IT in Use magazine - November/December 2011 issue

Technology & The Transformation of Frontline Services

ITU UKauthorITy IT in Use November/December 2011

Game On - The technical, logistical and cultural challenges of an Olympic Games in our digital and mobile world

Virtual Justice ITU • November/December 2011

- The perennial problem of a paperless justice system

Open Data Shut Off - Will Bureaucracy 2.0 and the proďŹ t motive scupper data transparency before it gets going?

eLearning in the Age of Austerity - Training is one area where real digital savings are being delivered PLUS: News Update, ITU Live: Shared Services, ITU Live: Digital Citizen View over Westminster and Contracts Won. Won. Contracts

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Features

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November/December 2011 On the Cover See You in Virtual Court: the MoJ is once again heading for a wire-less and paper-less courts’ service.

ISSN 2046 7133

Publisher

See page 10

Helen Olsen E: Helen@infopub.co.uk T: 01273 273941

Editor

Dan Jellinek E: Dan@infopub.co.uk T: 07748 988092

Special Correspondent

Tim Hampson E: Tim@infopub.co.uk T: 01865 790675

Special Correspondent

Michael Cross E: Michael@infopub.co.uk T: 020 8341 0910

Photography

Paul Clarke E: Paul@infopub.co.uk T: 07515 655932

Advertising & Circulation

Ann Campbell-Smith E: Ann@infopub.co.uk T: 01983 812623

Design & Layout

Informed Publications Ltd

Printers

DC Graphics

UKauthorITy UKauthorITy comprises the online news service UKauthorITy.com, video news UKA.tv, the marketleading IT in Use magazine and ITU Live webinars, and the market information newsletter, UKauthorITy Report (formerly Town Hall newsletter). Our core editorial focus is the use of technology to both improve public service quality and reduce service delivery costs across the UK public sector: Central Government, Local Government, Police, Fire and Health.

Editorial:

Editorial for all UKauthorITy titles is written in house by the editorial team: Helen Olsen, Dan Jellinek, Tim Hampson and Michael Cross.

Relevant news releases should be sent by email to: Dan@infopub.co.uk or Helen@infopub.co.uk

Published by: Informed Publications Ltd, PO Box 2087 Shoreham-By-Sea, West Sussex BN43 5ZF

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Contents Comment

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The new ‘can do’ approach to the Government Digital Service brings with it an air of optimism for dramatic improvements say Helen Olsen and Dan Jellinek.

UKauthorITy.tv

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Round-up of the latest interviews on UKA.tv

News Update

3-6 / 8-9

Mutual pioneers, rationalisation of public sector estate, EU e-government , personal data schemes and channel shift all feature in our regular news round-up.

ITU Live: Games on The Go

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Michael Cross reports from our ITU Live panel discussion on the impact on the public sector of the first Olympic Games to be held in a digital, mobile world.

See You in Virtual Court

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Michael Cross looks at plans to create a wire-less and paperless justice system and wonders what will be different this time.

eLearning in the Age of Austerity

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Online learning makes huge financial sense, says Dan Jellinek, reporting from the ITU Live debate.

View over Westminster: Connected House

12

Tim Hampson asks whether by embracing social media, MPs will become closer to the ordinary people.

Bureaucracy 2.0

13

Will the forces of bureaucracy and profit combine to scupper open data plans? Michael Cross reports.

© Informed Publications Ltd All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part, storage in a retrieval system or transmission in any form, of any material in this publication is prohibited without prior written consent from the Editor. The views expressed by the Editors and writers are their own. Whilst every care is taken, the publishers cannot be responsible for any errors in articles or listings. Articles written by contributors do not necessarily express the views of their employing organisation. The Editor reserves the right to edit any submissions prior to publication.

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Shared Services and Shared Experience

14-15

Shared services are on the rise, but what is the right role for technology? Dan Jellinek reports from ITU Live.

ITU Live: Digital World, Digital Citizen

16

The boundaries between devices, channels and behaviours are increasingly blurring - posing an enormous challenge to digital by default services. Helen Olsen reports from ITU Live.

Contract Roundup

17-19

See inside back cover for details of FREE public sector subscriptions

To advertise in ITU call Informed Publications: 01983 812623 2

November/December 2011

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COMMENT

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Catch the latest interviews and debate on the UK’s most incisive public sector internet TV channel, UKauthority.tv, brought to you

by IT in Use magazine with UKauthorITy.com:

o people want more control over their personal data? Most of us would probably say so. But would we actually want the hassle of it?

This month the government launched ‘midata’, a scheme to allow consumers to access and use personal data held by companies such as energy suppliers and banks. It’s voluntary from both sides –companies have to agree to surrender some of the data they hold on us, despite its commercial value, and could theoretically withdraw from the scheme at any time. It is also voluntary for people to join in – naturally enough, in a country where the merest whiff of anything like an ID scheme creates political pandemonium.

FLAG PLANTED, NOW MOVING FORWARDS: Local CIO Council chair, Jos Creese, joins the dots between central and local ICT strategies to deliver better public services for less.

And of course the companies still hold a copy of the data – it is not about citizens taking control of their data at all, more about them taking a copy from many of the entities that hold it, and then acting as their own clearing house for anyone who might be able to offer them benefits for accessing it.

IMPLEMENTATION IS ALL IN THE DETAIL: Government’s deputy CIO, Bill McCluggage, outlines the two year Strategic Implementation Plan that aims to make government ICT deliver.

So far, so good – we all struggle with trying to work out the best tariff for our mobile phone or the cheapest energy supplier. What if everyone could sign up for a midata account, have all the information flow into some easy to use dashboard or app and have third party systems advise them when a change of supplier might be worth their while?

Or course, security is a huge concern but, as with every online service, it is solvable given enough effort and a critical mass of users. In fact trials have been under way on a key part of any such secure system for a year or two – ‘Mydex’, a ‘personal data store’ prototyped by a nonprofit group of tech entrepreneurs who are also bringing public sector services into the mix. Brent, Croydon and Windsor and Maidenhead councils have joined this trial, on the theory that if residents also held copies of public service data from health, social services, benefits and other sources, agencies could tailor services in a way which data protection and privacy laws – or the fear of them – have been hampering for a decade or more.

DATA AND DEVICES: Phil Pavitt, CIO at HMRC, tells UKAtv why he is leading the charge on rationalising government’s end user devices – from desktop to mobile, value for money is the name of the new game.

GOVERNMENT CLOUDS TAKE SHAPE: Chris Chant, executive director at the Cabinet Office and G-Cloud programme director, talks to UKAtv about the government’s implementation plans for cloud technology.

At the moment, both midata and Mydex pose more questions than they answer. Will only an already-proficient elite of tech users make the most of such systems, with the less connected and less confident suffering by comparison? Isn’t, in fact, the need for a better deal and more joined up services inversely proportionate to the likelihood that individuals will want to run a ‘personal data store’ – or understand what one is? If the scheme is voluntary, what if important companies and services don’t take part, or withdraw? What if security does go wrong? Can the market really lead a project like this? Why would big business set something up that benefits us, not them?

PSN IN PRACTICE: AlcatelLucent’s Stuart Smith offers the lowdown on how Warwickshire County Council has deployed a county-wide PSN-compliant network to manage and share services with local fire and rescue services, district councils and schools.

For all these real concerns, however, there is something happening here that seems worth the experiment. We may not be able to predict what will come out of such schemes; and it may be that nothing much does.

But somewhere out there the ‘killer app’ for personal data control might be lurking, and the answer might just lie in the public sector.

Dan Jellinek, Editor

Survey Prize Draw

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ur thanks to all those who participated in the survey that formed our latest report, ‘The first steps: building a culture of trust to deliver shared services’, and congratulations to the prize draw winners. The top prize of an iPad2 goes to Louise Raisey at Hammersmith & Fulham LB, with second prizes of £50 worth of Amazon vouchers each to Phil Woods at Doncaster MBC and Barry Lowry at the Department for Finance & Personnel (NI). The full report is available free of charge to the public sector. For a copy email: shared@ukauthority.com

Tune in now on www.UKauthorITy.tv

Helen Olsen, Publisher UKauthorITy IT in Use

November/December 2011

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NEWS UPDATE

Leaner and greener - £8bn reward from ‘ruthless rationalisation’

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new report claims that there is a potential £8bn prize to be won for ruthless rationalisation of public sector estates. The report, the results of a parliamentary inquiry into the use of public buildings, was launched by Communities secretary, Eric Pickles, with the words ‘Never judge a book by its cover’.

‘Public sector estates management is not the sexiest phrase but, what the heck, it gives us some eye popping results,’ Pickles said.

The report suggests that if the public sector rationalises its property portfolio, works in partnerships and improves workplace

conditions by championing practices such as flexible working, it can improve the productivity of its workforce between 5% and 15%.

A 5% increase alone would equate to £8bn worth of staff time.

The findings of ‘Leaner and Greener II: Putting Buildings To Work’ build upon those of another inquiry, conducted earlier this year, which highlighted the £7bn of savings local authorities could make through reducing unnecessary space and combining purchasing power across organisations. The work has cross-party support and backing from the public and private sectors.

UK Online becomes national mutual pioneer

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he UK Online centres network has joined the first wave of public sector employeeled mutuals, the network’s head, Helen Milner, announced this week. Milner and her team of 32 staff will take over management of the centres from 1 December.

UK Online Centres co-ordinates a network of 4,000 centres across England offering free computer courses to get people online and boost their confidence and skills.

Membership of the new mutual will be open to all staff, who will be able to vote at AGMs. Day to day strategy decisions will still be made by a board, though this will include two elected staff directors.

Speaking to UKauthorITy.com, the network’s head of policy and business development,

Anne Faulkner, said: “We’ve had a very open and consultative management style, so we were very attracted by the idea of becoming a staff-owned mutual and social enterprise.”

