Socitm National Conference 2010

Doing things differently and doing different things: sharing experience of radical change

With major cuts in public sector budgets already a harsh reality, the positive thinkers are urging us not to 'waste a good crisis' but to use this time to push through radical change and innovation. In this spirit, the Socitm National Conference has been designed to bring you a range of experience from organisations pioneering new ways of approaching public service delivery.

The Keynote Speaker this year has been confirmed as Michael Frater, former Chief Executive at Surrey County Council.

Michael was appointed in January 2009 as interim chief executive. He has 15 years of experience as a chief executive at four urban local authorities, including Telford and Wrekin first local authority in the West Midlands to achieve 'excellent' status in the Government's Comprehensive Performance Assessment at the end of 2003.

While still working at Telford and Wrekin, he took on the role of interim chief executive of Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council for nine months from July 2002, at the request of the Government, to help improve performance.

Mr Frater started his career as a chief executive at the London Borough of Redbridge in 1993 and was awarded the CBE for services to local government in 2004.

Morning keynote sessions will encompass vision, challenge and leading practice.

Our Marketplace of Innovations and Solutions will feature in the afternoon - expert-facilitated roundtable discussions focusing on the practicalities of implementing innovative approaches to information handling, shared services, flexible working, strategic commissioning, customer access and other areas of opportunity.

Delegates will be able to exchange experiences, opinions, ideas, and solutions with fellow managers from local government and other public services.

Draft timetable

0900 Registration & sponsors showcase

0945 Welcome: Steve Palmer, Socitm President and conference chair

0950 Introduction to the conference themes: Martin Ferguson, Socitm Head of Policy

1000 Vision: Michael Frater, formerly chief executive

1030 Challenge: Professor Colin Talbot, Manchester Business School and author of the 'Whitehall Watch' blog

1100 Break

1125 Practice: 1 David Molchany, Deputy County Executive, Fairfax County, USA

1145 Practice: 2 Lyn Carpenter, Director of Resident's Services, London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham

1205 Q&A with practitioners

1215 Socitm AGM

1230 Lunch and sponsors showcase

1330 Marketplace of Innovations and Solutions

Introduction to roundtable sessions: delegates will be able to attend four from a choice of 10 to 12 topics to be confirmed shortly (see likely topic list)

1335 Roundtables session 1

1400 Roundtables session 2

1425 Roundtables session 3

1450 Roundtables session 4

1515 Closing presentation on conference themes: Martin Ferguson, Socitm Head of Policy

1525 Closing remarks from the new President of Socitm

1535 Tea and depart

Possible topics for roundtables

• Holistic design and delivery of social care
• Using customer insight tools
• Strategic commissioning
• Strategic partnership
• Total Place
• Council of the Future
• Enabling re-use of public data
• Customer access and channel shift
• Social media and citizen engagement
• Rationalising business processes using agile development
• Server virtualisation
• Public Sector Network
• Information handling

Delegate fees Socitm members:

Full price £195

Second delegate £150

Early Bird (all bookings up to 05/03/09) £180

Delegate fees non-members:

Full price £225

Second delegate £180

Early Bird (all bookings up to 05/03/10) £210

NB Discounted prices to be confirmed by Socitm office

Socitm Consulting update:

Welsh public sector embraces benchmarking

Socitm members who have been involved in benchmarking over the last nine years or so will be interested to hear that the Welsh Assembly Government (acting on behalf of the Public Sector Directors of Finance Network) has commissioned Socitm Consulting to undertake what is believed to be the United Kingdom's largest ever benchmarking exercise.

Up to 140 public sector bodies in Wales will be provided with access to the extended Socitm benchmarking service to compare the performance of their HR, Finance, ICT, Estates and Procurement functions against the Audit Agencies' Value for Money indicators. The initiative forms part of an ongoing campaign to improve services, identify cost reductions and implement efficiencies.

Socitm Consulting experts will consolidate and analyse the raw data collected, publish a series of reports on the various functions, and then work with participants to identify best practice and help identify areas for improvement.

The project is an exciting one, because it confirms Socitm benchmarking as the public sector industry standard and also validates the extension of benchmarking into the wider organisation, partly to measure how ICT is actually assisting transformational change, but also to apply the rigorous performance measurement techniques developed for ICT services to other administrative cost centres.

Christine Daws, Director General Finance, Welsh Assembly Government commented: "As Directors of Finance in the public sector we are in no doubt about the scale of the financial pressures ahead, but I am encouraged by the commitment to tackle the challenges together. The combined benchmarking project offers the chance to look not only at performance in each sector, but across sectors, and not just of organisations of one own size, but of varying sizes. It aims to provide insights into alternative approaches which can be shared widely. I firmly believe that by investing in this project the Welsh Public Sector will be better placed to meet the serious challenges ahead."

