Socitm Blog

A voyage of discovery through February - different perspectives on the vision and shape of Tomorrow's Public Services and how these might sit with the Government ICT Strategy.

Given the impending General Election, the pace of thinking about Tomorrow's Public Services appears to be quickening. I was able to attend and contribute to a series of events during February that examined the theme; the Government ICT Strategy was published; we published our policy response; and work began on defining the content of one key element - G-cloud and its associated services.

I represented Socitm at a number of seminars, workshops and other events during the month that explored issues relevant to our top policy priority of Tomorrow's Public Services. Breakthrough - how to enter the new territory of financial austerity and rising demand/expectations, while doing more and better, with managed risk - figured strongly at these events. Notable amongst them were:

The Guardian Public Services Summit thrived on thought leadership, with speakers and delegates from across the spectrum of public services - public, third and private sectors - and academia, politics and think tanks. Speakers included the Right Hon. Paul Martin, former Minister of Finance (and subsequently Premier) of Canada, who gave a compelling account of how his government had engaged with the citizens of Canada to 'rescue' the country from a massive budget deficit in the 1990s. Other sessions looked at the breakthroughs that could be achieved in service design and delivery by innovation, co-production and self improvement (Rob Whiteman, Chief Executive of Barking and Dagenham and soon to take up the post of Managing Director of the Improvement & Development Agency); 'Easy Barnet' (Mike Freer, ex-Leader, LB of Barnet) ; the long term view (Sir Andrew Foster of the Commission for Public Services 2020); the role of the third sector in its many different guises; and much more of relevance to Socitm's policy work in this area.

Capgemini made available its collaborative working environment and the Technovision concept to a group of interested Socitm members to look at how Local Public Service Delivery organisations (LPSDO) can work together to share insights and gain a new understanding of emerging technologies to help enable delivery of more efficient services. Issues we addressed included:

• How IT can support a 20% reduction in the cost of running local government.
• How IT can potentially support a new government.
• How to share information more effectively
• How new IT can provide continued delivery of local government services whilst reducing spend.
• To identify and prioritise technology opportunities to address the business drivers.
• To build a shared view of what the future technology landscape could potentially contain.
• To explore what the considerations should be for joint working and communities of interest.

Sir Ian Blair (former Metropolitan Police Commissioner) gave an impassioned plea for locally determined, cost effective solutions at a CIPFA-HM Treasury seminar.

This theme was taken further at a SOLACE event where Martin Reeves (Chief Executive, Coventry MBC) and Mike Attwood (Programme Director, Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire Total Place project) gave a frank and considered analysis of their Total Place project. Prof. Sue Richards (National School of Government) followed with an academic treatise on 'whole systems' thinking relevant to the future of public services. Katherine Kerswell (SOLACE President and Chief Executive, Northamptonshire CC) spoke on the new financial landscape, while Bill Hall (Deloitte) and Mark Biggs (Chief Information Officer, Essex CC) gave an insight into Essex' transformation project and its potential use of cloud computing.

At the Intellect-Socitm Local Government Supplier Forum this month I gave a presentation on the implications of the Total Place approach for information handling and technology strategy in Tomorrow's Public Services.

A series of early evening Public Policy and Management Association seminars in conjunction with Accenture have explored the theme of Local Government of the Future, including sessions by Stephen Hughes (Chief Executive, Birmingham CC) and Cllr. David Parsons (Chair, LGA Improvement Board and Leader, Leicestershire CC) on the value and experience of the Total Place approach and by David Walker(Managing Director, Communications, Audit Commission) arguing that the experience of history and other countries suggest that the age of austerity will not favour localism.

Similar, early evening events at the LSE have included challenging sessions on Shared Services IT Procurement with Professor Helen Margetts (Oxford Internet Institute) and Dr Mark Thompson (Judge Business School, Cambridge University).

I represented Socitm at a EURIM parliamentary roundtable which explored the subject of Uncovering the truth: using information to deliver more for less. Steve Bundred (Audit Commission) kicked off with an exposition of The Truth is Out There, while discussion centred around the opportunities and risks associated with more open approach to sharing data in developing future public services.

So, where does all this take us? For Socitm, our interest lies in how more intelligent innovation and improvement of information handling and deployment of technology can enable the breakthrough into Tomorrow's Public Services. Many of the points of view covered above have direct relevance to our case. Our thinking is developed in my LGC webcast and is being taken forward in collaboration with the Local Government Association and the Improvement & Development Agency. Our National Conference workshops will give us the opportunity to explore some specific aspects of information handling and technology deployment to support our vision for Tomorrow's Public Services in more detail.

