Socitm Blog

This group grew out of the ProfIT (Professionalsim in IT Alliance) and consists of a wide ranging group of organisations from across public and private sectors seeking to advance professionalism within IT and to work collaboratively in order to maximise the impact we can have. The meeting chaired by John Higgins of Intellect considered how best to take the group and the subject forward in ways that were beneficial to each of our constituents and that would achieve significant profile, not for the group, but for professionalism generally and individual members specifically. We had some very interesting discussion around the development of cloud based computing across the public sector and particularly the implications of such developments for many within public sector IT who are unlikely, yet, to posses the required skills or professionalism in this and related areas. The pace of change in technology, the application of technology and the huge expectations created by the functionality we all enjoy 'at home' presents serious threats and opportunities in equal measure to those tasked with delivering efficiencies through the implementation of technology. This is a subject to which I am sure we will return.

In the middle of the week a budget happened which contained further requirement to deliver savings and efficiency gains upon people who are finding it more difficult to deliver the year on year savings they are being asked to. From our perspective there is a clear challenge, to which we are rising. We need to continually demonstrate how our key products and services actually enable our members to deliver better and more for less and, on a personal level, to equip them for the other challenges, financial and technological, that are following hard on the heels of the current ones. The plans we have for restructuring our service offerings and the developments within professional and personal development opportunities are all geared towards this end.

I attended an event at the Royal Courts of Justice, hosted by Global Crossing which was a really good networking event and the surrounding were stunning. I am often in the position of seeing clear synergies between organisations I speak with and this was no exception as i was left wondering about the benefits of companies such as this getting down with the likes of JANET (appropriately of course) who presented at our recent Socitm Futures group.....we'll just have to leave them to it I guess.

I made my monthly trip up to Northampton for our Corporate Services Team meeting where we review the support we are able to offer the Society as a whole, plan for future requirements and events and, most importantly, are starting serious discussions about how we can offer a more consolidated business and member support service from a coordinated Socitm Office to ensure we make best use of all resources and reduce much duplication. I think 2010 will see significant moves in this direction. The website continues to cause equal measure of joy and pain although we are beginning to see our way through to some of the hoped for benefits....I am sure that the saying about 'the best laid plans' is never more true than when you are talking about the development of websites and particularly keeping content current and in a format that everybody 'likes'.....

I rushed down from Northampton to meet with Bill Wells from 2dot0. I have mentioned them before and am as impressed with their business now as I was the first time we met....it really is one of the examples of a technology that can have an immediate and beneficial impact on a business. As it happens it was also the 2nd birthday party of 1 Alfred Place, where we were meeting, so I stayed on for the celebrations (as you would)...but I really wasn't expecting to meet a hero there. If I say that I am an avid - very avid - fan of Pink Floyd, then follow that with the fact that Nick Mason joined the party...other fans will get the picture. Now, it's weekend preparations for next week's board meeting, which I think will be a significant one.

Picked this up in The Register ......you'll like it!

( http://www.cfdg.org.uk/cfdg/cfdg.asp ) Firstly I want to congratulate David Membury and the events team for a fantastic event. It was held at the Royal College of Surgeons on Lincoln's Inn Fields, which was a great venue.It ran like clockwork, had a bustling exhibition area at which, form our perspective, delegates were generally eager to visit and chat, and had a simple but information packed structure.
With John Tate in the chair, following a brief introduction, we began with a 50 min session from Dave Aron from Gartner, who was excellent. This was a very pleasant surprise having had mixed experiences with Gartner in the past.

Some of the thought provoking one liners are probably worth a repeat or two:

•  CIO's suffer the problem of 'being horizontal in a vertical world'
• Security and enterprise applications are moving to tactical rather than strategic issues for the 1600 CIO's surveyed.
• CIO's are now focussing on 'lighter weight' technologies - virtual, cloud, web 2 , ( survey of 1600 CIO'S globally)
• Collaboration technologies now on the 'plateau of productivity' (Gartner), as is mobile commerce, social web2 on the way.
• Efficiency: do more with less: productivity: work smarter not harder: Not how much has IT saved per unit, how much benefit has it produced per unit
• IT managers can too easily focus on efficiency rather than productivity and heavy IT systems rather than light and agile 
• IT directors often not good at communicating benefits of IT , it's not all about cutting costs. 
• Many IT orgs can be described as follows: great landing, wrong airport

That's probably enough from Dave......

The final plenary session was Prof. Peter Cochrane who, as ever, was stimulating, controversial and sent you away thinking hard about  a number of your previously held preconceptions.

To see more about him, visit his site, but two things got me thinking.

He started talking about 'wicked problems' and we all thought he was joking, especially when he referred to IT as a wicked problem....for more on wicked problems see here, then apply it to IT

And to finish, a great quote from a Chief Exec:

'infrastructure is everything just below the things I really care about'

All in all a very good day with loads of ideas and thought stimulation to bring back with me.

And, if you're not squeamish you really must visit the museum at the Royal College.....

Last week I went to a workshop organised by Consumer Focus following its somewhat critical report on Directgov published at the end of last year.

It was a very good day, with lots of participation from senior people from Directgov and DWP and a range of other interested parties, and some good discussion about making public service websites more consumer-friendly. The day's events have been comprehensively socially reported by David Wilcox and his team.

Right at the end of the day, the issue was raised of the difficulty of hiring experienced professionals to manage significant web projects, certainly not at the public sector pay rates available for these roles.

In part the problem is because public sector HR and its grading and pay structures has not caught up with the multi-skilled, constantly evolving being that is the really effective web manager. Similar frustrations (but coming from the point of view of web professionals, rather than their employers) inspired Socitm to initiate its project to define a web skills framework. The project kicked off in earnest late last year, supported by webbies from across the public sector, and will publish a draft skills framework for consultation shortly.