At just 16 months, the initial contract is not long, though ministers will have the option of extending it for another two years beyond that without further tender if they are happy with how things are going, Faulkner says. At £7.2m in value, the contract also - unsurprisingly, in these times - represents around a 30% cut on historical funding levels, though the new organisation will have more freedom to generate other sources of income, she says.

This is likely to come from three sources: selling services like training; expanding grant funding; and bidding for other government contracts.

Borderless e-government ‘solution to euro-crisis’

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ross-border e-government services offer a way out of Europe’s economic woes, says the European Commissioner responsible for digital policy.

“We should be not more conservative, but all the more ambitious, in our quest to make public efficiency savings,” Neelie Kroes, vice president of the European Commission, told the 6th Ministerial eGovernment Conference in Poznan, Poland. “Genuine, cross-border e-government could help here. It could help put the citizen in the centre: it could strengthen the reality of the single market.”

Up to now, however, national e-government initiatives have been “part of the problem,” she said. “National e-government systems have developed in isolation, creating new digital borders where physical ones have long since disappeared.” For example, while students have the legal right to enrol in any university across the EU, they cannot do so online “because national electronic ID systems are not recognised abroad”. Interoperable electronic ID (eID) is a central component of the EU’s current e-government programme, launched at Malmo, Sweden, in 2009.

©iStockphoto.com/ Franky De Meyer

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Kroes said that the European Commission is now proposing investing 9 billion euros in a Connecting Europe Facility which includes “sizeable funds to establish and start running pan-European digital public services”.

UKauthorITy IT in Use

Council data generates £7m bonus for fraudsters

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ocal authorities in England are being fleeced of millions of pounds by criminals exploiting online ‘transparency drives’, the Audit Commission has warned in a report, ‘Protecting the Public Purse 2011’. The commission - which highlighted a 37% leap in fraud suffered by councils and other publicsector bodies - pointed to the growing amount of information freely available on websites about local authority suppliers. It warns that fraudsters are using information gleaned from spending transparency to con the public sector into paying fake bills.

At least £7m was successfully siphoned off by criminals using legitimate-looking letters, based on creditor information available on council websites. The letters persuaded officials to change the bank account details of building firms and other contractors. Another £20m worth of such scams was discovered before payments were made. Increasingly sophisticated methods were being employed to get around checks - including temporarily diverting the firms’ own phone lines to fool staff who checked original records. The watchdog, while backing the transparency agenda, demanded stronger warnings to prevent the scams spreading.

Web access problems could prevent channel shift

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naccessible websites are preventing councils from maximising cost savings from shifting older and disabled citizens towards online self-service, says the head of the UK’s leading digital inclusion charity. Nigel Lewis, (left) chief executive of AbilityNet, said: “Too many online public services are not truly accessible and inclusive, and with the public sector’s digital by default strategy we’ve got to get those things right.

The problem is severe, and if the public sector don’t wake up to the fact that they have got to make things simple, usable and accessible then they’re not going to get the channel shift they want.” Lewis was speaking at the launch of the UK’s first e-learning course delivering a national qualification in web accessibility. http://www.bcs.org/wae

SURVEYING THE BARRIERS TO SHARING: A survey to help identify the enablers and barriers to electronic information sharing in local government is being run by Brunel University with support from Socitm. The study is focused on how information is shared both within and across local authority departments and between organisations, with a focus on citizens’ personal information. To participate in this anonymised survey visit: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/EIS_IN_LGA

NEWS UPDATE

‘Midata’ scheme could expand to personalise public services

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voluntary scheme set up by the government to allow consumers to access and use personal data held by companies would be equally valuable for use in the public sector, one analyst has said. This month, in what is claimed to be the first move of its kind in the world, the government announced a partnership with 19 businesses and seven regulators and consumer bodies to launch ‘midata’.

services such as price and tariff comparison tools. First wave participants include energy companies, banks and mobile phone providers.

The scheme envisages a two-step process: first, data will be released by companies to consumers in a machine-readable format, and probably with a security certificate or token so other participants can verify authenticity; and second, the sharing of the data by the consumer with other organisations including third-party developers of

The service will be voluntary from both sides.

Richard Bates of the statutory consumer agency Consumer Focus, another midata partner, said the principles of the system which currently only includes private sector data holders - are also applicable to public sector bodies. “In the public sector, if you are in a situation where you are dealing with a number of services such as health and social services, at the moment they don’t talk to each other very well. If you could join your data up to provide a whole-person view, in theory agencies could then design a more personalised service around you.”

£10m injection for ID assurance plan

Maude plans ‘Tell Us How’ crowd-sourcing website

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overnment efforts to create an ecosystem of secure online identities for citizens are to get under way with new funding of £10m.

The Identity Assurance programme is one of a portfolio of initiatives being undertaken by the Government Digital Service to encourage “digital by default” public services. In May this year, the Cabinet Office said that it planned to allow citizens to pick their own provider of a single electronic identity for use across government. Now Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, has announced the new money to encourage commercial suppliers to develop suitable systems. In a statement he said: “To deliver the Identity Assurance programme it is imperative that we encourage and work with the private sector. The government will aim to provide a supportive role so that companies can develop solutions that work not just for us - but also for the citizen.”

taff in local authorities and other parts of the public sector have been urged to put forward ideas to cut “excessive burdens” in their workplace. Suggestions can be submitted anonymously, said the minister announcing a new website to purge the organisations of inefficiencies. Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, said that he wanted all public sector workers to log on to ‘Tell Us How’, the crowd-sourcing website he is setting up. Ideas put forward would be assessed by the Cabinet Office and the best would be adopted as part of the government’s drive to remove burdens in the way of better public © Paul Clarke services.

UKauthorITy IT in Use

Open data: beware the empire striking back

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ne central figure of the UK government’s initiative to open its data for re-use has warned of the risk of ministers being thwarted by reluctant or apathetic bureaucrats. “There is a real risk of the empire striking back,” Andrew Stott, the government’s first director of digital engagement and a former deputy chief information officer, told the Open Government Data Camp, an event in Warsaw hosted by the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Stott said that, despite the government’s promise to introduce a new “right to data”, the campaign for open data is not over yet. He warned that the civil service has a wealth of tricks for diluting the coalition government’s pledge to make data available.

“We’re seeing a move from Bureaucrat 1.0 the straight ‘No Minister’ - to Bureaucrat 2.0.

That’s the one who says ‘Yes Minister’ but then quietly fails to execute the plan.”

See page 13.

Open data plans ‘fundamentally flawed’

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ocal authorities still ‘struggle with the business case’ for publishing their data for free re-use, according to the professional body of IT managers. In its responses to twin Cabinet Office consultations on open data, the Society for IT Management (Socitm) says that government statements over-emphasise the role of open data in serving armchair auditors and developers. “Socitm sees open data primarily benefiting management of public services, as managers are able to access/share more and better information produced by their own organisation and other public services.” This process, it says, would be helped by adoption of common data standards across local authorities and other public services, allowing re-use of master data such as the National Land and Property Gazetteer.

See page 13.

November/December 2011

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NEWS UPDATE

Government must jump hurdles to reach the cloud

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he UK government will have to negotiate a series of tough challenges to maximise savings from its cloud computing strategy, one industry observer has told UKauthorITy. com. These include changing Whitehall culture to view ICT as a commodity and not a custom-built service; forcing departments to work together and compromise on the outcome; and integrating completely new ways of working with huge legacy systems.

The government has now published an implementation plan for cloud computing. It said the use of cloud computing to “exploit commodity ICT services” across central government and eventually the wider public sector would cut running costs and power consumption, and optimise use of the government’s own data centre infrastructure, “which traditionally has been hugely inefficient”. It would also allow quicker implementation of government policies by supplying services on a pay as you go basis, scaled up or down according to need, the plan said.

However Andrew Greenway, global cloud programme lead at Accenture, said that the government’s first challenge would be to “force a degree of sharing across common solutions” if it is to realise full savings from cloud computing. “So for example if every government department decides to go and buy a different human resources IT system from a different provider, it will be hard. It’s not just about cloud, they are going to have to force a level of compromise into the departments.” http://bit.ly/e6Xpb2

DATA FROM SUPERMARKET CARDS ‘COULD REPLACE CENSUS’: Under the striking headline “Could our storecards replace the census?” the Daily Mail has reported the launch of an effort to replace the 10-yearly household census with data drawn from existing information systems. According to the report, “the historic national census is set to be abolished and replaced by information on everybody in the country gathered from banks, stores and estate agents”. It refers to the “Beyond 2011” initiative launched by the Office for National Statistics. The Daily Mail postulates that “in future information people hand over to banks, to retail chains through their storecards, to energy companies or to mobile phone firms could be bought by the state and used by Whitehall departments, councils and quangos”.

IT FOR NEW CRIMINAL CHECKS: The national bill for a new computer system to speed up criminal record checks for town halls and other employers will be £200m. Fees will rise for people applying to work with children and vulnerable adults to cover the cost of the improved IT system. But the move will benefit both employers and staff, argue ministers - by introducing ‘portable’ checks that could last a career. At present, employees need to apply for separate checks by each organisation, paying a fresh fee each time. The new online Disclosure and Barring Service will be viewable by all potential employers and can be continuously updated. The shake-up will be welcomed by local council social services and education departments, following criticism that the current system is time consuming and nonsensical.

Liverpool’s local authority-led model for digital inclusion

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new local authority-led model for helping everyone in the UK access the internet - driven by economic development and the need to shift people over to accessing public services online - has been launched in Liverpool.