Beyond this, our plan is to produce guidance - the 'how to' - for Government Ministers and their advisers, for local politicians, for the other professions, and for our members and the different sectors that they represent. We can expect to deploy a wide range of communications to convey our messages.

All this activity on envisioning the shape of Tomorrow's Public Services provided a strong basis for commenting on the Government ICT Strategy. In our policy briefing, published halfway through the month, we made the case that it was exactly this vision that is needed to give the strategy a firm footing in what is required on the ground by locally delivered public services.

On successive days, the Cloud, or to be more precise, the G-cloud was rolled back at two workshops to reveal the emerging landscape of services beneath. Martin Bellamy and his team from the Cabinet Office took the Local CIO Council through their vision for the G-cloud. The following day, Dilip Parmar of CLG and colleagues from Deloitte and a range of suppliers entreated around 50 Socitm members and others to their suggestions for 'quick wins'. Both days gave plenty of opportunity for Socitm members to offer their ideas, which are now being developed further.

These workshops were helpful in giving me a sense of Socitm's emerging perspective on G-cloud, as I had been called to a so-called 'starting gate' interview being conducted for the Cabinet Office team on just this topic. I talked about what would represent success for local public services, which services would need to be effectively engaged and what we might expect in terms of engagement and management of suppliers.

Later in the month I fed more detailed information from the workshops into the Socitm Insight Briefing on G-cloud, which is now available for download.

I met Mary McKenna and Dave Briggs of Learning Pool, where we explored the opportunities offered by e-learning approaches to exploring features of Tomorrow's Public Services with different audiences and to sharing international exemplars. Dave also pointed me to his Twitter Guide, which is an excellent introduction to anyone out there who is wondering what, how and why they should bother with abbreviated communications!

I prepared the content for the new Socitm website's <Policy and campaigns> section. Now loaded, it gives readers an insight into Socitm's priority policy areas and our work to develop and underpin these across the full range of the Society's diverse activities.

Numerous press contacts ensued from our policy briefing on the Government ICT Strategy, along with an interesting conversation with Robin Latchem (Local Government Chronicle) about our perspective on digital inclusion.

Finally a meeting with Socitm's Third Sector members rounded off a February which had begun with a stress on the growing importance of the third sector as public service delivery agents, especially to the 'hard to reach', with all that is implied for information handling and technology platforms.

I realise that our more 'spooky' colleagues will be only too aware of the threat from cyber attacks,

and indeed being of the disposition they are will probably read this article and say "this doesn't even scratch the surface", although it is quite alarming enough for the rest of us...

One of the numerous fascinating statements and facts , apart from the 1.6 Billion attackes per month on US government systems (that's about 90 attacks every second of every day!) is that 'there is no effective response to counter malicious attacks'. Assuming we can find out who it is - it's China - (although they obviously categorically deny it, so we must be wrong!) the reasons for why there is no effective response could be very interesting. On the 'raiding of secrets level' it could of course be because we have lots of info the want but they have 'nowt worth anything to us' - unlikely I would think. Perhaps our technology isn't up to penetrating their systems - equally unlikely. Perhaps it is because ny measure that may be effective in preventing them hacking would need to be on some other politically sensitive level - such as some sort of sanctions on technology, trade, finance etc - but that would be tantamount to cutting of the proverbial nose or the bullet in one's own foot scenario. so maybe there are measures that could be effective in stopping the cyber attackes but would be so detrimental in other areas that the balance of risk dictates that the attacks should continue and we will keep shouting about how there is nothing we can do...but be doing something anyway? I'm beginning to understand why the spooks need to be spooky. Interesting artical though.

According to PublicTechnology net the Tories have plans, for ICT that is, and they are likely to bring fresh challenges as the frocusmoves away from 'big ticket' high risk projects and adopt a more 'small is beautiful' approach. This, for Socitm, is not a party political point as it is an approach we have been advocating in much of our thinking on 'Tomorrow's publiic services' and about which we will have more to say irrespective of the outcome of the general election. See more on Socitm's developing key policy areas here

That's a statement, not a question, by the way.

For anyone still wondering about the value of the 'social web' for professional purposes, you should know how helpful its been this week with the launch of Better connected 2010.

Better connected's publication on 1 March each year is anticipated with some trepidation. By web mangers of course, who judge their own performance, and are judged by their bosses, on how their council did. By CMS and other suppliers who look to the results for opportunities to promote the success of 'their' councils. And not least by the Better connected team, who put the report out and wait for the feedback (to put it politely) from web managers and others who think we got it wrong. This year someone even observed that we'd been overgenerous in our scoring of their site - a first I think.

