December 2009

Putting the front-line first: Smarter government -- yet another government policy paper emerges as we reach the end of 2009, acting as a useful reminder of what has been achieved in local public services from our benchmarking activity  

The launch of IT Trends 2009/10 reflects on the previous year and looks ahead to the next. For many the financial pressures are already severe, but they also contain seeds of opportunity.

We have been tracking the evidence of one major opportunity in developing self-service, but current levels of website performance need to be much improved. Finally, in the form of social media facilities the world is changing around us, offering another opportunity for doing better with less.

Smarter government? What next?

Central government policy

Modernising government, e-government, transformational government, now smarter government.. those of us who have participated in the past decade in the various programmes for efficiencies across the UK might be excused a certain weariness in this latest policy unveiled the day before the budget.

The paper on Smarter government does introduce some new ideas and initiatives. One such is the welcome notion that government should benchmark its costs and the value that it delivers. Although it only reports what central government has done in the past year in this area, it is worth reminding ourselves that most local authorities, supported by Socitm have been effectively benchmarking ICT service delivery and costs for many years. In chapter 4, John Suffolk, the Government's CIO, highlights the difficulties in measuring costs of ICT and the value of measuring user confidence.

The season's greetings

The Socitm Insight team wishes all its subscribers a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year. We look forward to working with you, and for you, again in 2010.

Martin Greenwood

These are lessons that we learnt in the early years, but now we can reap the reward from that initial effort.

Local government achievement

As we prepare for the workshops for our 33rd series of user satisfaction workshops, it is worth recapping what has been achieved.

We have recorded a 9.4% increase in user satisfaction since 2005 - the upper quartile score moving from 4.91 to 5.37. In particular we have noted major improvements in 2009. For example, in the summer we found that 70% of all councils in Wales achieved an overall user satisfaction rating of 5 out of 7 compared with 31% for all unitaries in England and 20% for all London boroughs. One Welsh council achieved 5.92, the best results from any single-tier council in the UK.

Processing results from 25 organisations in our latest series, we have found the highest ever score by any council of 6.15, the highest ever by a metropolitan district (5.76), by a Scottish unitary (5.62) and by an English unitary (5.58).In a sub-group of seven Scottish councils the average score is 5.33; all are over 5.00.

Service user satisfaction is a key factor in the credibility of any ICT service, in-house, shared or outsourced.

Our customers take the credit from these improvements, of course, but improvement can only be achieved if the survey has a built-in mechanism for pointing providers to prioritised areas for improvement.  Ours does have this mechanism; most surveys do not.

Further information: Terry Madgwick

IT Trends 2009/10: stretched to breaking point

Today's threat

There is a belief that the cost of public service ICT is too high. The existing
technology infrastructure was built in an era of growth and prosperity. The downturn in the economic cycle means that the money to pay for current services will not be there. The demand to use ICT services to take cost out
of other parts of the organisation continues to grow. The challenge for the ICT
professional is how to meet these conflicting requirements.

Our latest IT Trends report (23rd annual edition) identifies the size of the cuts in spending and staff that are currently taking place within ICT in the local public service sector. We identify the programmes and schemes that are being introduced to deliver greater efficiency and propose what action
might need to be taken if we are to satisfy a growing demand for ICT with less resource.

Tomorrow's opportunity

It is obvious that the growing public deficit cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely. Commentators see little prospect of an early return to the levels of
economic activity that we enjoyed before the meltdown in the banking system.

The fact that there will be a general election in 2010 has tempered drastic
action. Is this just the quiet before the storm? We predicted last year that spending on ICT would be cut. We predict now that public services will be
driven to depend even more on ICT in the coming years. There is a need for a radical rethink about how technology can be exploited for
the public's benefit. The worldwide infrastructure, communications and technology services available today offer a fantastic opportunity to public service providers. The challenge for all is how to exploit the potential at the pace demanded.

One message from 2009 survey

Budgets available to ICT functions in 2009 have declined on average by more than 11% since 2008. Sources of external funding appear to be drying up and efficiency savings are declining. Organisations will either need to find more cash to support the ageing ICT infrastructure or find new lower-cost ways of
delivering ICT service.

The 2009/10 package
This report is essential reading for all ICT organisations working with local public service providers. It is available on CD-ROM with an 8 page printed executive briefing and, optionally, a full set of supporting survey data.

We would like to thank all Socitm members who completed the survey and contributed data to aid our research. They will receive their free copy in January.

Those not completing the survey can buy the package from www.socitm.net as follows:

Package	Insight subscriber	Not Insight subscriber
Report	£295	£495
Report plus data	£395	£595

Three copies of this printed executive summary are provided with every package.

Contact: John Serle 

Use of social media

In January we will launch a new report on the use of social 0media. Its focus will be the tension between the enthusiast and the cautious, between those who have experimented and see the benefits and those who have not and seen the difficulties.

In the latter camp, many enthusiasts see the ICT manager acting as the policeman, either by personal inclination or as messenger for the corporate body. Is this fair? Is this the case? How much is this the reality or just a perception? We have surveyed heads of ICT and colleagues for their views and explored the results.       

There is no doubt that everywhere the use of social media has exploded, appearing on the radar of ICT managers, but mostly for the wrong reasons. The term 'social' implies 'not related to work'; for example, the new word that has crept into our vocabulary 'twittering' implies triviality. This, however, is a fallacy.  Many respondents to our survey stated that they saw no business application for social media, but we have uncovered many and they are growing.