Go ON Liverpool brings together the city council, housing bodies, health services, business and other partners in what is described by one of its architects as “a new, sustainable model of digital inclusion”. One element of the plan is to encourage social landlords to offer broadband access to their tenants - in Liverpool, at least 50% of people offline are in social housing, said Natasha Innocent, director of community partnerships at Race Online 2012. In a November pilot scheme, one social landlord working with a technology partner will connect an estate to offer all tenants broadband for £1 a week, with costs recouped through savings generated by the ability to communicate with tenants by email instead of paper and telephone. Other savings will accrue from allowing tenants to use the system to monitor their energy use, she said.

© Paul Clarke

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November/December 2011

“We’re actually moving the dialogue away from digital inclusion. Many councils have had shiny digital inclusion strategies sitting on the shelf funded by the government, but local authorities didn’t get it until we started having a discussion about economic recovery, and economic efficiency”, said Innocent. http://raceonline2012.org/ UKauthorITy IT in Use

Two county shared service claims year of success

© iStockphoto/coloroftime

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ocal Government Shared Services, the shared service venture set up by Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire county councils, is celebrating its first birthday this month with a claim of £11m in banked savings over this year. One year since its launch, the LGSS venture is now an £83m business running finance, human resources and property and asset management as well as other services, the venture states. It claims the IT costs are the lowest per user of any UK county council.

Cllr Nick Clarke, leader of Cambridgeshire County Council, said that 30% of the LGSS turnover comes from outside the two founding councils. “We are looking to expand on this in future years by working with a greater number of public sector organisations.”

In January this year the venture renewed its contract with Fujitsu to supply an ERP shared services platform based on Oracle e-Business Suite.

Big IT bounces back with £350m DWP deal The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has picked Accenture to develop and maintain applications for the new universal credit - centrepiece of the government’s public sector reforms. The contract is the second this year to go to an incumbent multinational supplier and to break the “presumption” that no single contract will be worth more than £100m.

According to a press release, the Accenture contract “to deliver application development and maintenance services” systems will be worth between £350m and £490m over seven years. Under the department’s policy of paying for services rather than infrastructure, the exact value will depend on demand. Accenture’s main job will be to develop a suite of programs to enable citizens to apply for benefits online or by telephone.

Earlier this autumn the DWP revealed it is sticking with incumbent supplier HP for the bulk of its IT needs, in another apparent break with the £100m “presumption”.

ITU LIVE: OLYMPICS 2012

Games on The Go

Nicky Ward, Transport for London

Geoff Connell, London Borough of Newham

As the first games in a mobile digital era, next year’s Olympics could be a technical, logistical and cultural challenge in some unexpected ways, for private and public sector. Michael Cross hears why from this month’s ITU Live panel.

Met Stuart Hill, BT

Helen Olsen, ITU

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he experience of next summer’s Olympics could change the culture of flexible and mobile working in the UK, according to one of the event’s technology partners. Stuart Hill, BT vice president responsible for building the infrastructure and keeping communications flowing for the duration of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, says that one legacy of the events could be to make remote working more acceptable. The experience of the event would counter the adage that “if you can’t see an employee, they’re not working”, he said. “Maybe flexible working will become part of a culture that puts less stress on London for the future.”

Hill was joining an ITU Live panel on how the 2012 Olympics will affect local communities. With his fellow participants, Geoff Connell, chief information officer of the London Borough of Newham, and Nicky Ward, head of travel advice at Transport for London, he painted a dramatic picture of the scale of the 2012 Games and their likely impact on London and the rest of the country. “It is probably the largest peacetime logistics operation the UK has ever run,” Hill said.

The panel heard that the 2012 Games will be the first to be held in a mobile digital world, with the organisers expecting ten times the data traffic of Beijing in 2008. “Only up to 30% of Beijing transmission was in HD, and mobile use was still 80% voice,” Hill said. “That has been turned on its head. We expect to carry 60 gigabytes of information a second at times, the entire contents of Wikipedia every half a second. It will be 100% HDTV, with hundreds of hours of 3D TV.” Ward pointed out that events will be running all over London. “It is going to be a challenge for the transport system; at certain times and on certain days, the transport system is going to be affected.” She urged London firms to plan in advance, and said TFL expects a “dramatic uptake” in home working and video conferencing.

The Games will have a particular effect on

Newham, said Connell, with many hundreds of thousands of people coming in every day.

While Newham has been ready for mobile and flexible working “for some time”, the Games will require it to step up to the next level. Newham already has a 7:10 ratio of desks to people, he said. “We’re expecting to at least double our remote access capacity for Games time.”

Hill raised concerns that many private sector organisations had yet to appreciate the scale of the challenge. “I worry about this one.” He said the Games would “take the entire population of Leeds and put it on top of London… at peak there will be some 240,000 extra people ebbing and flowing between Newham and other parts of the capital. I don’t think companies are really planning for this the way they should. Your culture has to be different during those six weeks.”

During the last Winter Olympics, 28% of organisations in host city, Vancouver, experienced higher levels of absenteeism, he added. He urged human resources departments “to start thinking about ‘how do I get my people comfortable working at home and accessing their normal lives?’”

Ward said that impacts on the transport network would vary between different days, and that some parts of the network would not be affected at all. TFL is to release new open datasets and information services for use by businesses to plan ahead, she said.

“What we do is look at normal modelling information but also information from transport operating companies, and overlay the spectator information on to the normal background demand on the network, and we can begin to build up a picture of when there is more pressure on the network compared with a normal August period.

We’re saying to people ‘plan and prepare now’.”

Connell agreed, saying on remote working: “People need to be more flexible than at any time in their lives. Don’t try it for the first time on the first day of the Games.”

UKauthorITy IT in Use

A special legacy of the Games will be a demonstration of the way in which different parts of the public and private sector are working together, the panel heard. Connell said the Olympics has helped to create a new relationship between Newham and its suppliers. “We have been working very closely with BT looking at how we can bring superfast broadband to Newham ahead of most other areas.” He describes this as a “preGames legacy... the benefits of the Games being available to residents before they even start.”

On the question of whether the legacy would be compatible with the PSN, Hill said that he is working hard to ensure that anything BT put in the ground is in line with the PSN. “We will be moving all our products towards PSN.” Hill said that the efforts in Newham would ensure that the legacy sustains itself.

Newham is receiving the equivalent of 100 years of ordinary regeneration income for the Games, he said. “There’s a real focus for us on jobs, even if it’s just a taster of a temporary job or even volunteering. The legacy works on lots of different levels before we even get to the Games.”

Hill said his “personal want” would be to take his Olympics team aspirations to other big programmes, “So that we get it right first time.”

Quite apart from the Olympics, next summer will also feature the Queen’s golden jubilee and the Notting Hill carnival. “We will be showing the world how we can party,” said Hill.

ITU Live Sponsored by

www.ukauthority.com/ITUlive-olympics November/December 2011

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NEWS UPDATE

Local transparency code to get legal teeth

Thousands flock to Scottish tweetathon

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rganisers of the first Scottish council ‘tweetathon’ this autumn declared the event a success after 27 of Scotland’s 32 councils joined in, posting more than 1,500 tweets (plus 500 ‘retweets’) in 24 hours on 27 September.

© Paul Clarke

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inisters “are minded” to make the local government code of transparency a legally binding requirement, Communities secretary, Eric Pickles, has revealed. He was speaking on publication of the final Code of Recommended Practice for council transparency which will help reveal the fine details of authorities’ daily business, including senior salaries and contracts.

Every council in England except Nottingham City Council now publishes data on all their spending over £500. The new power would force Nottingham to follow suit - and all local bodies to publish details of contracts and tenders, as well as employees’ salaries over £58,200, performance information and the locations of public land and building assets. http://bit.ly/qIYiKC

Hampshire-wide crime map a national first

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eople living in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight now have access to some of the country’s most detailed information on crime in their area. A county-wide online crime map details information reported by fire, probation and council services, as well as the police, in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

CrimeReports is a partnership between Hampshire Constabulary, Hampshire County Council, Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service, the Probation Service and all district and unitary councils across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Ken Thorber, leader of Hampshire County Council, said: “Never before has a crime mapping site provided this level of frequently updated detail and context about crimes and incidents in local communities.”

The National Communications Group (NCG), a support network for Scottish local authority communications teams, was inspired by similar events run by other UK public bodies including Walsall and Bracknell Forest councils and Greater Manchester Police.

Marking all participating tweets with the ‘hashtag’ #whatwedo, the councils highlighted the range of services and activities they run over a 24-hour period and answered citizen questions. Kate Bond, NCG chairwoman and head of communications at Aberdeenshire Council, told UKauthorITy. com that the exercise had reached more than 150,000 people. “One of the things local government wrestles with, because we are such large and complex organisations, is ‘how do we get across the range and breadth of services we offer?’” Bond said. “This was a way to demonstrate that.”

NHS interoperability must improve, suppliers urge

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lans to enable health and social care systems to share information are doomed unless the NHS radically changes its approach to interoperability, an IT trade association has warned.

The plea from Intellect comes as the Department of Health announced that its information strategy for the NHS, including a replacement for the National Programme for IT in England, would now be delayed for a second time. Originally scheduled for June, it was put back to this autumn and will now not appear until next spring.

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However, according to an Intellect paper entitled ‘We Should Talk’, without interoperability ‘no carer can know as much about the patient as they should. Tests are repeated, inappropriate care may be given and hospital stays extended. In short, without interoperability healthcare processes are less effective and the NHS is less efficient.’ http://bit.ly/sEbGGj

Open data activists cry ‘betrayal’ on corporation

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lans for a new public data corporation (PDC) are a “bodge” and a “betrayal” of the government’s pledges on open data, a coalition of transparency activists has claimed.

The corporation was announced earlier this year by Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, as part of the government’s promise to make datasets available for free re-use.

However activists represented by the Open Rights Group say that the corporation will betray coalition promises to create full government transparency and fuel an open data revolution.