Before the social web came along, there were limited opportunities for us to explain how Better connected was done - the evaluation process, the scoring system, how eventual judgements were arrived at, and QA of the results. The assessment criteria were, of course, published in detail in our publication Better connected: aiming high and every edition of the report described the process at some length. But not everyone with a view took the trouble to read all this and I think there was quite a lot of misunderstanding and scepticism about how scoring was done.

Then along came the social web. Last year we established the Web Improvement and usage community, for web managers and other interested parties, on the IDeA Communities of Practice platform. The opportunity to have an ongoing dialogue, much of it initiated by Better connected users, has been a huge help in de-mystifying Better connected and demonstrating the quality, thoroughness and objectivity of the assessment process.

During the summer, the existence of the web community enabled us to consult widely on changes we were proposing to the Better connected assessment and ranking system. In the old days we might have held a consultation meeting, knowing that participation would necessarily be limited to those with the budget and time to travel, and probably to one person maximum per council. With the CoP in place, everyone can make a contribution and see that shared instantly with everyone else. And with lots of CoP participants in touch with networks reaching well outside our own, the information and discussion published there gets broadcast much further and faster than we'd be able to do just on our own.

But the really, really, big benefit from the social web has become clear this last week, with the ability its given us to respond to people's questions and issues (and ok, some grumbles) about the assessments their council got in Better connected 2010.

We've always had questions on publication. Better connected involves 12 reviewers, 433 councils, a 120-question main survey, and numerous additional surveys, some carried out by third parties. Multiplying all those factors makes for a lot of potential issues and errors, just at a clerical level, even before anything involving reviewer judgement comes into play.

In the past, questions came in by email, and were answered privately. Sometimes there would be - generally pretty unhelpful - spillover into the media. Often there were disgruntlements that the Better connected team never even heard about. This year, thanks to the social web, we had the means to listen in to, and respond to, queries and issues raised in public from the word go.

Discussion of Better connected in Twitter started as soon as the report went out, at 8am on Monday morning. Most people using Twitter quickly adopted the hashtag #bc10 which meant most comment could be easily found in one place. By following Twitter (mainly) and some other blogs/forums, we were able to pick up on the discussion and respond immediately.

Obviously you can't respond to something complicated in the 140 characters Twitter offers, but we were able to use Twitter to signal to the local gov web community that we were on the case, actively following their issues, and would be publishing responses asap in the Web Improvement and usage community - which many belong to anyway. And of course, this information got around through Twitterers' networks, bringing a whole bunch of other people ('what's this #bc10 thing?') in to the discussion along the way.

As each query came up, some in Twitter, some in the web community, and some direct, we were able to respond right away (and be seen to be doing so). That provided the breathing space for us to investigate each issue, provide explanation and/or justification and in a few cases, agreement that an error had been made and what we would be doing to put it right. Every question asked, and our answer to it, meant we could explain more about the assessment process and the many complexities involved in judging whether a particular website had been useful/usable in dealing with a particular issue. Its still ongoing as I write.

The process has been fast and transparent and has brought lots of useful information, discussion and points of view into general circulation. It has also generated some good ideas about future of Better connected and how this major annual exercise can be further developed to bring even greater value to the growing numbers interested in development of public sector websites. I also think its further raised the profile, and I hope, reputation of Better connected, although that is for others to judge.

And thanks to the social web, that's really easy to do: its all out there for you to see for yourselves. Just take a look in the Web community and if you feel so moved, get involved. You might also want to look at the many blogs and press comments around Better connected (a Google News search on 'Socitm' for the last week ie since 1 March, will turn up many, and there are several links our newsfeed on the Socitm home page today).

One other, related, web 2.0ish thing: this year we decided to publish Better connected's headline results as open data, ie easily re-usable by web developers. We did it really because Socitm is backing the campaign for local open data, and we wanted to walk the talk. So we really didn't know what - if anything - would happen next.

What did happen was that Stuart Harrison at Lichfield DC mashed up the data and almost instantly we had a map of where all the different star-rated councils appear in the UK . You might like to take a look..........

I cannot begin an account of this week without reference to the fact that 8am on Monday saw the launch of Better Connected 2010. This meant that the weekend was not without some tension and a little lost sleep.