Our surveys have found that most ICT managers take a cautious view of social media, restricting or even blocking access. Having explained why this position is untenable in the medium term at least , we suggest what CIOs and ICT managers need to do in order to support and exploit social media facilities for business advantage.
Contact: Chris Head 

Customer access improvement service

Event on 3 December

On 3 December we held in Birmingham the second of our two annual seminars for customers of the Website take-up service and of our partners from rol (GovMetric). Some 65 subscribers and others attended with, as an experiment, another 20 watching the event remotely on a web broadcast.   

We heard from Adrian Blair from Google about how other sectors are using Google Analytics followed by a session from Russell Sutton from Conversion Works ( a Google partner) who looked in greater detail at how local authorities might use the tool. Incidentally, Socitm Insight is considering ways in which we might offer a complementary benchmarking service to the Website take-up service using Google Analytics

Continuing the Google theme, Dominic Miller, Corporate, Leisure and
Culture Marketing Manager at Nottingham City Council, recounted his experience in using Google Ads as a way of securing income from the city's website. Gross income was running at £15k a year. Intrigued, delegates fired many questions at him in order to work out whether it might work for their organisation.

In between, we heard from Steve Langrick, Assistant Head of Service
(Business Strategy & Access) with overall responsibility for the excellent Kirklees website (one of eight flagged in Better connected 2009). He began with the striking, yet valid, comment that the most important task for a web manager was to recruit the right people to the web team, by which he indicated that customer service skills count above all.     

The day finished with an entertaining story from Nick Booth (Podnosh) about how social media had stimulated local communities in Birmingham. This then led on to how Birmingham bloggers became involved in setting up an alternative Birmingham City Council website to show how the £2.8m
re-development of the main website, and recently launched to much criticism, might have been mis-spent.

Findings from service

The country cannot afford the current scale of the public sector. this issue is now at the heart of political debate leading to next year's general election. It is more true than ever that all public sector organisations must commit to self-service wherever it is feasible.

The web channel is so much cheaper than going through an intermediary such as a phone call, or a visit to the one-stop shop. It is critical that the whole of the public sector maximises the use of the web channel wherever it  is appropriate to do so. However this strategy will only work if websites work right first time and every time. This will require some investment as the current low costs have only funded a relative poor performance from the web channel.

The latest findings from both GovMetric and the Website take-up service  indicate that the problem of failure to complete tasks is getting worse. In September 2009 we found that the scale of the problem had worsened by over 13%. Net visitor satisfaction has also dropped by nearly 14%

On average 21.18% of visitors fail to find what they were looking for and another 21.09% only find part of that. This equates to up to 20,000 visitors per month for single tier (or county) councils and up to 5,000 for shire districts. In financial terms we estimate that up to £11m is wasted each month.

The solution to this growing problem of frustration for the customer and waste for the council is to measure the success of tasks on the web by applying the traditional techniques of work study. Did the visitor complete the intended task? If so, how long did it take?

More about this in Better connected 2010 to be published Fri 1 March 

Contact: Martin Greenwood 

Events with NHS Choices

We are working with NHS Choices in helping to improve the content of council websites. Supported by Socitm Insight and the Better connected team, NHS Choices is hosting a series of free half day events around the country for local authority web managers and editors.  The events will explore what content is available from NHS Choices (eg the latest advice on swine flu, or where to find a local GP) and how to use this material for the benefit of council website users (eg a range of options such as XML feeds, widgets, applications etc).

We will also be providing an update about Better connected 2010 and related activities

All events start at 10am and end at 1pm. Venues are
27 Jan  York
10 Feb Cambridge
  4 Mar  Reading
10 Mar  Birmingham
11 Mar  Loughborough
18 Mar  Blackburn
24 Mar  Exeter

Contact: Martin Greenwood 

Benchmarking news

The 2010 programme

Here we show the new programme for benchmarking in 2010 

Channel value benchmarking (with Socitm Consulting)

Group	Title	Workshop	Date	Venue
4	UK1	Launch	20 Apr	London
		Results	22 Jul	London
5	UK2	Launch	16 Sep	London
		Results	16 Dec	TBC

Contact: Sandra Milne-Skinner

Benchmarking the ICT service (with Socitm Consulting)

Group	Title	Workshop	Date	Venue
50	London	Launch	21 Apr	London
		Results	10 Sep	London
51	UK1 & SW	Launch	10 May	Birmingham
		Results	21 Oct	Birmingham
53	Partnerships & outsourcing	Launch	23 Jul	Birmingham
		Results	4 Nov	Birmingham
54	UK2	Launch	14 Sep	Birmingham
		Results	10 Dec	Birmingham

Contact: Roland Waterhouse

Benchmarking user satisfaction

Series	Survey period	Workshop	Venue
34	January to February	13 Apr	TBC
35	May to June	7 Jul	TBC
36	September to October	9 Dec	TBC

Contact: Terry Madgwick

Contact points for Socitm Insight:

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

Other contacts:

• Chris Head (tel: 07880 748299, e-mail chris.head@socitm.net)
• Terry Madgwick (tel: 01483 855288, e- mail terry.madgwick@socitm.net)
• Sandra Milne-Skinner (tel: 07717 327796), e-mail sandra.milne-skinner@socitm.net)  
• Tony Riding (tel: 0113 261 2688, e-mail tony.riding@socitm.net)
• Vicky Sargent (tel 07726 601139, e-mail vicky.sargent@socitm.net)
• John Serle (tel 01395 576940) e-mail john.serle@socitm.net)
• Roland Waterhouse, (tel: 01244 678294 e-mail: roland.waterhouse@socitm.net)

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

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