The activists claim that current plans for the corporation will force it to sell vital datasets in order to attract private investment. These datasets, like maps, weather records and land registers, are seen by transparency activists as vital ‘infrastructure’ to enable other data to be properly understood. The campaigners say they are vital for democracy and innovation. The Ernestmarples. com campaign, which led to the publication of data about the boundaries of postcodes, has called for a government U-turn.

Parties at war over electoral registration

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abour has vowed to fight the government’s plan to require voters to register individually rather than by household, warning that millions will disappear from electoral rolls.

The plan was condemned by deputy leader, Harriet Harman, who claimed it was cynically designed to “help the Tories win”. The claim follows an Electoral Commission warning that a little-noticed part of the shake-up - allowing voters to “opt out” from the electoral rolls - could lead to 10 million names disappearing.

According to the watchdog, the young, the poor and those from ethnic minorities were most likely to drop off registers.

The system is the first UK implementation of CrimeReports software, developed in the US. The website features up-to-date, more frequent and detailed data to the public about crime, incidents and anti-social behaviour, as well as information about how partners tackle incidents at a local level. Members of the public can sign up to CrimeReports and receive crime and incident updates by email daily, weekly or monthly so they can continually be aware of what is happening in and around where they live and work. www.crimereports.co.uk

When it does eventually appear, the strategy is expected to flesh out the policy of replacing the “one size” approach of the national programme with an ecology of distinct but interoperable information systems, covering both health and social care.

©iStockphoto.com/Vic Pigula

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Ministers have already launched data-matching trials in some areas, in which town hall electoral registration officers compare their registers with other public-sector databases in order to find missing voters. If these prove successful the idea will be introduced nationwide to support the move to individual electoral registration (IER) by 2014, which is expected to cost £108m.

NEWS UPDATE

Whitehall down to its last 444 websites Efforts to cut the number of websites run by central government are beginning to pay off, according to the Cabinet Office. The first edition of a promised annual report of website closures reveals that on 1 July 2011 Whitehall main©iStockphoto.com/Linda Steward tained 444 websites, 1,526 down from the peak under the last government. The report estimates the total costs of central government’s web estate at £150m a year.

According to the report the government is getting a grip on the use of the .gov.uk domain. The only new sites that have been approved are those made necessary by a machinery of government change (education.gov.uk), a change of name (for Children’s Commissioner), and a temporary development site (the Cabinet Office’s alpha.gov. uk). However the report reveals the existence of a new domain, independent.gov.uk, to signal independence of particular inquiries, commissions, committees and public bodies. Users include the Office for Budget Responsibility. Of the 444 open websites, departments have committed to closing a further 243. http://bit.ly/oT7S1e COUNCILS NEED TO ‘ACCEPT NOT AVOID’ RISK: A little risk can be a good thing, yet 99% of councils surveyed have no risk strategy for this new era of community involvement, according to a survey launched at this year’s Society of Local Government Chief Executives (SOLACE) summit in Edinburgh. By continuing to avoid risk, councils could miss the opportunity to mobilise communities to run local services, warns the joint report by think tank, the Local Government Information Unit, and insurer, Zurich. ‘Risk and Reward,’ highlights the difficulties councils face with the combined challenge of a tough financial climate and the government’s localism agenda. However, by adopting a more strategic approach to risk, embracing community involvement, councils could create better service provision and increase cost efficiencies, it says. http://bit.ly/v1WsrC

DATA WATCHDOG ASKS FOR MORE COUNCIL POWERS: Powers to conduct compulsory data protection audits in local government and the health service are needed to ensure compliance with the law, the Information Commissioner has said. Christopher Graham’s call came as figures showed that his office is being blocked from auditing organisations in sectors that are causing concern over their handling of personal information. The only compulsory data protection audit powers the ICO currently has are for central government departments.

For all other organisations the ICO has to win consent before an audit can take place. Data breaches in the NHS continue to be a major problem, Graham told the annual Data Protection Conference in London.

Of the 47 undertakings the office has agreed with organisations that have breached the Data Protection Act since April, over 40% (19) were in the healthcare sector. In addition, the most serious personal data breaches that have resulted in a civil monetary penalty occurred in local government.

CABINET OFFICE ALLAYS BRISTOL’S OPEN SOURCE FEARS: The Cabinet Office has held a meeting with Bristol City Council following security concerns over the roll out of its ambitious open source strategy. The council was considering a number of open source email solutions but understood that none of them has the necessary government security accreditation. It found that only three email systems are currently certified by CESG, the information assurance arm of GCHQ. These systems are Lotus Notes, Novell Groupwise, and Microsoft Exchange. Bristol City Council leader, Barbara Janke, said that the meeting was very productive and the council now has the green light to push ahead with its open source strategy. “The Cabinet Office were able to reassure us that there are no security or accreditation issues that should hold us back from pushing ahead with our open source agenda.”

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CRIMINAL JUSTICE

See You in Virtual Court COMMENT: The justice system is set to try to wire up and go paperless – again. Michael Cross on what needs to go very differently this time.

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or a government that promised to do away with dependence on high-risk public sector IT, the coalition is walking some pretty high wires.

A paperless Crown Prosecution Service is not the only big IT ambition for the Ministry of Justice. It is also planning to extend its pilot of virtual courts, in which defendants make their first appearance before magistrates over a video link from police custody rather than travelling to court in person. This enthusiasm is despite the reports on a previous pilot, which showed that the costs of the experiment © iStockphoto/Anthony Baggett exceeded the benefits.

The universal credit reform depends on very large-scale systems being developed to a tight political timetable – a familiar ingredient of previous disasters.

Plans for NHS reform in England depend on the successful adoption of new IT at a time when cash is short and cynicism about IT running high. Meanwhile, the government’s wider efficiency programme depends on an unprecedented take-up of shared services, such as the single government web domain.

However some of the riskiest gambles on IT-based reform will be played under the wing of the Ministry of Justice. Undaunted by previous failures to drag the various arms of the justice system into the digital age, the Crown Prosecution Service has pledged to go paperless by April.

Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, told a seminar organised by the Law Society that by April 2012 digital case files will be the “currency” of the service, with information received electronically from the police and held in a secure case-file depository that would be accessible on-screen in court. Defence solicitors and probation and prison services would work from the same files.

Starmer said “the biggest transformational change in a generation” would bring the criminal justice system up to date with other professions. “We need to be radical. The challenges facing the criminal justice system provide an opportunity to radically reform the way we deliver criminal justice. We should seize that opportunity.”

The plan is controversial among lawyers, especially defence solicitors. Comments in the Law Society Gazette raise objections from the cost of equipment to the ethics of using insecure email, and the difficulty of taking computers in to prisons. Starmer acknowledged the difficulties, but said: “We can’t contemplate a system in which we are

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still paper-based in ten, twenty or thirty years’ time.”

The virtual court was piloted between May 2009 and May 2010 in one magistrates’ court and 15 police stations in London and one magistrates’ court and a police station in north Kent.

While the pilot was successful in reducing the average time from charge to first hearing, the number of no-shows and the cost of transporting prisoners, these savings were exceeded by costs, particularly those associated with the technology. Virtual court activity placed an additional resource burden on police custody officers, case file handlers and, most significantly, designated detention officers (DDOs), who were charged with overseeing virtual court hearings in custody suites. It concluded: “The evaluation evidence indicates that, overall, the Virtual Court pilot added cost to the delivery of criminal justice in the London pilot area, compared to the traditional court process.” Notwithstanding this finding, the use of virtual courts is now certain to be extended.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Justice has also revealed that it is planning a £300m IT contract for the prison and probation service as part of a transition to a new model of IT procurements. The new deal will replace the current National Offender Management Service’s (NOMIS) IT contracts, which expire in 2012.

NOMIS was the subject of a blistering National Audit Office report in 2009. The investigation found the project had been hampered by poor management leading to a three-year delay, a doubling in project UKauthorITy IT in Use

© Paul Clarke

costs and reductions in scope and benefits.

In particular, it found that the core aim of the original project, to create a single shared database of offenders, would not be met.

The NAO found that many of the causes of the delays and cost overruns could have been avoided with better management. There was inadequate management oversight and the technical complexity of the project was significantly underestimated. Budget monitoring was absent and change control weak. In addition, the main supplier contracts were designed in such a way that sufficient pressure could not be brought to bear on suppliers to deliver to time and cost.

In the words of NAO head, Tim Burr: “The initiative to introduce a single offender management database has been expensive and ultimately unsuccessful. These problems could have been avoided if the National Offender Management Service had established realistic budget, timescales and governance for the project at the start and followed basic project management principles in its implementation. In delivering the new reduced programme, NOMIS need to focus on better financial controls and more effective management oversight.”

The assumption is that the successor to NOMIS will have learned lessons. It will be part of a programme called Future ICT Sourcing (FITS) which will “change the way ICT services are delivered from the current end-to-end contracts by line of business to an MoJ-wide ‘service tower’ model.”

These are big ambitions for the Ministry of Justice and its agencies, with the usual complexities of political pressure and competing stakeholders. For a glance at some of the complexities, look at the recent NAO report on the project to “streamline” prosecution case files so that they contain only essential information when defendants are expected to plead guilty. The report strongly backs the idea - but finds that local police forces have dragged their feet implementing it, and there is no national way of cracking the whip. That, in a nutshell, is the problem faced by efforts to transform the justice system with technology. Perhaps the new round of projects will fare better. The NAO and Public Accounts Committee will certainly be watching with interest.

ITU LIVE: ELEARNING IN THE AGE OF AUSTERITY

Game On Online learning makes huge financial sense – but can it ever be as engaging and compelling as a computer game?

Dan Jellinek reports on the ITU Live debate.

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lassroom training is expensive. Keith Quinn, senior education advisor at the Scottish Social Services Council, said that the typical cost of bringing front-line social care staff in for a traditional learning day was on average around £200 an employee per event. “The average employee will have five days’ training a year, so for our sector that means around £198 million a year is spent on routine training like health and safety.”