I was in the Socitm Office last year for the launch of BC09 and it was genuinely manic. From 8 am there were phone calls - a lot of them, from people who could not access the material for a whole variety of reasons. This year, as you surely know, we have the recently launched new website....and all the questions around how it would cope. Unlike previous years where we really were constrained by our technology and had to send the same single password out to all Insight subscribers (and only one contact in each organisation received the password......)the new site has intelligent individual authenticated logon so we really do know who you are and where you work and if you have subscribed etc etc....so in theory the system would just let you have it if you had permission to access it and it wouldn't if you didn't. And it worked as we started the day averaging 700 downloads per hour, with very few phone calls. So all in all it was well done the central team who set up the site, turned up early on Monday and made it happen. More on BC10 here

Perhaps a word or two on the new web site, which, by the way, is now fully integrated into our back office CRM system. It has come in for a little criticism following its launch but by and large it is streets ahead of what we had previously in terms of functionality, capability and flexibility for the future. Of course it is not yet as we want it, but we are getting there and we very much appreciate your 'bearing with us' during this beta phase. For those who are not aware of quite how much infrastructure work has been going on within the Society over the last 18 months, we have in this period changed our hosting and e mail service provider without so much as a hiccup for end users, moved our domain to .net, sourced and moved to a totally new data centre, changed our technical support provider, procured and implemented totally new CRM (Gold Vision) and CMS (Jadu) systems and integrated them to each other and the finance system. I realise that many of our members do this kind of thing in their sleep but this has been achieved on a budget of less than £100 K for the systems and with 1 technical member of staff and one webby.... (and a lot of support from our partners) So, while its not perfect it has been a fantastic achievement and it is only the beginning of the process.

So, after that little diversion, it was good to start this week, albeit unexpectedly, by travelling to London to sub for Martin Ferguson at a meeting in the Cabinet Office considering some of the requirements, opportunities and implications of 'future public service delivery'. Well, it was a little more than attending on his behalf; it was giving a presentation to the assembled group which outlined our take on 'Tomorrow's public services'.

Whilst not being able to report much of the detail of the meeting at this stage, it was refreshing in its honesty and the depth with which participants were prepared to share about the barriers and cultural issues that still exist, particularly, but not exclusively, between central and local government. These issues will be ignored at our peril and to the detriment of the quality and efficiency of future public services. However, there was also a genuine optimism based upon the opportunities we can all see in identifying and moving forward in a more collaborative and open way. Unlike many such meetings I have attended it was not just 'nice sounding words built on the foundations of zero intention'. There was genuine intention move us forward towards the goal of 100% digital delivery of all appropriate services. As we considered the notional concept of 'digital place' it was good to do so within a framework in which real people, real communities, real businesses and their needs were the drivers and in which digital issues had in mind real benefit for users not simply enforced migration to cheaper delivery channels (although in today's climate there is no escaping this factor).

One of the messages that Socitm is very eager to place at the forefront of people's thinking is that or better (not just more) for less. The introduction of a serious qualitative element is, for us, very important because in the public sector we do not and should not inhabit the warehouse festooned world driven by a particular "stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap" retail mentality. Nor for that matter should we flirt too closely with the budget airline philosophy which rather disingenuously seeks to bedazzle with 'good value' prices only to leave you paying and paying again for anything remotely resembling satisfactory quality. We did hear a rather amusing example (well, it would be amusing if it were not true) of a particular project (which will remain nameless) whose programme board decided to investigate to the nth degree a budget variance of £1M (which represented a relatively insignificant proportion of the total budget) and spent more than £1M conducting the 'inquisition'.... It would be wrong to finish on such a sceptical note as that would not at all give a fair representation of the meeting. Many of the discussions around subjects such as the Total Place pilots and 'Tell us once' certainly demonstrated that there is innovation happening, that there is both opportunity and maybe even emerging 'solid evidence' for a genuine 'paradigm shift' in our approach to public service delivery. Then it was off to Birmingham to meet with Glyn Evans over a pleasant meal at Chez Jules (recommend it if you are stuck for a place to eat in the middle of Brum).

On Tuesday I was at the next in a series of meetings with our Consulting business team during which we are looking at ways in which we can further and more effectively develop not only this particular area of our work but also how, as an organisation, we can operate in a more integrated and coherent way to produce better value for our members and more effective processes within our businesses....we are making progress. Next stop Lincoln, to meet with our finance director and finance manager in preparation for a meeting with our financial advisors Wright Vigar. I highly recommend them as purveyors of direct no nonesense financial advice - in plain English, now what more could you want? . We are in the process of forward planning, looking specifically at the governance and financial structures of the organisation over the next 36 - 48 months. There is a game plan..... and we are fast approaching the point where it will be sufficiently robust and coherent to take it outdoors......so to speak. The rest of the week (it is Wednesday evening and I am currently on a train northwards - that's the right way for those in any doubt) will be spent at home putting further detail around the outputs from some of these meetings.