The wider implication is clear: organisations of all sizes can learn from each other, but need a common set of performance measurement tools to make comparisons meaningful. You and your colleagues might want to take a closer look at the extended benchmarking service - our benchmarking manager Roland Waterhouse (roland.waterhouse@socitmconsulting.co.uk) will be pleased to discuss it with you.

While we're on the subject, a recent Consulting project for Rochford District Council demonstrates the value of benchmarking as a management tool, and the value for money of (some!) consultancy services. A benchmarking exercise revealed that Rochford's outsourced ICT was costing more than other authorities in Essex were paying. With the option on the table to extend the contract for a further two years, Rochford called on Socitm Consulting for advice. To cut a long story short (you can read the full version on our website), we helped the council to renegotiate the contract with its service provider and set up a joint continuous improvement programme. The bottom line is that consultancy fees of a mere £20,000 will generate savings of approximately £400,000 in less than three years, a return on investment of 20:1. My email address and phone number are below:

Doug Maclean, Consulting Manager

doug.maclean@socitmconsulting.co.uk

tel: 0845 241 2770

GC Awards 2010

Rewarding excellence in public sector IT

Now in its 14th year, the GC Awards are the original and most prestigious awards celebrating the use of technology to raise the game in public services.

Has your team been smart with IT? Do you think your project is worth shouting about? We want to hear from you.

Awards will be presented for projects within six categories including:

Collaborative working

Supporting collaborative working between different areas of government

Delivering efficiency

Projects that demonstrate clear efficiency gains for their organisations

Shared services

Projects that have shown clear benefits through the shared application of processes and technology

Transformation

For the project that has delivered a radical change in the delivery and quality of a service

Customer services

Providing a radical improvement in service delivery to the general public

Innovator of the year

For the person who has made an outstanding contribution to the modernisation of services through technology

The awards are free to enter and open to organisations of any size from any part of the UK public sector.

With several categories available to enter, make sure you get your entry in before 12 February 2010 at www.kable.co.uk/gcawards.

Winners of the awards will be announced at a gala reception at a central London location in April 2010. More details will be announced closer to the event. The winning teams and organisations will feature in a special awards feature that will appear July edition of GC Magazine. The Awards are supported by Socitm and we are often involved in judging entries, and Steve Palmer, Socitm President is on the panel of judges again this year.

Guidance on Remedies Directive

Guidance on the Implementation of the new Remedies Directive.

Late in 2009 the new Public Contracts (Amendment) Regulations 2009 and Utilities Contracts (Amendment) Regulations 2009, were enacted to implement the new European Remedies Directive. These rules include several important procedural changes to the standstill period, and new penalties for certain serious procurement rule breaches. The rule change affects all new public procurements starting on or after 20 December 2009. If you are unsure how these might effect existing and new procurements, please contact socitm consulting, who can either advise you directly or can identify the relevant guidance.

Terry Street

terry.street@socitmconsulting.co.uk

tel: 0845 450 2317

Socitm appoints Head of Commercial Development

Karl Grundy joins Socitm as Head of Commercial Development from similar role at MySociety

Socitm has appointed Karl Grundy to the newly-created role of Head of Commercial Development and Business Relationships. He joins Socitm from mySociety - the organisation behind websites like TheyWorkForYou.com and FixMyStreet.com - where he was Commercial Director.

Karl's appointment completes the line-up of a new senior team for Socitm, following the appointments of Martin Ferguson as Head of Policy and Ellen Jessett as Head of Membership, during the last few months.

The Head of Commercial role has been created by Socitm to consolidate and expand the revenue-generating activities that enable the professional association to support professional development for its members, policy development and campaigns, and best practice research and dissemination around public sector ICT.

Karl will be responsible for developing commercial relationships with organisations supplying ICT products and services to the public and third sectors, and for developing income from events, publications and other commercial activities. He will be the main point of contact for commercial organisations that want to discuss opportunities for working with Socitm.

Before joining Socitm, Karl spent two years as Commercial Director at mySociety, where, in what was also a new role within a non-profit organisation, he was responsible for putting commercial structures and contracts in place and for developing new products and services for customers in commercial, public & third sectors. Prior to joining mySociety, Karl held a series of sales, commercial and account management roles at leading organisations in business to business publishing, including Incisive Media, Kable, Mintel, INPUT inc. and Haymarket Publishing.

"Karl's career to date has given him an ideal set of skills and experience to fulfil this important new role for Socitm," says Managing Director Adrian Hancock. "A strong track record in sales, commercial and product development gained in a range of highly respected organisations, together with a thorough understanding of the public and third sectors is ideal for this role. We are delighted he is joining us at this time of great opportunity for Socitm."