So if only 20% of that moves to e-learning, that’s saving about £40m a year, Quinn said.

It’s not just about cost savings; another benefit of a technology-enhanced approach is you can standardise. Quinn said that with physical training, one trainer might be brilliant, but another may be weaker. “Whereas if you’re doing it virtually, you create the resources once, you get the best take you can get, and it’s there forever, consistent every time.”

Mike Brook, manager of online business education at HM Revenue & Customs, said his team had recently launched ‘My New Business’, an e-learning project including video material aimed at helping people starting up small businesses to interact with government.

As with most other e-learning projects, cutting costs had been one of the main drivers, he said, but as the materials were aimed at the public the savings accrued not from cheaper staff training but from less use of other more expensive public advice services. The result should “release the pressure on our call centre services by enabling people to self-help,” Brook said.

The savings could be further increased by targeting learning on key pressure points where research shows people seek the most advice on the phone, from self-employed tax assessment to becoming a company director, he said. “We’ve plotted it out like bus stops, showing what you need to do in sequence.

And then we looked at where the pressure points are, how much money will we spend on those particular bits to try and help.”

One of the biggest e-learning projects

Keith Quinn, Scottish Social Services Council

Helen Olsen, ITU

under way in the public sector is the Learning Pool, an online system that allows councils and other public bodies not only to access e-learning tools but to share ones they have developed themselves with colleagues nationwide. The system was set up by the Improvement and Development Agency in 2002, becoming a private company in 2006, and now serves around half a million learners with 7,000 developers sharing their resources.

Paul McElvaney, LearningPool director, said that because the platform operated in the public sector, people were happy to share their resources. The result was that large numbers of people could receive training on a tight budget, like some 27,000 volunteer school governors, mostly busy parents of young children who might otherwise find it difficult to travel to remote classroom training sessions.

Overall e-learning costs were typically ten times cheaper than traditional methods, McElvaney said.

Keith Quinn said that his organisation had run a pilot project earlier this year testing the use of mobile devices for staff training, but instead of using smartphones or tablet computers the project used something altogether more surprising: PlayStation Portable game consoles. Learning videos were issued to staff on memory sticks to plug into the consoles, and videos were triggered by pointing the device’s camera at a special series of barcodes known as QR codes.

“The reason we chose it was because there was zero learning curve... they switched it on, they pointed the camera and the learning material played,” Quinn said. The system is also relatively cheap: “If you lose a PlayStation Portable it’s £100. If you lose a smartphone, it’s four or five hundred pounds.”

At this cost, each staff member could be equipped for ongoing learning at the same cost as a single day’s old-fashioned classroom training, he said.

Mike Brook said that HMRC had considered creating video learning material for portable devices like smartphones, but had decided the format was not weighty enough.

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Mike Brook, HMRC

Paul McElvaney, LearningPool

“I think there are limits to what you can put on a smartphone,” Brook said. “People tend not to learn from a handheld source, they normally engage with it for quite a short amount of time, and they will be entertained through it... but it’s not a very efficient way for us to try and get people to learn.”

However, learning can take many different forms, Quinn said. “It depends what you mean by learning. One of the real issues I have with a term like e-learning is that people think it’s an e-course, a curriculum, whereas if you look at what learning is, it might be something as simple as watching a four minute video or listening to some audio on the bus on the way to work.”

The training community had a lot to learn from online games, Quinn said. His own pilot project had tried to engage people using simulation game techniques by creating a fictitious town and populating it with people and services. “We’re trying to engage people at an emotional level... the beauty is you can make a really horrendous decision where it’s awful for the main characters, but nobody has really been hurt. It’s all bits and bytes.”

Sometimes, Paul McElvaney said, the only problem people might have with using gaming techniques is the frivolous image people might attach to it. “We built an induction game for one of our consoles, a bus tour of quite a rural county council area, and it’s a great experience. The cost of delivering it was a fraction of what it would have been three years ago. The only drawback was the little doubt at the back of people’s minds that ‘this is a game’!”

Ultimately, however, once the cost savings of all forms of e-learning start to be realised, people will not be complaining, said Quinn. “I think it’s something you can no longer say is frivolous or fringe; it’s now essential.” www.ukauthority.com/ITUlive-elearning

ITU Live Sponsored by Adobe UK November/December 2011

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VIEW OVER WESTMINSTER

Connected in the House Now that MPs are allowed to use electronic devices in the chamber, will they start to embrace social media and become closer to ordinary people? Tim Hampson picks up on the wisdom of Lord Sugar.

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here is a joke going around at the moment which has Moses, clutching the 10 commandments, meeting Apple founder, Steve Jobs, as he enters heaven through the pearly gates. “Would you be able to upgrade my tablets?” asks Moses.

Recently, parliamentarians have been taking steps to upgrade their technological image. They want to dispel the myth that when it comes to social networks, MPs don’t give a tweet.

Prime minister David Cameron, who was all set to shut the internet down over the summer following the riots, has now joined LinkedIn. He has a Facebook presence and has recently used Foursquare, a location-based social network that is gaining popularity.

MPs now have the option to tweet and check their emails during political debates. They can use electronic devices such as iPads and Blackberrys in the House, but they are warned not to make frivolous tweets about going on holiday or colleagues’ attire while solemn announcements are being made.

The only restriction on electronics in the House is that the device cannot be larger than an A4 piece of paper, but then the lives of MPs have always been ruled by strange and arcane procedures. One 13th century rule bans MPs from wearing suits of armour in parliament and another makes it illegal for any member to die in the chamber.

According to the Customer Contact Association (CCA) the social media revolution will have a profound impact on how parliament and councils operate. The association says the number of social networking users has surpassed email users.

Nearly a quarter of all time online is spent on social networks and people access the internet more from mobile devices than from desktops. People are choosing how they want to interact with politicians and the wider public sector.

Hugh Flouch, founder of the online community support body, Networked Neighbourhoods, agrees that people are

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increasingly using social networks to communicate with politicians.

Speaking at a recent meeting on the “relocalisation” of the web hosted in the House of Commons by the Hansard Society, Flouch said that some 50% of people are connecting with council or council officers as a direct result of engaging with neighbourhood networks.

A survey he undertook finds “huge increases” in the level of awareness of neighbourhood websites among council officers and councillors, with awareness of local networks now running at 84% among officers (up from 63% last year) and 92% of councillors (up from 55%).

Benefits of engagement with neighbourhood networks cited by both members and officers included help identifying areas of current resident concern; use as a channel for feedback on council services; as communications channels; and as a link or bridge to council services online. This was backed up by a powerful statistic from the residents’ side of the equation, Flouch said, which found that 63% of people who use neighbourhood websites use them as their primary source of local news and information.

It seems strange therefore that local authorities are blocking access by their own workers and councillors to online community and neighbourhood networks. According to Flouch, many councils block access to these local sites. In others, there is a lack of guidance on who in a council should use a website, and what the rules of engagement should be, he said. “In many cases access is blocked, and even where there is access there is little guidance on who should be responding and how they should respond, so officers are fearful.

“Given the growing potential and benefits of neighbourhood networks, we need a culture change in councils where they open things up a bit, and make it clear to officers who should engage, and how,” he said.

More politicians should get tweeting, according to the well-known parliamenUKauthorITy IT in Use

© Paul Clarke

tarian, electronic magnate and no-nonsense communicator, Lord Sugar. Writing in a blog as part of Parliament Week, an event aimed to encourage engagement with the UK’s democratic system and its institutions, the entrepreneur said that social media are a way for politicians to break down barriers and connect with the public.

The entrepreneur said that politicians across all parties had been using social media sites like Twitter to communicate with people. Ed Miliband apparently scores the highest number of followers of any MP - at more than 100,000 - though Lord Sugar said none of them had reached his own number of followers (1.2 million at the last count), meaning there was “work to do”.

“Social media means that people can have direct access to me as a Lord and as a businessman,” he said.

“Individuals, campaigning groups and external organisations should be able to contact us and on some occasions, put us on the spot in public forums for the decisions we take on their behalf.

“It is a brave move for politicians, particularly when they are making controversial decisions, but the way I use social media means there are no barriers between me and the public, with information flowing freely and unedited between the two; this is unlike any other medium for communication has done before.”

Lord Sugar said he wanted other peers to embrace social media as part of everyday political life.

“We should be looking at the best way to break down barriers between the House of Lords and what happens in people’s everyday lives,” he said.

“But this should happen all year round, not just for Parliament Week. It should become a part of everyday political life.

We need to get the message across that what happens in our House actually affects what happens in their house.”

OPEN DATA

Bureaucracy 2.0 The coalition government is sounding impressive on open data policy, but will it back up the talk next year with strong action, or will the forces of bureaucracy and profit combine to scupper its plans? Michael Cross reports.

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rofessor Nigel Shadbolt, the government’s transparency guru, says that the value of public sector data is in its use, not its sale. Try telling that to hard-pressed local authorities being urged by Whitehall to give up their claim to a potential revenue stream, the intellectual property in their archives.

In its response to one of two Cabinet Office consultations on open data, the society for public sector IT management (Socitm) says that local authorities still “struggle with the business case” for publishing their data for free re-use. “There is an oft-made argument around savings on handling Freedom of Information requests, but Socitm has yet to see any real evidence of this.”

That’s just one example of push-back from the front line against the Cabinet Office’s ambition to make the UK the most open-data minded administration in the world.

Socitm describes itself as an advocate of transparency and the democratisation of public data, but it has emerged as a critic of the government’s current open data programme. Its response to the consultation ‘Making open public real’ criticises the emphasis on Communities secretary Eric Pickles’ “armchair auditors”.

Rather, it says, the policy should start from making public data such as the National Land and Property Gazetteer easy to exchange between public services and, from that, wider transparency will follow. “Socitm sees open data primarily benefiting management of public services, as managers are able to access/share more and better information produced by their own organisation and other public services.”