And finally....this is a great quote (at least I think it is) and particularly relevant to what goes on in the name of 'progress' within some of the 'transformation' agenda.

I knew this had to be a week of 'getting things done', by which I mean nailing some of the internal stuff that just didn't seem to want to go away.......

This meant of couple of other external meetings needed to wait till later. One of the meetings I really didn't want to miss, but had to, was with Peter Tinson of UCISA (our oppo in higher education). However, I think he got a better deal because Ellen, our Head of Membership, stepped into what proved to be a very useful meeting. I will report more about this developing relationship as there is more news. We are quite excited about a number of relationships that we are developing with universities on a number of levels. I did manage to meet with NCC this week to discuss some interesting work they are doing around accreditation for IT departments...another space to watch!

 Wednesday was our monthly commercial board meeting, which is rapidly becoming a focus for much activity. For those who are not aware, Socitm generates its own income to support and develop its membership programmes and services from a wide range of services, products and growing consultancy - see www.socitm.net Obviously the content of this meeting is for the most part confidential but suffice to say we are extremely encouraged by the opportunities we have and particularly the recent appointment of Karl Grundy as Head of Commercial.

If you are a supplier to the government or third sectors and are interested in knowing more about how the Society may be able to help you please contact Karl : karl.grundy@socitm.net . Following this meeting it was straight up to Leicester to meet with Jadu, our CMS partners, to plan out the next major phases of our new site - the transactional functionality....then back to London to meet with our FD in preparation for a meeting in Brum on Thursday with our new legal advisors, Anthony Collins Solicitors. Now I have to confess that, based on my experience with lawyers and legal advisors generally I have gained the impression that they always like to make an industry out of whatever issue you bring to them...possibly a little stereotypical, but that is my impression. What a pleasant and unexpected surpirse I got, a two hour meeting full of straight questions, straight answers and no nonesense advice..I'm looking forward to our next meeting. There is at least one other lawyer I have met who also fits that description... Simon from Sprecher Grier Halberstam  : see ./info/161/membership/17/benefits/2 . I had to rush away from this meeting - well pleased - to get back to London where we were having a meeting with our third sector colleagues to give details of the new Socitm Third Sector community . The meeting went extremely well with a welcome from William Hoyle of CTT and presenations on our new proposed membership structures from Ellen Jessett and an overview of Socitm Insight from Martin Greenwood. There was a really good level of participation and range of questions, which continued into the bar afterwards.

 Unfortunately I had to leave early to get to the CIPFA Annual dinner at the Intercontinental...and that is where it all began to go wrong..I left London Bridge at 6 pm and by 8.20 pm I had still not reached Park Lane - in fact I was only just at Covent Garden. I had to give it up as a bad job because the meal started at 7.30. Having e mailed my profuse apologies I ended up in an Indian on my walk back from Covent Garden to my hotel. Still, in the big scheme of things a minor glich in an otherwise great week.

 Remember the 'good ol' days? http://www.shoeboxblog.com/?p=15314

Despite the 05.15 start on Monday morning, what a great week!

Monday was pretty full, and began with a meeting of our full 'management' team. This team includes the various heads of service, our business managers and marketing /PR and is very much the 'workhorse' of the Society in terms of getting stuff done. The remit of the group is broad and generally informal but focussed upon making the most of our combined resources to offer more effective service and support to our members. We looked at key messages from Insight and Consulting as well as the central policy themes and messages for the coming year. There are some interesting, if slightly worrying trends coming from our study of local authority web capability, but watch out for the launch of Better Connected on March 1st for more information on this.

We are continuing to develop our work on 'Tomorrow's (local) public services' and are focussing particularly on the links between this over arching policy and the Council of the Future work that is being developed and refined. Our National (spring) Conference on April 22 (https://www.socitm.net/events/event/87/ ) will pick up and further develop some of these themes. you can subscribe to an RSS feed and receive information about all Socitm Events

 We also discussed some significant moves towards new membership and grading structures within the Society that will be a great step in our pursuit of professionalism. work continues on these and will be put before members at our AGM on April 22 (at the National Conference). We are continuing to develop a 'corporate membership offering' for both public / third and private sectors so watch this space for more news on these initiatives.

Talking of the Third Sector, Socitm has for some  time now been developing its relationship with the third sector through our merger with CITRA (http://www.citra.org.uk/) and this week this particular alliance has been rebranded as Socitm Third Sector - see http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/it/news/content/6003/charity_it_alliance_announces_steering_group

There is a lot of important and exciting work going on within this sector and particularly our ability to speak with a common voice over issues of mutual concern (note our comments on the Government ICT Strategy coming up later .....)

