it below.

IN THIS EDITION………………..

Two new initiatives have started since our last issue. Below, we cover a very stimulating start to a new project about the impact of web 2.0 and social networking. Later we cover the launch of our new Customer Access Improvement Service set up in partnership with rol, developers of GovMetric.

We then give a brief update about several projects that are just completed or work in progress. Finally, we have three events to promote over the summer period.

Social networking and Web 2.0

In Better connected 2008 we focus on the future for public sector websites. One strand in the predictions of the 20 commentators whose views we sought was the development of social networking. We also featured one strong example that gives us a glimpse of what the council website of the future might look like – Redbridge i.

No surprise, then, that our latest project is about the impact of Web 2.0 and, more generally, social networking on public sector organisations. To help get us thinking on the right lines we invited Ewan McIntosh, National Adviser in Scotland on Learning and Technology Futures and a member of the Channel 4 New Media Education
Advisory Board to facilitate the workshop on 9 June at Coventry.

Ewan is a committed practitioner of all the main technologies as any visit to his website (www.ewanmcintosh.com)  or his blog (www.edublogs.com) will show instantly. He covered a number of very interesting examples relevant to those working in the public sector.

We also invited along Dr. Nicola Millard, futurologist at BT, another dedicated and enthusiastic practitioner who looked at social networking more from the viewpoint of customer service in a large corporate organisation.

Another practitioner provided a very different perspective. Councillor Mary Reid from the Royal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames demonstrated, for example, how blogging had helped her greatly in her role as a leading councillor

It turned out to be a powerful mix of contributions that left the 40 delegates enthused and keen to get started on some of the ideas put forward, as illustrated below

In the words of one delegate:

• The speakers - their presentations were excellent
• The content was equally as good
• The technologies are here, (I learnt) how they could be used, and what we need to think about in terms of taking these back into our organisation.
• Overall, excellent event - very informational

Another e-mailed Ewan the following morning on his blog (www.edublogs.com) with ‘Just wanted to say a big thank you for the social networking presentation yesterday. We've taken away some really valuable pieces of information, and I'm in the middle of writing a presentation (in Keynote no less, all hail the Mac) to feed back to my bosses and big cheeses’.

We now plan to repeat the whole experience on September 10th in London. 

CUSTOMER ACCESS IMPROVEMENT SERVICE

Does your organisation know the answer to questions such as these?

• How many enquiries are you getting through web, phone and face-to-face channels daily?
• Which channels are growing and which declining?
• Does your organisation have a channel management strategy?
• Is the senior person responsible for customer service also responsible for the website?

These were the opening words used in the launch presentation for this new service at the British Library in London on 24 April. The theme of the new service is taken directly from the Varney report – A better service for citizens and a better deal for the taxpayer. Making self-service a strategic objective will lead to higher levels of satisfaction for the general public and should also reduce costs for the organisation.

The need for our new service has been recognised by both auditors and politicians. The Audit Commission has made frequent references in Best Value reviews over the past 12 months to the need for a value-for-money framework for customer access. For example, in one recent review it commented on ‘inadequate data and insufficient benchmarking prevents a clear baseline assessment of the Value for Money provided through the council's access points and some of its initiatives to improve access’. As for politicians, the Public Accounts Committee reported in April that ‘The Government does not know how much it is saving through internet services, nor whether any savings are being re-deployed to improve services for those who do not or cannot use the internet’. Although focused on central government, it surely applies just as well to many councils. 
 
The three elements of the service

Our service has three main elements. Over time we plan to bring these together in terms of shared reporting, briefing and events to provide an integrated service.  

GovMetric

The first is the GovMetric system (from rol) that provides valuable management information about take-up and satisfaction for the three main channels (web, phone and face-to-face) with others such as e-mail to be added soon.

Contact: Nic Streatfield 

Website take-up service

The second element is our Website take-up service that provides more in-depth analysis about take-up and satisfaction for what is fast becoming the channel of choice for the majority.

One important factor that will make the service much more responsive to change is the conversion of the system used. Now running under software provided by rol, the service should be easier in a number of ways (eg the ability to correlate answers to two set of questions, such as different levels of satisfaction by age, gender, ethnicity and disability). The conversion itself is now complete and, thanks to everyone’s co-operation, has been carried out smoothly.

The first event under the new service took place on Tuesday 24 June at the Barbican Centre in London. We invited David Pullinger, head of digital policy at the Central Office of Information (COI). The main theme of his talk was a new set of guidelines being developed on using visitor feedback for website improvement. We also invited Rachel Smith to speak about the story of East Sussex CC, the SPiN/Socitm winner of best council website in England, and, moreover, subscriber to this service.

Contact:  Terry Madgwick

Channel value benchmarking

This is the third part of the customer access improvement service.  It plans to explore the costs of different channels.

On 12 June we held our first preparatory workshop on this new service. We had a very good take-up at this event that had to be limited to 20 organisations with many more showing real interest in attending. We reached broad agreement on the direction that the service should take in the next few months and will be launching the full service by the end of July with a view to starting in September.