This is an understandable viewpoint given the history of frustrations experienced by local authorities in making effective use of data - including resources they themselves have created, such as postal address gazetteers.

The frustration surfaces even more strongly in Socitm’s blistering response to the government’s second open data consultation, on the Public Data Corporation. Here, the Cabinet Office’s idea is for the putative corporation to manage the licensing of

data from organisations such as Ordnance Survey, Land Registry and the Meteorological Office, currently run as trading funds.

Socitm attacks this concept as “fundamentally flawed” and at odds with the government’s own open data policy. It says the consultation “appears to be driven by the interests of institutions such as HM Land Registry, Ordnance Survey and Meteorological Office, all of whom have a particular interest in controlling and charging for public data, rather than by the interests of potential data users. While streamlining data prices and licences may be an improvement for commercial organisations dealing with trading funds, this has little to do with open data.”

While accepting that the status quo is unsatisfactory, Socitm calls for a proper debate on the need for a public data corporation in the first place.

The responses to the consultations are expected to feed into the development of a government white paper to be published in the spring. But an international conference organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation in Warsaw last month heard that, despite the government’s stated intentions, the fight for a “right to data” is a long way from won. “There is a real risk of the empire striking back,” Andrew Stott, the government’s first director of digital engagement and a former deputy chief information officer, told the Open Government Data Camp.

The veteran senior civil servant warned that those built in the mould of Sir Humphrey may have various tricks up their sleeves for diluting the coalition’s open data pledges.

“We’re seeing a move from Bureaucrat 1.0 - the straight ‘No Minister’ - to Bureaucrat 2.0. That’s the one who says ‘Yes Minister’ but then quietly fails to execute the plan,” he said.

One trick, said Stott, is to change the definition of open data and say “we’re free already”. This was the claim made by Royal Mail for the Postcode Address File, he said - however it is free only to people looking up fewer than 15 postcodes a day for personal purposes.

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Nigel Shadbolt: ‘A long way to go’ for UK open data © Paul Clarke

Other tricks include requiring data users to register at websites on the grounds that “We need to keep users informed”, setting up log-ins routines so that they cannot be handled by machines and requiring users to pass through a landing page “with a lot of guff about the department” on the grounds that “people need to understand the context”.

Stott also warned that “corporate IT is starting to strike back”, with departments stalling on open data until they have a “proper system” in place to make sense of it.

One unnamed department had promised to make data available from a single integrated data system - planned to be running in 2017.

Another excuse, he said, was that “no-one’s really interested”. He warned that transparency data tends to disappear from official websites unless it is regularly accessed.

“You’ve got to watch that like a hawk.”

Finally, he said, bureaucracies will argue that “killer apps” will use only a small proportion of the data available so “it’s better to wait to be asked” rather than pro-actively releasing data.

At the same meeting, Professor Nigel Shadbolt of Southampton University and a member of the UK Transparency Board said the open data campaign still had a long way to go. He singled out the Meteorological Office for failing to embrace the new Open Government Licence for re-use of data. “You can’t get primary weather data in the UK.” The conference also heard some good news, from Neelie Kroes, vice president of the European Commission and commissioner for the European digital agenda. She revealed that a new Europe-wide directive on open data would greatly strengthen the current Public Sector Information (PSI) directive, which requires governments to play fair with releasing data but also allows them to charge. She also promised that the “European Commission will practice what we preach”, in making its own data available for re-use.

We shall see. If there is one lesson to be drawn from the open data revolution, it is that lofty ambition is the easy part.

November/December 2011

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ITU LVE: SHARED SERVICES

Shared Experience Shared services are on the rise, but what is the right role for technology? Dan Jellinek reports from our ITU Live debate.

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ne of the most significant findings of recent new research into shared services by Informed Publications, Capita and Socitm was that of the people who responded to the survey, one in four was a manager from the highest level – a chief executive, or director of service. Does that reflect the new importance shared services are assuming to the public sector?

“Yes, there is a strategic dimension to this,” Geoff Connell – shared services personified, as joint CIO of Newham and Havering – told an ITU Live panel exploring the survey’s implications.

Looking across their organisations senior managers are focused on one issue, Connell said: “How can you change it, what are the things you can do that will drive out the savings? And to choose to partner up with your neighbours or similar organisations does require that direction from the top.”

Paul Taylor, director of change and communities at Tunbridge Wells Borough Council which is part of the Mid Kent Improvement Partnership (MKIP), a three-council shared service grouping, agreed. “There’s a recognition that shared services are here to stay.

The financial climate of UK plc is an issue for the next five to ten years, so strategically it has to be a key option for chief executives and senior directors.”

Another clear research finding was that technology is an enabler for sharing – a view supported by almost nine in 10 respondents. Connell said this was unsurprising.

“Ultimately, if you want people to work together you need to look at having them on the same network... the systems have the ability to standardise process.

“We did this in Newham and Havering – first we aligned our infrastructure so we had the ability to log on in the same way, to access the system remotely in the same way. What we’re moving on to now is the line of business systems which is a much trickier area, but it’s much more where you get the value.

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“So we’re starting to look at where we’ve got one system that is better than the other and we should both move to that; where we’ve got two that both work very well so there’s less benefit in sharing; or where we’ve got contracts running out at the same time meaning we should both go out together for something new.”

Ian Gates, divisional director of Capita Software Services, agreed that common ICT systems and infrastructure are the keys to common practices between organisations, which in turn are the key to unlocking savings. “You can then move staff around, and they can cross-train and support. And you want your citizens to have a common experience as well; you don’t want the situation where in one borough you get a good service and not the other because of applications.”

Geoff Connell said one project already under way in London, Programme Athena, is looking at aligning the whole group of internal ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems across many councils – including finance, procurement and human resources systems. “If you’ve got common systems, processes, policies and procedures, then you open the door to all sorts of future sharing.”

Taylor said that private sector technology suppliers must realise that flexibility in contract, implementation and licensing processes are critical in an age of shared services. “We will do business with those organisations that are as flexible as we want to be,” he said.

“There are some suppliers who have not embraced the shared service world as much as others – they just stick to a traditional response in terms of licensing – and I think it’s short-sighted. It requires a new culture from us, so it requires a new culture from suppliers.”

Connell was adamant that those suppliers UKauthorITy IT in Use

that did adapt would realise that, while there may be less money coming to them from individual councils in shared services, overall they would gain: “Suppliers that embrace the opportunity will grow market share.”

On other barriers to sharing services, staff fear of job losses loomed large in the research, debate chair, Helen Olsen, said.

According to Taylor, the key to minimising such concerns was communication: “You can address some of the concerns provided you paint a vision, repaint that vision and then paint it again.

“In a partnership with three or four organisations, the timing of that communication is also critical: the same messages have to get out at the same time. You do everything you can to mitigate those job losses by holding posts open, by looking at ways of redeploying staff, but... having that clear leadership and having a very visible leadership is so important.”

There is also a need to ensure partners come into a shared service on an equal footing, Taylor said.

“In the private sector, most mergers are actually takeovers. You have to look for common ground, be that in savings or investment, or in picking the strengths and acknowledging weaknesses. If there is a weaker partner, often the partnership will fail.”

Gates said that one way to minimise the inevitable friction generated by combining separate organisations was to bring in someone independent as a senior project manager, or onto the management board, who has no allegiance to either organisation. “People can see that there is someone leading the overall new

ITU LIVE: SHARED SERVICES

organisation, not preferring one of the old ones.”

Another survey finding was that few councils are yet exploring the route of outsourcing services to employee-led ‘mutuals’, as promoted by current government policy.

“I think we’ll probably go that way increasingly, but they’ve not yet happened in some cases because people want to get started quickly, and if you spend a lot of time and energy creating the vehicle, then that’s obviously a block on delivering the savings,” said Connell.

“It’s also about having an exit strategy that’s not too heavyweight. So if you have a joint head of service role, and it doesn’t pan out, it’s not too hard in the early stages to say ‘...it just didn’t work, let’s try something else’.

“Whereas if you’ve created a joint vehicle, you’ve maybe [transferred] people out into it, and you’ve got contracts in place for the council’s business for the next five years, [it] is a much tougher position to work your way back from.”

Audience Polls 1. Are shared services an ‘inevitable’ response to current challenges?

Yes, due to lack of budget and increase in service demand

85.7%

Yes, because of political will

14.3%

No, it is unnecessary / undesirable

0%

2. Will shared services deliver financial savings to your organisation?

Yes, from the short term onwards

9.1%

Yes, but only in the long term

81.8%

No, the set up cost / investment and running costs will outweigh the savings

9.1%

3. Is the fundamental role of technology in delivering understood across the public sector?

Yes, at all levels, in all functions, the crucial role of ICT is understood

27.3%

No, it is only understood by the ICT people, not those outside ICT

54.5%

No, ICT people do not understand how to align ICT to the business and make it central to the successful delivery of shared services.

Taylor agreed. “I think we’re on the cusp of moving to experiment with different models, but it’s been about achieving early successes, because you build incrementally on those successes. [Mutuals] are largely speaking too new, and therefore there isn’t a great deal of information about who’s been successful and who hasn’t. But it’s not far away.”

Overall, service sharing tends to be a gradual process that evolves over time, step by step, Taylor said. In Kent, “the partnership started out of opportunity, and as it’s become more mature we’ve looked at where there are the greatest savings, in high volume transactional services such as revenues and benefits, and then we’ve moved on to areas where scarce resources and resilience were a key issue, such as legal, and audit. And then we’ve moved

more latterly into the strategic services such as ICT. “So there is a continuum, and it has evolved.

We’ve proved the concept at each stage; we have a business case with each of our partnerships still. That business case is challenged rigorously, and our managers and heads of service are tasked to deliver at those business cases.”