With the start of our Head of Commercial, Karl Grundy, (karl.grundy@socitm.net )comes a renewed focus on our supplier member community. As full members of the Society we acknowledge the different, but often overlapping, needs of this sector and are now actively developing new opportunities for engagement, partnerships and high value opportunities. Our Head of IA, Mark Brett, (mark.brett@socitm.gov.uk ) is very actively involved in many areas - but apparently he can't tell me what they are or he will have to kill me! Seriously, we, through Mark, are deeply involved with work in this increasingly important area on behalf of our membership. Security issues will feature 'large' in some key initiatives such as PSN and G Cloud.

We have also published our response to the Government ICT Strategy this week and you can find it here

 If you would like to subscribe to Socitm News feed click here 

Following the managers meeting it was straight into a meeting with the Socitm Consulting management team to discuss our ongoing business development plans and particularly how we can develop our work across the Society in a less silo'd more integrated way. I am hopeful of real progress here.

Then it was straight to Waterloo for a workshop that was run with Socitm Consulting in conjunction with Cap Gemini looking at future service delivery. The event began with a meal somewhere near France (I think it was Weybridge!!) at which Andrew Stott shared the honours of speaking along with Pierre Hessler . It was a good start to what turned out to be an excellent workshop the following day. We were hosted by Cap Gemini at their Woking HQ, in their ASE - Accelerated Solutions Environment and it was without doubt one of the most effective and productive workshop environments I have encountered. One of the many interesting areas we considered was that of ICT delivering real benefits out in the frontline service areas, the value of which, in terms of effectiveness AND savings generated was not realised within the core ICT function but, where it should be, at the front line. This is great - but only if there is a means to measure and attribute that value and ensure that the 'cut the ICT service to cut costs' brigade doesn't have its unsophisticated way. There will be opportunity to share the outputs with members very soon so I will keep people informed.

Returning to London I prepared for our Membership Board the following day. This turned out to be a very important meeting in which we made some great strides towards clarifying our new membership structures. The debate was stimulating and very beneficial. I believe it will, in the future, be viewed as one of the key milestones in our development as a professional organisation. At this meeting we also heard good news about our mentoring scheme and our ongoing work with the Cabinet Office and the GITP.

And that, other than trying to deal with a staggering backlog of e mails, was pretty much that......now it's time for the weekend. to end on a light note, have you ever wondered how the stock market really works? See:

http://www.burnabrain.com/how-stockmarket-works/

Readers of this blog will be aware of the web skills framework Socitm is developing as part of its wider plans to develop a web professionals group that will offer public sector webbies an attractive professional 'home'. The initiative has also been well covered in Sharon O'Dea's blog from the UKGovCamp a couple of weeks ago.

Thanks to its work in the web arena, principally the annual Better connected report, the Website takeup service, and this community, Socitm Insight is in regular touch with a large constituency of web professionals, and is aware that many of them feel undervalued, misunderstood, and mismanaged by their employers and colleagues.

So, behind the demand for a professional 'home' for public sector webbies lies a strong drive to define what web professionals do, to demonstrate how their roles relate to other professions within employing organisations, and critically, specify the levels of skill and professionalism at which web professional in relation to the national skills framework.

Thursday 4 February saw the second of two planned workshops to support initial definition of a web skills framework, in a project being led by Mary Wintershausen from Socitm Consulting.

An enthusiastic bunch of web practitioners and managers, plus some individuals with backgrounds in professional development and accreditation, assembled the CLG offices in Victoria . Local government, central government departments, CoI and Directgov were all represented, and among the group was a good cross section of professional web skills, ranging from the technical, through editorial and publishing to the wider arena of internal and external communications.

The group picked up the threads from the first workshop, which had ended up with the compilation of a large and wide-ranging list of possible 'web professional' roles and sub-roles, covering four broad areas including web management, technical development, editorial and content development, as well as web-based communications. Within these roles, a total of 128 skills or activities was identified, running alphabetically from 'accessibility' to 'writing for the web'.

In between the workshops, Mary reviewed our list to see the extent to which elements on it were already included in existing skills frameworks for related professional areas, including the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), developed by the IT sector, Skillset modules developed by the film & TV sector, and digital communications and web publishing modules developed by marketing and publishing professional bodies.

She'd also looked at the range of skills specified in the large number of web role job descriptions sent in following our appeals to web managers and others who've have been following what we are doing. Added to this mix were the 'core skills for government communicators' defined by Whitehall's Government Communications Network - recommended to us by a number of Whitehall webbies - and material from Business Link defining the skills and accreditation required by editors in other organisations publishing directly onto businesslink.gov.uk.

