Socitm Blog

I have received the following comments from Simon Norbury in his capacity as a member of our Socitm Futures group. These are some challenging and untested views! We would welcome your reactions and comments.

"Interesting report and regardless of its accuracy/validity in some areas, its implications could be very significant. Although it does not refer to local government per se, if central government brings its online services together in one place, how long will we be allowed to run 376 separate council web sites in England? You can imagine Eric Pickles asking these questions of his mandarins as I write.

 

As significant is the proposal to develop APIs to key transactions. Why should you have to go to separate council web sites to pay your council tax etc?

I thought one of most significant comments in the report was the distinction between information citizens want and need versus that which departments are promoting. You can see a situation where the standard texts - what is council tax etc and transactions being brought together with councils left to maintain the promotional material. There is already a tension between these activities.

How should we move forward - await some diktat or develop our own response?

Rather than stonewall the report and try to fend off its proposals on the grounds that every council is different (when we know that large chunks are the same), we should look at areas where we could bring things together. I would suggest that we look at the top transactions - 30,40,50? Look at where there is potential to bring them together in one place as standard applications. For applications where there is a genuine difference (say in interpretation e.g. empty properties for council tax) could we have APIs to the local application? Overall we should have APIs to the common applications enabling associated web sites or Apps to link and enable payments/applications etc. 

Just some immediate thoughts ....."

Your comments, please, in this blog entry or direct to:

martin.ferguson@socitm.gov.uk and snorbury@redpepper52.co.uk

Local Public Services ICT Strategy:

The strategy is now in a rough draft state. The first draft, completed from the contributions of the various workstreams, was discussed at the Local CIO Council meeting on 3rd November.

We agreed some measures to govern the further development of the strategy, including an editorial board comprising Jos Creese, Glyn Evans, Dylan Roberts and Geoff Connell.

A summary draft version of the strategy (approx 20 pages) will be commissioned, supported by more detailed documents for the individual workstreams. These documents will form the basis of a consultation through December-January with Socitm's membership and with key stakeholders and others interested in participating. The consultation will be transparent and fully open, and will be conducted online and through various fora, including Socitm's regional meetings.

Our aim is to have an agreed version of the strategy ready for launch in March 2011 and to maintain it as a 'living strategy' beyond that date, with appropriate updating as new requirements and opportunities arise.

Digital inclusion and Race Online 2010:

We will write to Martha Lane Fox to secure the release and publication of Socitm Consulting's research on digital inclusion.

Futures will assemble a brief business case for digital inclusion, to be used by Local CIO Council as the basis of a letter to all local authorities urging them to commit as a partner to Race Online 2012.

Google Apps:

Dave Fitton of Google introduced Google Apps to the group as a cloud-based solution. We discussed the scope and availability of the solution, and security and privacy issues (including Google's proposals for EU containment of data), and pricing.

Government Connect Secure Extranet (GCSx) to Public Sector Network (PSN) transition options:

Ian Wilcox attended from the Cabinet Office to set out potential options being considered for local authorities to transition to PSN in coming months. Kent and Hampshire will be leading the way by the end of 2010. Further work is needed to cost the various options and to determine what may suit local authorities at different stages of developing their network infrastructure.

And, finally: we welcome comments on these or any other items that you think should be under consideration by Socitm Futures.

Mobile Social Networks and how best to support them create a disruptive trend, one in which Facebook is at the forefront. Gartner recommends that organisations should not attempt to inhibit or ban these technologies because this won't work: either employees will work around these restrictions, or they'll move to more enlightened employers. Instead, organisations should plan to explore and exploit these social systems including microblogging and calendar mashups.

Business Communications are evolving to the extent that Monica Basso makes the aggressive prediction that by 2014, social networking will replace email as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20% of business users. The drivers for this are: Facebook, the demographic change, and vendor push; whilst the Inhibitors include security concerns and management scepticism. If you doubt this prediction, reflect that when Instant Messaging first arrived, many managers rejected it. However, the reality is that today, 60% of users employ IM. Under 25s consider email as a dinosaur, and they want to use Facebook to communicate.

Monica Basso recommends that you use this age group to find the best ideas for collaborating, and improving your business. As an example, Oce adopted Yammer to address information flow blockages, and worked with more receptive young. Subsequent measurements showed major reductions in email traffic. Planning investment in mobile collaboration is not easy because the technology changes every 6 months. Gartner's Market clock ( the subject of a separate blog entry) helps understand when to invest, and when to divest.