Gates said that it was typical for councils to start sharing in some smaller areas to test the waters, and if things went well an attitude of trust is built up between partners.

“Once you’ve got the first service up and running well, it almost becomes inevitable

18.2%

across the organisations that they want to do more. It is a continuum – start well, get something working and move on.”

Trust is the key word, agreed Connell. “It’s about people doing business with people, building up relationships, and that develops over time.”

The question is, do councils now have the time and space to build up relationships and build up trust, as Kent and other pioneering areas have managed to do over the past 5-10 years or more? In the modern world, shared service evolution may have to speed up if savings are to be realised in time.

Culture club S

ome 479 senior directors and officers from 310 organisations spanning the whole UK public sector – nearly one in five of all major UK public bodies - participated in the research. The largest response came from local government, followed by central government, health and emergency services. More than a fifth of survey respondents (22%) were categorised as ‘level 1’ in seniority, including chief executives and heads of department; 58% were level 2 – senior officers and managers – with the remaining 20% categorised as level 3. Just over a quarter of respondents (27.1%) had an IT role, with the rest fairly evenly spread across other functions.

Taken together, these figures show the study is one of the most comprehensive of its kind ever conducted.

‘The first steps: building a culture of trust to deliver shared services’ is published by Informed Publications and is available free of charge to the public sector.

For a copy email: shared@ukauthority.com

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November/December 2011

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ITU LIVE: DIGITAL CITIZEN

Digital World, Digital Citizen The boundaries between devices, channels and behaviours are increasingly blurring – posing an enormous challenge to digital by default services, says Helen Olsen, reporting from ITU Live.

A

few years ago, when digital was limited to websites, email or interactive voice response systems, organisations could get away with strategies that allowed them to take a channel by channel approach to the customer. However, with the recent explosion of digital devices and their increased capabilities, organisations have come under fire to not only create but also deliver a unified experience across multiple devices and platforms.

Helen Olsen, ITU

Paul Annett, Government Digital Service Ron Rogowski, Forrester

The route the government is taking with a single government website for public services is to present only the navigation at each stage for related content and tasks, says Annett.

“We found that people are only coming there for one thing. People don’t tend to want to renew their car tax and while they are there also apply for a passport. There is very little switching. But they do need to know where the edges are of the related content for that service.”

Annett explains the According to Forrester current disjointed VP and principal analyst, online experience: Ron Rogowski, a unified searching on Google experience means that the customer gets the Marcus Castenfors, SapientNitro Ben Watson, Adobe for ‘passport’ brings up a number of sites – information or service they need, regardless of the touchpoint they if you click through, for example, to the Foreign come into contact with. A simple concept, Office, you then get sent off to Directgov for more information before clicking through to but difficult to put into practice. the Home Office to apply for a passport, from Consistency is key but, adds Rogowski, “it can an Identity and Passport branded service. “It be a dangerous term”. Enforcing the same is very confusing for the user – who doesn’t level of content and functionality across each care about the identity of the provider, they touchpoint, “doesn’t make sense. It is really just want the government to provide them about prioritising rightsizing of the experience with a passport. To the user it almost seems as if the government is fighting itself for who for the device.” owns the transactions.

Ben Watson, principal customer experience strategist for Adobe, agrees: the answer is “Going forward we are really trying to address to deliver content and interaction from the this, to remove all the different brands and just same place, from a centralised, enterprise have one central one.” management point of view. “The functionality may include content, the content may include Rogowski agrees that GDS is right with this functionality, but that doesn’t really matter. focus: “People just want the passport. So a What really matters is the context of the user structure where people have to bounce back and their expectations and the ability of the and forth between different visual design and structure can be very confusing, and these organisation to deliver that expectation.” are points where you start to lose people. You Core to this is navigation, adds Watson. “The also start to lose the trust of the brand and in way we are developing navigation is evolv- the government’s ability to deliver. ing, especially with the ascendance of touch technology. We should recognise where the “And these are times when government’s user is, what they are trying to get done and image of being ‘wasteful’ needs to be help them focus on the task. We don’t really rectified.” need persistent navigation any more. We He believes that it is time to “change the culneed to remove the unnecessary options.” ture, to take that user-centric view, to see Government has a particular challenge on this what people do, and to understand the jourfront, says Paul Annett, design lead for the ney they go through and where the different UK Government Digital Service (GDS). “The touchpoints map to their needs - and then scope of services is so huge – the navigation build in the continuity across that journey.” hierarchy would be immense to display on the Annett points out that, uniquely, GDS is a team screen at all times.”

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purely focused on creating a consistent digital citizen experience – not taking away control from departments but helping them to break out of the traditional silo approach and ensure that they are creating a consistent experience. It is about “talking to other departments and facilitating the reusing of design patterns,” he says. “We are also designing and building an experience language that will roll out over time.”

Watson is impressed with the “centre of excellence approach that the British government is creating”. Customer experience leadership can “be a facilitator in bringing people together to improve operational efficiency”.

GDS created a prototype “of what a single government domain might look like” earlier this year. But that was very much the beginning of the process, says Annett. “The mindset is that the launch is not the end.

Almost all those developers involved in this have now come on board full time to retain that expertise and user experience thinking within the heart of government, so that going forward we can iterate and manage the way that the government builds these products.

Says Watson, “The one thing that would be death in this arena would be to commit to an 18 month project with a hard outcome, because in that 18 months so much is going to change – devices are going to change, economic conditions are going to change, and who knows what life-changing situations citizens are going to go through during that 18 months. We need to be able to iterate at the pace of technology and at the pace of change.”

Keeping up with the pace of change and designing one government online experience will indeed be an enormous challenge, but one that GDS is tackling head on: “We have to design for everybody,” says Annett. “Part of the challenge is in breaking the mindset in users that it is going to be hard. And part is in creating a reputation of excellence in online government transactions.”

ITU Live Sponsored by Adobe UK

www.ukauthority.com/ITUlive-digital

CONTRACT ROUNDUP

LOCAL GOVERNMENT BARNET COUNCIL residents now have access to a wide range of services at their fingertips, with the launch of the council’s official Smartphone application. Available to download on iPhone via the Apple App Store, the free application, which has been designed and created in-house, allows users to access local information wherever they are and whenever they want.

BIRMINGHAM CITY COUNCIL is to roll out a £14m citywide telecare service, with provider Tunstall. The service, planned to benefit up to 25,000 residents over three years, combines a response service with a range of telecare solutions, including motion detectors and temperature sensors to support older people and those with long-term needs. The service will be delivered across chosen care pathways, which include reablement of service users, prevention services and assessment.

BOROUGH OF POOLE has awarded ProcServe a contract to provide a hosted purchaseto-pay (P2P) and electronic marketplace managed service for the next four years under its pan government framework. The council’s use of P2P and electronic marketplace will cover both corporate and programme spend across its service directorates.

CHESHIRE WEST AND CHESTER COUNCIL is targeting £500,000 savings as it implements a budget monitoring and forecasting system from Advanced Business Solutions. The system is being integrated with the council’s Oracle financial system to enable the quick and easy download of data.

GLOUCESTER CITY COUNCIL and Civica have launched a partnership to outsource the delivery of revenues, benefits and welfare rights services for the authority and deliver annual savings of £220,000. The seven-year agreement is the first step in the creation of a centre of excellence in the city for local government revenues and benefits administration that is planned to sustain local employment and bring new business to Gloucester by providing outsourced business process services to other local authorities around the UK. HERTFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL has selected Updata Infrastructure to service and manage a shared broadband infrastructure connecting nearly 600 primary and secondary schools and 260 council corporate sites in a £20m contract running over six years. The supplier anticipates achieved cost savings of 12.4% in the first 12 months.

HERTFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL’s libraries service is to enhance loans management and improve choice with the help of Civica.

The new system will help to improve library management and integrate the council’s library systems with South East Library Management consortium. Civica is to install its Spydus library management systems across the county’s full library network and to

MERTHYR TYDFIL COUNTY BOROUGH COUNCIL has become the latest Welsh council to use a new web hosted service from Mayrise. The online system will record street works activities across the council, co-ordinate works and events that affect the highway, generate key performance indicators and management reports and, with software held and updated centrally, keep the council up to date with changing legislation and working practices without needing to worry about software upgrades. train staff. Spydus will enhance the management of Hertfordshire’s core library functions for its 6.5 million annual loans including stock circulation, cataloguing, public access, stock rotation, facilitating reservations and stock purchase. It also integrates with RFID enabled self-service facilities, encouraging customers to use and access the systems themselves.

LEICESTERSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL has awarded Azzurri Communications a £2.5m, four-year telecoms managed service contract. The contract will see Azzurri provide, manage and support the council’s 3,000strong mobile telephony estate and its 1,300 fixed landline extensions. Azzurri won the contract after a tender process facilitated through ESPO (Eastern Shires Purchasing Organisation) using the OGC ICT buying solutions framework.

ROTHERHAM COUNCIL has deployed HumanConcepts’ charting software which is integrated with its HR systems to manage restructures across its 15,000 employee organisation. The system is being implemented by RBT, the joint venture partnership between Rotherham Borough Council and BT, and is available to council employees as a secure web-based self-service application, offering at-a-glance graphical views of the organisational structure.

STAFFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL is leading a group of six councils in a four year agreement which will see Capita implement a solution to efficiently and cost effectively manage income from a wide range of services across the authorities. Payments will be received through a variety of channels including over the internet, telephone and face to face.

share services. It provides secure voice and data services for personnel in all of the council’s 450 sites, including 250 schools. The deployment also allows the authority to share its network securely with other local regional partners such as fire and rescue, district councils, colleges and universities. The council has opted to own its network infrastructure instead of outsourcing to an external carrier which enables it to meet the requirements of Government Public Services Network (PSN) initiatives while retaining control of the infrastructure and saving money.