Contact  Martin Greenwood

WORK IN PROGRESS

Two reports due soon

We plan to distribute in July Version 2 of our Planning for ICT set of three guides to help organisations develop an appropriate ICT strategy, covering the process, the service framework and information and technology architectures.

About the same time we will also be releasing our Benchmarking summary for 2007 combining for the first time the results from our two main benchmarking services (Benchmarking the ICT service with Socitm Consulting and Benchmarking user satisfaction).

Contact: Chris Head

Improving service performance

The commitment by Welsh councils to benchmarking has allowed for a programme of publications about service improvement which is nearing completion with the final two volumes of the ten volume series:

• Managing ICT employees (Volume 9)
• Managing the improvement process (Volume 10)

The commitment has been renewed for another three years (April 2008 to March 2011), allowing for a programme of workshops for Welsh subscribers on specific issues related to ICT service delivery. In 2008 these include events on ICT governance and strategy (23 June), ITIL implementation (7 October) and efficiency gains with ICT (3 December).

Contact  Roland Waterhouse

Application software index 2008

Thank you to all those who have completed this year’s survey.  We will be publishing the information later than normal this year as a result of the improvements we have made from members’ comments earlier in the year. We plan to complete the distribution by the end of August.

Contact  John Serle

IT Trends 2008/9

We sent out the 2008 survey at the end of May. Those who have completed this before are supplied with last year’s responses to make it easier to update. The deadline for returns for this group is 30 June. Congratulations to Eden DC who retuned theirs within one hour of receipt!

Those organisations completing the survey for the first time can download the form via the home page of www.socitm.gov.uk and are given an extra two weeks with a deadline of 14 July.

Remember that this is a high profile document for the professional ICT community in the public sector. Your contribution is invaluable.

Contact  John Serle

Review of Better connected 2008

Every year the team carries out a half-day review of our annual report based on the comments made by subscribers in the weeks following publication. This year we received 23 comments of which one was a clear error on our part, four were complaints of unfair assessment that were ultimately a matter of opinion and the rest relatively minor being easily explained or rectified, generally having low impact.        

This year we have also actively engaged with some 60 web managers at a PSF event in Birmingham and will also seek feedback from an audience of between 250 and 300 web managers and developers at our third annual event Building a perfect council website (see below).

Contact: Martin Greenwood

Building a perfect council website 16 July 2008 Olympia, London

Last year we attracted 250 delegates and a full exhibition. This year we plan for more.    
Our key note speaker is Gerry McGovern, international web usability guru, making a rare UK appearance. Considered by many to be the world's leading authority on effective web content, Gerry was described by the Irish Times as one of the world's five leading web visionaries alongside Tim Berners-Lee, Tim O'Reilly, Nicholas Negroponte and Vint Cerf. His theme is ‘Citizen focus: The best thing local government can do on the web is get out of the way’
 
We also have a plenary session on ‘Lies, damned lies and website statistics’ with choice of
workshop sessions and lively debate on several others topics (eg, Web 2.0, marketing, procurement, accessibility). These will also include a ‘Better connected live’ debate and the event closes with a selection of council favourites by three BC reviewers.

Contact: Martin Greenwood

Starting a new project

The next Insight research project will investigate the practicalities of being a CIO. What does a CIO do, and how do CIOS spend their time compared with a head of ICT?  We plan to find out and share what seems to work and what does not.

Contact: Chris Head

BENCHMARKING NEWS

Special workshop on benchmarking

With Socitm Consulting, we are holding a free workshop in Scotland for all Scottish councils on 27 August at Stirling Management Centre. We will focus on the key messages from benchmarking.

Contact: Roland Waterhouse  

Benchmarking the ICT service (with Socitm Consulting)

Contact: Roland Waterhouse

Benchmarking user satisfaction

Contact: Terry Madgwick

Contact points for Socitm Insight:

• For information about the service in general (eg events, work in progress etc), contact Martin Greenwood - tel/fax 01926 498703 or e-mail insight@socitm.gov.uk 

Other contacts:

• Chris Head (t: 07880 748 299, e: chris.head@socitm.gov.uk)
• Terry Madgwick (t: 01483 855288, e: terry.madgwick@socitm.gov.uk)
• Tony Riding (t: 0113 261 2688, e: tony.riding@socitm.gov.uk)
• Vicky Sargent (t: 07726 601139, e: vicky.sargent@socitm.gov.uk)
• John Serle (t: 01395 576940, e: john.serle@socitm.gov.uk)
• Nic Streatfeild (rol) (tel 07973 730005 e: nic.streatfeild@govmetric.com) 
• Roland Waterhouse (t: 01244 678294, e: roland.waterhouse@socitm.gov.uk)

Information about administration (orders, subscriptions, copies etc) contact the Socitm Office.

Socitm Limited
F19 Moulton Park Business Centre,
Redhouse Road, Northampton NN3 6AQ.
Tel: +44 (0)1604 497774
Fax: +44 (0)1604 497610
E-mail: enquiries@socitm.gov.uk

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The latest publications

Don't forget that you can always find the latest Socitm Insight information on http://www.socitm.gov.uk/. You will receive an e-mail alert when reports are available in the online library. For most reports you will receive one printed copy, but can always order more within your entitlement. Printed copies  might take another three weeks to reach you.