For a quick overview of what's being viewed as important at the Gartner Symposium, please look at Carol Rozwell's summary of the Twitter feeds .

She says: "What's interesting is how the mention of some topics (such as cloud) is consistently high day-to-day and how new topics (such as innovation) manage to squeeze into the mix. One of the most retweeted items today was the mention ofSeven Major Projects CIOs Should Consider During the Next Three Years. If the tweets are any indication, there are big changes ahead for IT."

For a more rounded view, take look at Mark Macdonald's blog What I am learning from CIOs in Cannes - reflections from talking with CIOs both in 1:1 sessions as well as to groups of CIOs after presentations and during dinners, etc.

It was billed as a case study about channel shift from Eurostar. Shorter than most sessions, it sounded interesting and worth half an hour of my time. I arrived a couple of minutes late and found that it had alreday gone off track and the Eurostar story turned out to be one about Tottenham Hotspur FC.

With a professional interest in website good practice and a personal interest in soccer, I was immediately curious as my team operates away from the Premiership limelight where websites are universally awful. How could this be relevant, though, to the public sector?

Well, Spurs - who would have been my team had I been a Londoner - have a strong vision of being the most IT-enabled club in the land. They presented some impressive statistics. 92% of ticket sales made face-to-face just five years ago had turned into 90% sales online today. They have ambitions to develop a single customer record for all their 20m fans worldwide. The most interesting slides focused on sales of replica shirts. They showed, for example, how clear design and proper user testing added £5k sales in just one month from small percentage increase in converting a few more customer visits into sales.

All council web managers need to apply the same focus to improving their organisation's websites!(some do already of course). Since we presented the detailed case for managing top tasks in Better connected 2010, we know that many are working towards incorporating these principles, but progress is slow and sometimes misguided (eg adding a panel for top tasks in addition to existing navigation structures rather than replacing them). We might, of course, speculate why this might be the case, but that's for another time and another blog perhaps.  

Just as a reminder the critical work lies in

• identifying top tasks systematically from a variety of sources of customer access and also involving those customers
• re-designing home pages and landing pages using evidence from such an exercise
• measuring the success of top tasks, and their speed of completion, through panels of typical users

This will not result in sales of replica shirts, or probably sales of anything. However this methodology will make significant savings in the cost to serve by reducing the cost of avoidable contact as visit failure drives dissatisfied web visitors to using the phone. Our data suggests that large councils can save up to £1m per year just from this. Moreover, if councils can then streamline the back-office operation for the same top tasks, then there will be more savings still.

This really is the only business case, but a powerful one, for investing in your website at the current time. This is the way to win your spurs!

                                                            Martin Greenwood 

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In most organisations, these systems have evolved over a number of years, and in the majority of cases utilise a number of differing technologies, platforms and packages. To maximise business benefit and with the growing reliance on the internet as a mechanism for enabling customers, business and partners to access systems, interoperability between systems is becoming ever more important.

As Public Service pressures increase, IT constraints are also rising. The most fundamental question being asked by service managers is how to build business applications to support business change or how do i increase my business agility? In other words, how to take legacy systems that constrain business today and make them assets for the business. IT structures frequently hamper business agility, so it is imperative to understand how to break down IT barriers to flexibility and innovation.

Enough of the broad overview, now on to my notes and observations:

• new data types

• extreme data volume

• data quality

• data integration

• master data management

• alternative strategies

• metadata management

There were a set of do's and don't but i didn't get a chance to capture what was on the slide.

Posted By Carl Haggerty

Sad as it may sound but, right now, my mind is never far away from Socitm Futures' work in compiling a Local Public Services ICT Strategy! Here, at the Gartner Symposium 2010, I am attending an early morning session addressing governance. "Boring!" you may say. Yet, Tina Nunno - Gartner Analyst, argues (rightly in my view) that good governance is a fundamental prerequisite for effective business change driven by information and technology.

At the Local CIO Council meeting, last week, we debated a draft Strategy document that I had pulled together from contributions made by teams drawn from Socitm Futures and beyond. Governance is one of a number of areas identified as needing to be addressed before we release the draft strategy for wider input.

Simplifying, rationalising, decommissioning, realising benefits and capturing savings all will require good governance processes. But, how do we determine what is 'good'?

Tina argues that governance should be viewed as a leadership tool, rather than just a means of oversight.Her session covers the elements of good governance, sources of weak governance and how these can be treated.