YORKSHIRE AND HUMBER REGION has appointed shop4support as its social care e-Marketplace. It will help people access the support they need all in one place, by visiting a ‘shop’ online, viewing care services, leisure services and other activities that promote health and wellbeing. Web users will be able to use their own money, or funding they get from their local council, to safely purchase online services that meet their social care needs, the same way as they would purchase their grocery shopping. The e-Marketplace will be rolled out to 15 local authorities over the next 15 months. The first will be Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council.

TANDRIDGE DISTRICT COUNCIL IS HOSTING RUNNYMEDE BOROUGH COUNCIL’s Local Land and Property Gazetteer with the support of GGP Systems. The shared services arrangement is providing secure access to the data via a common network shared by all 11 councils within Surrey. Tandridge has also used GGP to integrate the gazetteer within Runnymede’s geographical information system (GIS), joining up a range of back office systems and frontline service delivery.

STOKE-ON-TRENT CITY COUNCIL has chosen to deploy LogRhythm’s integrated log management and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution. The council will be using the software to strengthen its networks by identifying and remediating internal and external security threats across its IT infrastructure. Prior to the LogRhythm deployment there was no centralised approach to logging, with major applications handling their own logs independently.

WARWICKSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL has deployed MPLS Wide Area Network from Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise to manage and UKauthorITy IT in Use

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CONTRACT ROUNDUP

CENTRAL GOVERNMENT & AGENCIES CESG, the information assurance arm of GCHQ, has appointed a consortium comprising IISP (Institute of Information Security Professionals), CREST (Council for Registered Ethical Security Testers) and Royal Holloway’s Information Security Group (ISG) at the University of London to run the IA Specialist Certification Scheme to protect against growing cyber threats. The consortium has been awarded a licence to issue the CESG Certified Professional Mark based on the IISP Skills Framework.

DEPARTMENT FOR TRANSPORT has awarded ProcServe a contract to provide an electronic marketplace for the next four years.

The electronic marketplace will be delivered through the department’s Shared Services, and will be available to the department and its customers including the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the Driving Standards Agency.

DEPARTMENT FOR WORK AND PENSIONS has awarded a seven-year contract to IBM to develop applications to support the government’s flagship Universal Credit benefits reform programme. The deal, announced on 28 September, is the first major IT contract from the department since its cancellation of a deal with Fujitsu in March. According to IBM, the new contract will increase the efficiency of service delivery and reduce costs by providing services across approximately 60 applications in the department’s business technology estate.

It will also facilitate the secure sharing of data with other government departments and suppliers and help move services online.

DRIVER AND VEHICLE LICENSING AGENCY (DVLA) has signed a £6.7m, three-year deal with Virgin Media Business to provide its business phone lines, supported by a hosted

call management system. It will be hosted on the company’s fibre optic network and route all of the agency’s incoming calls to its nongeographic numbers beginning with ‘08’ and ‘03’, allowing it to control and manage call routing plans in real-time. Virgin said this will also make it possible for the DVLA to monitor how well the calls are handled.

GOVERNMENT DIGITAL SERVICE (GDS), based in the Cabinet Office, has relaunched the Civil Service website using the WordPress blog tool, one of the most widely used open source content management systems on the internet. The site is the primary means of communicating what the constitutional role of the UK Civil Service is, what it does and its codes of conduct. It also provides information on the role of different organisations and bodies and their performance to ensure the Civil Service remains accountable and transparent.

HIGHWAYS AGENCY has selected IPL, an IT services company specialising in business intelligence and information management, to design, build and operate the Highways Agency Weather Central Service. The system will allow the Highways Agency and its service providers to use data collected from a greater number of sources to identify trends and traffic patterns in response to weather conditions, enabling the agency to pre-empt potential disruption and mitigate against any adverse effects of weather.

MINISTRY OF JUSTICE has selected CourseBuilder to provide a shared services platform to enable the department’s learning services team to create e-learning programmes for a range of staff. The MoJ team has been working closely with Edvantage Group’s product experts to ensure they have the skills and knowledge to deliver courses to 76,000 employees through the Justice Academy’s Learning Management System.

POLICE WEST YORKSHIRE POLICE has awarded a framework contract to Ultra Electronics for the provision of a fully networked digital interviewing solution. The system will replace legacy tape recorders with digital equipment that records synchronised audio and video to evidential standards, while reusing existing infrastructure where possible to reduce cost and deployment timescales. The recordings will be held on a secure network that can be accessed locally, force-wide, regionally or nationally, enabling secure remote review and transcription using Medirva, Ultra’s content management and delivery solution.

MERSEY TUNNELS POLICE has deployed a TETRA communications platform from APD Communications based on the Cortex Software Integrated Communications Control System (SICCS), providing low-cost access to group communications with neighbouring forces and services for the first time. APD has provided a direct integration between the force’s existing CORTEX software platform and the Sepura SRG3500 Mobile Gateway, which acts as a TETRA base station suitable for the force’s small size.

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HOUSING LAMBETH LIVING, London’s largest housing Arm’s Length Management Organisation, has selected Vangent to manage customer contact during normal working hours. Lambeth Living had previously joined the Pan-London Out-of-Hours Shared Service, also operated

by Vangent, to handle all customer calls during the evenings and weekends.

NOTTING HILL HOUSING TRUST (NHHT) has contracted Advanced 365 to deliver a private cloud managed IT service for four years with the option of extending it for a further two years. This £7.43m outsourced IT service contract - key to supporting NHHT’s growth plans and flexible working environment, and enabling improved communications between NHHT and its tenants - is being delivered in phases with completion due 31 March 2012.

PLYMOUTH COMMUNITY HOMES has turned to Stem Group for a new separate IT infrastructure and support after its recent move away from Plymouth City Council. Part of the solution included providing 14 servers hosted within Stem Group’s data centre, 400 workstations, 50 laptops to allow staff to work remotely and four Storage Area Networks to allow staff collaboration via shared drives.

NORTHERN IRELAND - DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, SOCIAL CARE AND PUBLIC SAFETY (HSC) has selected Advanced Computer Software Group for a £17m, 10-year contract to supply a province-wide finance, procurement and logistics system, part of a business services transformation programme aimed at saving more than £8m a year.

ROYAL ARMOURIES has purchased Asset4000 from Real Asset Management (RAM) to improve the asset tracking and management of its £55m fixed asset base across three historic locations. The Royal Armouries sites together form one of the largest collections of arms and armour in the world, comprising the UK’s National Collection of Arms and Armour, National Artillery Collection and National Firearms Collection. The agency has invested in the solution to improve the efficient tracking of all its assets, to eliminate the timeconsuming and potentially inaccurate process of spreadsheet accounting and to comply with the Modified Historic Cost Accounting legislation (MHCA). The software embeds pictures of assets into a database to assist those engaged in revaluations and indexation.

SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT has signed a £18.5m, four-year contract with Amor Group to run eProcurement Scotland, the agency which provides online purchasing services for the public sector. The contract will provide carbon savings by using a virtual hosting environment, which will reduce the infrastructure from more than 73 servers to 19. The main hosting centre will be the Scottish Government’s Saughton House in Edinburgh.

CONTRACT ROUNDUP

SHOWCASE

HEALTH

GGP

AYRSHIRE DOCTORS ON CALL, the doctors’ co-operative providing emergency out-of-hours care, has migrated to a cloud-based implementation of the Adastra clinical patient management software system from Advanced Health & Care.

CARDIFF AND VALE UNIVERSITY HEALTH BOARD has been kitted out with clinically designed netbooks installed with the Civica Paris case management package. The system allows staff to access and update patient information from the system on the go. Users report that patients are responding positively to staff using mobile working as they feel more involved in their care.

EAST OF ENGLAND PRIMARY CARE TRUSTS CONSORTIUM comprising NHS South East Essex, NHS South West Essex, NHS Norfolk, NHS Bedfordshire and NHS Hertfordshire, has selected MedeAnalytics to provide invoice validation and performance analytics services. The Invoice Validation and Clinical Commissioner services will help to monitor utilisation and ensure accurate payment for services.

MOORFIELDS EYE HOSPITAL is to roll out an open source electronic patient record system after nearly a year running as a pilot trial. Bill Aylward, consultant ophthalmic surgeon at Moorfields, said that open source might prove more suitable than commercial systems developed for the NHS. Instead of high costs – as OpenEyes is free software and without licence fees – he believes that with improved efficiencies and the phasing out of paper notes, adopting the open system could save several million pounds within three years.

MAYRISE

NHS 24, Scotland’s provider of national telehealth and telecare services, has named Capgemini as the ‘preferred bidder’ to run its clinical applications and patient contact management services. The first part of the contract has a total value of £100m over 10 years.

NHS EASTERN AND COASTAL KENT AND NHS MEDWAY are deploying EDT Hub to distribute documents electronically to more than 180 GP practices. The solution is expected to save £198,616 per year in time savings and consumables when transferring 900,000 documents, excluding savings in postage. NHS Medway estimates that approximately £108,122 will be saved per annum in time costs.

NHS LUTON has been working in partnership with MedeAnalytics to enable more effective communication and collaboration between the Primary Care Trust and GPs. NORTH MERSEY HEALTH INFORMATICS shared service has chosen Sophos for cost efficiency, ease of use and speed of deployment, to secure devices ranging from clinical machines to endpoints and mobile devices used to access confidential patient data.

SOUTH CENTRAL AMBULANCE TRUST’s third and final emergency operations centre has just gone live with Intergraph’s I/CAD system, completing a process that creates a three-centre, one-system virtual control room with the ability to balance workloads and dispatch the ‘nearest and best’ resources for incidents across the trust’s 3,500 square mile region. A network control centre with common telephony platform, integrated with I/CAD, will allow a SCAS call taker in any EOC to pick up a patient call from any location in the region.

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