It's pretty clear from our investigations through this project that the only way that web professional skills are going to be fully identified, documented and recognised is for us to draw up a new, web-dedicated framework. We did start out thinking we might be able to add web skills to an existing framework, but the scope and range of what webbies do is just too wide, and touches parts of too many different professions, for this to be a feasible option.

So the task last Thursday was to get started on assessing bits of existing frameworks that were relevant to webbies (mostly those identified above), identify gaps we'd need to fill, and consider how descriptions of specific skills would need to be adapted to reflect the specifics of what web professionals actually do. We split into three groups to cover editorial/publishing, communications, and technical web skills.

Huge progress was made, and Mary will now collate our work and fashion it into something we can circulate for consultation - hopefully early next month when the core group of people who've attended workshops have seen the result and had its chance to comment and provide feed back.

Reflections on policy developments in the first month of the new decade .....

Back from family holiday in Oz to snow beginnings, but this month my world would go ballistic!

Local CIO Council met (virtually) by telephone conference, when Martin Bellamy began our journey into the clouds ..... well, G-cloud to be precise - see my blog entry on Cloud matters ..... in which I have set out Socitm's commitment to helping to specify the shape and contents of G-cloud from a local public services perspective.

Our work on envisioning the shape of Tomorrows (local) public services kicked off with a joint workshop with LGA, IDeA, CLG and Socitm colleagues. This will link with some of the emerging thinking on the future of public services e.g. CIPFA-SOLACE: After the Downturn, Demos: The Power Gap, Commission on 2020 Public Services and the Institute for Government. Our particular focus will be innovation and improvement in information handling and the underpinning ICT infrastructure to support that vision. ­

To put it more succinctly this is about breakthrough delivery of public services.

So, what's next?

We will be distilling our thoughts in preparation for:

• testing them with a group of leading councillors brought together by the LGA
• further testing them with senior figures from the wider public services
• preparing briefings for ministers, advisers and local politicians
• developing guidance for our own members.

Karl Grundy came on board as our new Head of Commercial Development. I began the process of handing over some of the supplier contacts that I had made in recent months.

Talking of returning from Oz, I gave Scott Mansfield, Socitm's latest Graham Williamson Award winner some contacts in Australia to build his intended programme, one kindly provided by a former colleague at IDeA, Mary McKenna who leads the flourishing business that is Learning Pool.

I met with Cath Anley and Simon May of the Society of Chief Librarians (SCL) appropriately at the British Library. We talked about areas of common interest, particularly the advent of social media and the reluctance of some Head of ICT to permit its use. Cath and Simon explained that this is seen as a flawed position by librarians who are keen to see its exploration to facilitate learning and information exchange in the increasingly networked world in which their users, and non-users, live. For those who haven't seen it yet, do get hold of a copy of our Socitm Insight report on the use of social media in the wider public services and mirrors SCL thinking.

Socitm Futures met and reviewed progress on our priority policy areas:

• Envisioning, championing and shaping tomorrow's (local) public services
• Information handling
• Efficiency and sustainability
• Shared infrastructures
• ­Citizen and staff engagement

Paul Davidson of the Local e-Government Standards Body (LeGSB) gave an overview of progress in development and adoption of standards. My sense is that after too long a period of gestation, people in important places are starting to 'get it' with respect to standards. Certainly, they feature strongly in the Government ICT Strategy (of which more below). Of particular interest are proposals for defining and specifying standards for the nature of linked data sets, and to determine rights and responsibilities in relation to specific data sets to facilitate proper sharing which is vital for trusted, joined-up, local public services.

Gill Hitchcock of Government Computing Magazine interviewed me about my policy role for Socitm. The article, which sets out Socitm's policy priorities and expanding influence, has appeared in the February 2010 issue of the magazine.

The Government ICT Strategy was published, generating a wave of activity for me in producing a policy briefing and response from a local perspective. The draft briefing is currently being considered by members of Socitm Futures and the Local CIO Panel. Socitm will be playing a full part as critical friend in the strategy's implementation. Indeed, I will be serving on the Implementation Steering Group and endeavouring to ensure that the local perspective is respected and 'designed in' to the proposed infrastructure proposed in each of the strategy's 14 strands of activity.

Jos Creese (Vice president) and Tim Allen (Local Government Association) attended the first meeting of the Local Data Panel late in the month. This coincided, of course, with the launch of data.gov.uk. At Jos' request, I consulted Socitm Futures and Local CIO Council members to develop some thought leadership about the publication (by local authorities) of public data. This briefing is now in preparation - watch this space!