It suddenly occurred to me, while I was listening to the discussion at the Consumer Focus event, that the web management role had something in common with the role of brand management in an FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) company. When I was at university at the end of the 1970s, landing a job in brand management with Procter & Gamble or Unilever or ICI was the top aspiration for ambitious people who didn't have the connections to land a job in a newspaper or the BBC, and wanted faster rewards than the fast stream of the civil service offered. (Weirdly, the City didn't feature much then, that was reserved for toffs or wide boys).

Anyway, brand management was considered a demanding role that needed really bright, confident people with a huge appetite to learn, because to do it well meant mastering the many different processes that result in a successful product on the supermarket shelf. The brand manager needed to know something about manufacturing processes and production engineering. They needed to understand distribution and channels. They needed to know quite a bit about packaging, and how to combine shelf appeal and branding with efficiency in manufacturing and distribution. They needed to be able to get the best from creative agencies designing branding and creating ad campaigns. And they needed to understand the consumer, commissioning the right research and interpreting the results correctly, and being aware of the risks to sales and reputation of changing anything - or of failing to change. And of course they need to know why they were doing all this in the first place - where their product fitted into the business, and its goals in terms of market share, profit, and return on investment. Oh, and they needed top communication skills, in order to persuade senior management to go along with their plans.

A similar breadth of skill, knowledge and understanding is required of web managers. They need to know more than a bit about the technology that drives the internet and its supporting applications. They need to be able to talk confidently with, and challenge, the coders and application developers designing the 'back end' of web-delivered services. They need to respect and understand the importance of the written word, and how bad writing, naming and headlining can ruin a website's usability. They need to understand how people use websites, and how to manage and interpret user and acceptability testing. They need to know, at least a bit, about branding and visual design. They must be able to commission and interpret research on web usage, whether from statistics or consumer research. They need to understand, and know how to exploit, the interface between the web and social media. And they need top communication skills to work effectively with people from the top to the bottom of the organisation, helping them make the most of this hugely powerful, constantly changing medium.

What's the point of the comparison between brand management and web management and does it have any value? Well, yes, I think it does. If the parallel is true, then it suggests that web management is a significant role with a vital part to play in the organisation's success. The person holding that role needs to be someone of high intelligence and capability who is expected and trusted to deliver on many fronts. Like brand managers, they will be well rewarded and can expect to go to the top.

It seems unlikely, in the short term at least, that the public sector will facilitate a fast track route into web management from university, characterised by the intensive, expensive on and off the job training that the private sector offers for brand managers. More likely, public sector web managers will work their way up, learning by experience from different web roles that demand more of less of the IT, design, research, content management, service delivery, communications and e-marketing skills that are required.

Which makes all the more important the work Socitm is currently doing to define and then promote these wide ranging 'web professional' skills. Watch this space.............

Last week began with the funeral of a very well known and popular Socitm member, Andrew McManus, a stalwart of the events organising group and former Head of IS & Communications at Newport City Council. These occasions are always times for reflection and an assessment of our own priorities and perspectives.

It was then up to Durham for a meeting with the Delivery Management group. There is a great mix of people from across central and local service delivery organisations and always good to talk informally with Martin Bellamy about the progress of 'Cloud'. I always like this group because it begins with a social occasion - a meal and drink or two - and is always really practical, down to earth and at the level of 'OK we've heard the strategy, and had the discussion, but how are we actually going to deliver something?' They are the sort of discussions that are invaluable for future planning and activity. Unfortunately I could only attend the social part of what was only the prelude to a full day of discussion as I had to travel to London - a 5am start (thought I'd drop that in) for our Membership Board.

The board was, as always, stimulating - and I am being serious - as we put some of the final touches to our proposed new 'accredited' membership grades. These proposals will be going before the AGM on April 22nd which forms part of our National (Spring) Event - if you are a member of Socitm please do have your say. One of the issues that we are aware of and which we will be addressing is that as we broaden our membership, our traditional base of senior managers and CIO's may appear or be perceived to be diminishing in importance or indeed focus. The concept of 'communities' that is being developed will provide networks based on areas of common interest, common issues and may be based upon sector, job role, specific technical areas and so on. We are working on a number of such communities at present, one of which is focussed upon our senior members and support of that particular community. Following this meeting, and in many ways not unrelated, I met with Karl Grundy and Vicky Sargent to discuss future developments around our communications and marketing activity - something we have long known requires a more detailed focus. The following day, Thursday 11th, I was at Northampton with David Goddard, our Head of Systems and Corporate Services, to assess progress on our newly launched web site and to prioritise the outstanding issues. Among other things we were discussing the (then) imminent go live of our online sales and retail module (now live) and the re-programming of our online members data base so that it can be sorted in ways that actually make sense. It was a significant meeting in terms of progress towards a more fully integrated front / back office, a road that we are, at least, now travelling.

Just to address a question that i get asked a lot "Why is the site beta?"

There are some significant elements of functionality in terms of integration , business logic and intelligence that may well not be up to multi national trading organisation standards but , from our perspective, is certainly new, challenging and as yet incomplete....so it is still beta.

A rush down from Northampton to London to meet with Dave Briggs from Learning Pool (@davebriggs  if you are on twitter) Always a pleasure, always stimulating and I think we have found a way for our respective organisations to move forward together in a number of areas which I am looking forward to getting stuck into. Well that was last week...trying to get up to speed with this week now......

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. You can listen to the discussion at:

http://www.eurim.org.uk/activities/ig/qoi/qoi.php

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.

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

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 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.