Karl says: "Socitm has great potential to utilise its unique market position to increase revenue across various disciplines in order to provide further services & products to its members, customers and partners. I am very excited to be leading on this new development."

Karl took up his appointment with Socitm on January 7th.

Further information:

Karl Grundy, Commercial Director, Socitm karl.grundy@socitm.net

tel: 07528 521 068

A Birthday with a gong

Philip gets mention in Socitm News as he's chairman of Socitm Cymru

Father-of-three Philip Steven Evans, who lives in Newport, is Head of Information Communication Technology at Caerphilly CBC. He received his MBE for services to local government. Mr Evans, 56, a former West Mon grammar school pupil, is an accountant by profession and began work with Pontypool council in 1972. He has worked in Caerphilly CBC since its formation in the mid-1990s.

Philip is quoted as saying:

"I'm very pleased. I think it is recognition for me personally and for my authority and the people I work with."

Why councils will save money by investing more in their websites

The impact of web failure

Over the past year we have published information about avoidable contact on the web, based on data from Socitm's Website take-up service. Month after month we have shown that on average, 21% of customer enquiries to the web failed completely and another 21% failed partially. In November 2009, for example, 20.65 % failed completely and 21.22% failed partially. A month later the figures were 20.71% and 20.78% respectively.

With the data being collected from a quarter of all local authorities and around 20,000 survey responses being received from council website users each month, we can extrapolate confidently from this data to calculate that some 4.4 million web enquiries to councils fail each month.

When these enquiries fail, they are likely to be recycled to other council channels, such as the phone or walk in contact centres. For a typical unitary, web failures may be generating as many as 650 extra enquiries a day. Because we ask people, we know which channels they will most likely use as an alternative to the web, and based on average costs for servicing enquiries to these different channels, we can work out the total cost of these 'unavoidable contacts'. Last September, this added up to £11 million - and that's just counting instances where customers totally failed to find what they want. Add partial failures and the cost doubles.

Of course, this cost arises from people already using the web channel. There is a far greater opportunity cost to the councils from people who could be using the web channel and are not, including people who have tried the website in the past and reverted to traditional channels because of an unsatisfactory experience.

Many councils are now aware that to maintain service levels with reduced budget they must shift customers to the lowest cost channel (i.e. the web) wherever possible. Some have already adopted customer access strategies where channel shift is an explicit goal. But for these activities to deliver the desired cost savings, council websites must significantly improve their performance.

Steps to web success

So what needs to be done?

Although Better connected shows the quality of council websites to be improving each year, the pace of improvement is slow, with little change recorded on any of the essential criteria between 2008 and 2009. Information from the 2010 survey, due to be published on March 1, suggests that the last year has seen no substantial improvement either.

This year's report will focus on the need to measure the customer journey from start to end to understand why so many visits lead to failure. We have ourselves in this year's survey examined the start of that journey on home pages and service landing pages (for visits by Google direct to a service) to see how the most-frequently used tasks (so-called top tasks) are handled.

Almost all sites fail in this first step of task management in the sense that there is little recognition that top tasks are clearly identified and visitors are made to think too much about the next step. For example, many are exhorted to 'Do it online' but why given that they are online already? Or some are urged to 'Apply for it, pay for it, report it' or some such, but why as we know that this only covers 12% of reasons for visits (December 2009)?

The problem that we have uncovered is that managing web tasks has not been the driving factor in navigation. We have been too concerned about making sites transactional wherever possible (a hangover from BVPI 157 in England) and not concerned about the customer journey. Two-thirds of visits, for example, are about finding information.

Conclusions

Improvement will not happen overnight and will require investment. One reason why the web channel is so cheap is that not enough has been invested in it, we need to identify, measure and improve on those top tasks and make the customer journey quick and smooth.

Better connected 2010 (published 1 March) will document the case in much more detail!

Martin Greenwood, Insight Programme Manager

martin.greenwood@socitm.net

Membership matters

January has been a busy time in membership terms. Renewal notices were issued in mid December and the quick response from members has been encouraging and much appreciated. Perhaps the distinctive envelopes bearing the new Socitm logo helped the letters to stand out from the rest of the Christmas mail. Socitm team member Mark Evans provided the creative input and the whole project was managed by Mel Duncan.

The notices were accompanied by a letter from Socitm's President Steve Palmer outlining some of the challenges for 2010 and inviting members' views on:

• What Socitm does well that you would like to see more of?
• What, if anything should Socitm stop doing?
• What Socitm doesn't do that you think should be done?

