Friday, October 15th, 2010
The potential value of a high-speed internet connection was vividly illustrated by government digital champion Martha Lane Fox’s address to Socitm 2010, delivered as it was over an online video link from Cardiff, where she was due to address council chief officers at the SOLACE annual conference.
“I am convinced we as a country have to have as near as possible to 100% connection to the internet,” Lane Fox said. “Nine million are still not online, four million from the most economically disadvantaged groups.”
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Friday, October 15th, 2010
In a session sub-headed ‘Channel shifting for dummies’, Tim Rainey, Assistant Chief Executive of Tameside MBC, said the private sector had understood for some time that the more activity you can shift onto your customers, the cheaper it is to provide services.
Thus, at many supermarkets these days, you can scan in your purchases yourself. And it’s not new, Rainey said: petrol stations did it years ago.
“So why should councils be any different?” he asked. “We shouldn’t – and we will increasingly use self-service.”
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Friday, October 15th, 2010
The new coalition government’s ICT strategy is “a work in progress”, but key elements are emerging that make it clear in which direction it is heading, Andy Tait, Deputy Director of the G-Cloud Programme in the Cabinet Office, told Socitm 2010.
These included an “aspiration” – subject to working through the legalities – that 25% of government ICT contracts should be awarded to small and medium-sized businesses; “encouragement” of greater use of open source solutions; a maximum size for government contracts set around the £100 million mark to create a more modular approach to the largest projects; and cuts in the overall cost of ICT, while supporting ‘channel shift’ – moving far more services online.
Cost-saving elements include vastly reducing the numbers of data centres and servers in use in the public sector – 130 data centres in central government alone – to share resources using techniques such as virtualisation, Tait said.
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Wednesday, October 13th, 2010
In what he claimed to be a world first, digital entrepreneur William Heath used his platform at Socitm 2010 to unveil the live prototype of a ‘personal data store’, an online repository for personal data held under the owner’s control.
The Mydex community prototype is a ‘tell us once’ engine whereby individuals could eventually store all kinds of personal information and allow organisations access only to those details that are relevant to them, and only as long as the citizen themselves wanted that data to be shared with them.
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Tuesday, October 12th, 2010
GCSX (the Government Connect Secure Extranet – now being phased out), PSN (Public Sector Network, its emerging replacement) and G-Cloud (the Government Cloud, enabled by these networks) are all about cash, Dylan Roberts, Chief ICT Officer ICT at Leeds City Council told delegates at his packed Monday afternoon workshop.
“For me, GCSX, PSN, G-Cloud – they’re all about cashable savings. There are other benefits, like partnership with other public bodies, but with the PSN, unless it makes at least 10% cash savings then we’re not interested.”
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Tuesday, October 12th, 2010
Rob Whiteman, managing Director of Local Government Improvement, had entitled his Socitm 2010 session ‘Challenges facing local public services under the coalition government’: audience members braced themselves for a long list.
“The size of the looming cuts will create difficulties not just for operational management but also for organisational culture – we’ve come to think that the way to improve things is to spend more money on them”, Whiteman said.
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Tuesday, October 12th, 2010
Geoff Connell is divisional director, ICT services at the London Borough of Newham, yet his opening slide billed him as being from the “London Boroughs of Newham and Havering” – a clue to his new shared role.
“We know we will have to cut ICT overheads, and yet we must retain sufficient capacity to transform council service provision to make the big savings that are needed,” Connell said. To do so there are three main choices – to “continue down evolutionary path to efficiency savings”, to outsource, and “share the savings with a private sector supplier”, or to “keep all the savings in public sector by sharing services.”
Shared services is a much overused term, and one that has also been overhyped in the past, with only a few instances of where it has achieved very much in areas like procurement, he said.
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Tuesday, October 12th, 2010
The reason customer insight is so important to making service provision more cost-effective is that there is generally a big gap between what we need or would like our customers to do, and what they will actually do, Jane Frost, Director, of the Individuals Customer Directorate at HM Revenue & Customs told conference.
“Tools like process mapping will tell you what they should do, but it won’t tell you what they actually will do.
The measurement of what kind of experience customers have when the use a service used to be seen as just an add-on, and a cost, but is now increasingly valued as the starting point for increasing service take-up, said Frost. “Can people get it right first time? If they can’t, you will be reprocessing, and that is just costing you money.”
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Tuesday, October 12th, 2010
Like every speaker this year, Julian David, board member of ICT industry body Intellect, opened his talk by noting the huge financial pressures building on local government. Councils could respond in different ways, but all are likely to look at the options for some level of managed services, David told a workshop on the subject.
There are various managed service models, starting with the traditional one of outsourcing: using an external supplier who could provide “your mess for less”. By taking this route councils look to find capacity they don’t have, including financial capacity to fund projects, as well as buying in experience and expertise from large companies that may have run similar services many times before.
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Monday, October 11th, 2010
The need for strong communication between councils and citizens in times of trouble was the theme of Monday’s opening keynote from John Barradell, Chief Executive of Brighton and Hove City Council.
Even before the current financial crisis, there had been poor understanding among many local people of what his council did, Barradell said. In reality, the authority was providing around 800 services, mostly to an excellent standard, but many people weren’t even aware that services as long-standing and fundamental as the library service were council-provided.
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