She introduces three components of good governance that focus on decision-making, or to put it another way - who has a say and who gets their way?

The benefits are clear. Gartner research shows that firms with good governance, on average, havea 20% higher return on investment compared to those without.

She argues that good governance is about 'control'. My mind takes me back to Andrea Di Maio's session yesterday on social media. How does 'control' square with letting-go and allowing space for social data/media to flourish? Tina qualifies her statement by saying that good governance is about applying an appropriate amount of control, not being out of control, but how do we know what is appropriate?

She distinguishes between standing governance mechanisms for cyclical activities - use as few as you need, and project governance - time limited. The big problem is prolonging programme and project governance that saps resources and undermines capacity to do other things.

She talks about different metaphors for 'role, brick (structure) and mortar (communication)' perspectives on governance - Dutch (I think she means Flemish) bond, dry set (stone), reinforced steel , veneer, and a sheep creep - hole in wall - all of which she argues may be appropriate in different sizes/types of organisations and cultures.

The big assumption is that we all assume that decisions made by a governance group will be communicated by those in the room. Wrong! They are rarely communicated. So, we need to take steps to communicate decisions to the relevant organisations and their people.

Some more of Tina's tips:

The chief financial officer is a key, resource stakeholder. Look to them to provide the money, then leave!

Weak or non-stakeholders have no information or resources, but they have plenty of time!! So, don't involve them.

Do involve those with relevant information and/or resources and go back and map stakeholders in your governance groups. It could be revealing!

Synchronise governance to the cycles, including financial cycles in your organisation. (I reflect that this will be a particular challenge in governing across places and multiple organisations.)

Avoid the term 'steering committee'. It is a vague term - just because you have your hands on the wheel does not mean that you make decisions or advise.

A useful contribution by Tina's team is a soon to be published dashboard for presenting business cases, which she offers as suitable for the public sector with a minor change - substitute what she calls 'mission enhancement' for' topline revenue'. Ah, I hear you say, but whose mission?

On innovation, she says that a good governance process may kill innovation because it asks the wrong questions! So, you need to build in exception processes for innovation into your governance arrangements.

Finally, Tina presents a governance maturity model that allows you to assess your governance arrangements based on six key factors, including decision-making and leadership styles, and approach to risk.

So, what does this tell us about governance of information and technology in places? A 'statement of the bleeding obvious' or is there more to it? Few of us would argue that the governance arrangements for information and technology that we have in place in our organisations are ideal. The trick is to put in place the right governance processes for the problem to be solved with clear roles, structures and communications built-in.

On a lighter note, our Rentokil Initial presenter muses, later in the day, about the changing habits of men visiting the lavatories maintained by his cloud-based company. Always on, anywhere, anytime - he suggest that he should build in small shelves above the urinals for the iPad fraternity!

Our latest Socitm Insight survey on attitudes to social media made interesting reading on the plane on Sunday to the conference. Updating last year's survey it showed some increased awareness of the business potential of social media, but still only 44% see it as an essential tool for engaging with citizens and customers. There is some relaxation over employee access (eg allowing use over the lunch period), but still only12% allow unrestricted access. Although remaining significant, security concerns have dropped a little, but 70% still have concerns about time-wasting.

Contrast this caution with the Gartner view of global trends about open government. The first conference session on Monday morning from Gartner analyst, Andrea di Miao, was much bolder about the strategic importance of open government. The trend to social networks is unstoppable, he asserted, and also a global phenomenon that takes many forms. The UK government implementation of open data (eg publication of expenditure over £500) has really quite a narrow focus when compared, for example, with the US Open Government Directive launched in December 2009. 

The key lies in allowing employees to engage with the community through social media, and here UK local government clearly has much to do. The next opportunity that Socitm Insight has to take stock of this challenge comes next month. As part of Better connected 2011 we shall be carrying out in December for the first time a full snapshot survey of use of social media tools (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Linked In, Flickr  blogs etc) across all UK local authorities as evidenced by presence on their websites. Through this survey we will have much needed evidence of what councils are actually doing in use of social media to be contrasted with the October survey of what ICT managers say they are doing.

For those of us with long memories, we have been here before with the PC revolution in the 1908s when the old mainframe world was turned upside down with PCs at the desktop. Then the revolution was internal; this time it is external.

Perhaps with an information spin this is the arrival of the much maligned Big Society, not a term I like very much.     

                                                                                         Martin Greenwood