The invitation is open-ended and comments can be forwarded through your Regional Group, direct to me ellen.jessett@socitm.gov.uk, by email to other key staff contacts or by visiting http://www.opensocitm.com/

Proposals for a professional grade structure were approved by Membership Board on 13 January 2010 and will be considered by Socitm Board on 4 February 2010. The professionalism agenda forms part of a wider strategy for membership that addresses growth, improved support for members and increased reach, engagement and influence.

The proposals were shared with the National Advisory Council on 13 January 2010 and are being discussed with members at Regional meetings as part of an initial consultation process leading up to the Spring Conference in April. Further information will be included in Socitm Broadcasts and posted on the web site.

I am grateful to Alan Kirkwood and members of Socitm Scotland for giving time to outline the proposals during a very full agenda on 22 January 2010. The meeting included presentations from David Pullinger, COI's Head of Digital Policy and Socitm's President Steve Palmer. Both talks were main conference quality and typical of the standard experienced during visits to the West Midlands, East Midlands and North East Regions.

First visits to Northern Ireland, London, Yorkshire and Humber and the Southern Region are scheduled for the coming period in addition to attendance at meetings in the North East, West Midlands and East Midlands.

Regional meetings are very well attended and often oversubscribed. If you haven't managed to go along recently or are new to Socitm, early registration is advised.

The mentoring pilot launched in October 2009 is nearing the mid-point stage and is progressing well. Seven mentoring relationships are underway under the capable management of Pam Larsen. Mentoring is valuable and beneficial for the Mentor and Mentee so I would encourage you to read the guidance and consider how it could help you.

It is just over a year since the Socitm and CITRA merger and a meeting of members from the charity IT sector takes place at the offices of CFDG on 18 February 2010. CITRA members are a significant proportion of Socitm's Third Sector representation and the meeting will focus on strengthening engagement and ensuring membership value.

Over the coming year the Society anticipates an increase in the number of groups and communities of interest wishing to associate with Socitm. Existing groups are listed under Networks on the new website. If you know of other Groups perhaps in a new area of ICT, please forward details to me at ellen.jessett@socitm.gov.uk. I would also welcome your views on all membership matters.

Ellen Jessett, Socitm Head of Membership

That was the year that was

Reflecting on the last year at Socitm

Well, once again it's time to 'ring out the old' and 'bring in the new'. This seems to be coming round more quickly each year - scary!

However, as is the custom, I have been reflecting on the last year at Socitm, and it has been quite a journey - although I suspect, to keep the metaphor going, that we are only about half way through this particular roller coaster ride.

For me the year has shown just how easy it would be to simply grow content with, or become resigned to, a particular set of circumstances or way of doing things and that to allow this way of thinking is to give up on improvement and growth and excellence. However, as at the end of most years when looking back, you often realise just how differently you would have approached certain things if only you had known then what you know now...

Nonetheless we have seen some really positive developments. The Society now has a robust and well managed financial foundation and development plan; it is developing a much better understanding of its own identity and purpose and has made significant investment in people, with new technical and administrative staff as well as three new senior roles in the Heads of Policy, Membership and Business Development. All in all it has been a year of serious foundation building which means that the next year must see some real work building on these foundations!

Our focus will be very firmly fixed in the three key areas of:

• members service
• policy development
• resource provision through business development activity.

We are looking forward to finally being able to develop deeper, mutually beneficial, relationships with members from our supplier community, to the development of corporate membership for our public and third sector members and of continuing our growing role in policy development and influence. All of this alongside our commitment to personal development opportunities for our members and the embedding of professionalism within IT and related disciplines.

I think some of our most exciting plans are around the building of 'member communities' so watch out for these in 2010 and beyond.

Back to 2009 - not a bad year for starting things but, to quote Francis Drake (not something I do very often):

"There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory."

If you are thinking of any New Year Resolutions here is a 'helpful' quote from Oscar Wilde:

"Good resolutions are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account."

IT Trends 2009/10: stretched to breaking point

Socitm launched its annual report on local public services IT spending and other trends on 21 January, at the offices of Siemens Communications, 26 Old Bailey, London, EC4M 7HW.

Government CIO John Suffolk was the guest speaker.

The title of this year's report is IT Trends 2010: stretched to breaking point. As the report title suggests, we are in a situation where increasing demand and diminishing resource has brought the existing approach to IT to breaking point, so there is a need for a radical rethink. The report poses the critical question... "Can public authorities rise to the challenge?"

To get a copy order on-line at http://www.socitm.net/downloads/download/254/it_trends_in_local_public_services_200910-stretched_to_breaking_point

CD copies are priced from £195 for the report only for Insight subscribers, to £595 for non-subscribers for the report with the data.

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