IT Trends had its press launch and we were delighted to have John Suffolk, Government CIO present to discuss the findings.

So was the month really 'ballistic'? Well, I ended it with a presentation at the governmentIT 2010 conference in the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, a few floors above the Iraq Inquiry! I reckon we had the bigger audience (on-site, anyway). I shared the platform with Bill McCluggage (Deputy Government CIO) and Martha Lane-Fox (Government Digital Inclusion Champion). Bill gave an overview of the Government ICT Strategy, Martha enthused the audience about the prospects for digital inclusion and raceonline2012. I spoke about the findings in our latest Customer Access Improvement Survey and the enormous potential for simplifying and improving our website content to support 'channel shift' towards digital delivery of public services.

I then crossed the road to HM Treasury for a meeting with Oracle at which they set out their ideas (to a large and varied audience) for a proposed OGC public sector product and services agreement.

Finally, I had a useful discussion with William Barker of the Department of Communities and Local Government about our continuing work with LGA and IDeA on information handling and the prospects for sharing our developing thinking with colleagues in Whitehall who are charged with implementing Smarter Government and digital delivery.

It looks like the next few months are going to be even busier and certainly varied!

In my previous role within the Society I got used to being seen around various bits of government and getting involved in policy and steering groups and all kinds of outward facing activity, but now it is very different.

However, as an aside, part of my old role, policy, has been taken up with energy and skill by Martin Ferguson, Head of Policy, who is steering it, and the Society, exactly where we have wanted to be. Martin is, so to speak 'putting himself about a bit' so much so that there are weeks when I am fairly sure he must have a clone as he appears to be speaking or meeting in at least two places simultaneously. If you would like to learn more about the Head of Policy role and its importance for our members at the coalface there is a great double page interview with Martin in this months GC magazine. To remain for a while on my detour, Martin is ably aided and abetted by Mark Brett, Head of Information Assurance, who seems to be equally committed to the quest of omnipresence. Mark will be at the CIPCOG event in York on Feb 24th and 25th so if any of our members are going and want to collar him, why not give him advance warning mark.brett@socitm.gov.uk .

As I looked out from the beginning of this week it dawned in me just how much of my role involves attending internal meetings, getting into the details of running a company and very little getting out and about in government. That's not a complaint at all, as too many companies suffer for lack of attention to the running of them, it's just a difference to which you need to adjust. Tuesday saw me considering the details and implications of becoming a charity, something we have often considered in Socitm but which is certainly not yet the right course of action. I caught up for a one to one with Mark Brett on Wednesday morning, before going to the Insight steering group. The group is held at Seimens offices near the Old Bailey, for which we are incredibly grateful to Seimens as they are our regular hosts for a number of Socitm meetings. ( http://www.siemens.co.uk/entry/en/ )

It is going to be an exciting and fairly bumpy ride over the next few years right across the public sector but IT is still ideally, possibly uniquely, placed to enable the delivery of significant efficiency savings. There may well be a wave of pessimism, but those who focus upon the real business benefits that appropriate and properly implemented IT can deliver will reap rewards. The Insight programme, as with other initiatives across the Society will have more to say about these issues as the year progresses. As a Society we will be looking at the realities and issues around achieving 'better for less' (we are not too taken with 'more for less' as it contains no qualitative element) our overarching policy framework looking at 'Tomorrow's public services' will begin to examine future options and opportunities in the light of a better understanding about psn, G Cloud etc. Of course with our expanded corporate vision we also have a remit to consider the interests and requirements of members from the Third Sector who often get a pretty raw deal when it comes to national government initiatives. Their names are often scattered throughout a strategy document but with precious little practical detail so they can easily end up with the responsibility of service delivery without the resources or infrastructure that we may take for granted. We have a lively and growing Third Sector group from whom I am sure we will be hearing quite a lot.

After Insight I rushed up to 1 Alfred Place (quite a find, check it out: http://www.onealfredplace.co.uk/) to meet with a guy called Bill Wells (an introduction made on Twitter.....) who has a company called 2dot0.co.uk (www.2dot0.co.uk )and they have some phenomenally clever visual technology that can enhance and add value to any digitally streamed video...I was well impressed and will certainly be exploring this further. I am considering how it may be used in conjunction with Socitm TV (www.socitm.tv )Watch this space.........

Thursday was the monthly board meeting...and it was a pretty big one - in importance not size! However, as it is Friday evening and I swear I have just heard a bottle being uncorked, the board meeting will wait till later.

Socitm works with John Suffolk and Martin Bellamy on the G-cloud.

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