Local Government IT in Use - January/February 2010 issue by Informed Publications Limited

TECHNOLOGY & THE TRANSFORMATION

FRONTLINE SERVICES

LGITU Local Government IT in Use J a n u a r y / F e b r u a r y 2 01 0

Forecast: Cloudy LGITU â&#x20AC;˘ January / February 2010

- G - c l o u d s g a t h e r o v e r We s t m i n s t e r

Social Media Butterflies - Still searching for a business case

Stretched to Breaking Point - Council ICT feels the stress on the front line

Te c h n o l o g y o n t h e C a m p a i g n Tr a i l - What future a strategy in the current electioneering? P L U S : S e t t i n g D a t a F r e e , E n g a g i n g w i t h a D i g i t a l B r i t a i n , Vi e w f r o m We s t m i n s t e r, e F o r m s , P r o d u c t N o t e s & C o n t r a c t R o u n d - U p

CASE STUDIES

FEATURES

PRODUCTS

COMMENT

LGITU Local Government IT in Use

ISSN 1368 2660

Editor & Publisher

Contributing Editor

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

On the Cover

January / February 2010

The G-cloud gathers over Westminster. See page 6. © iStockphoto.com

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

Special Correspondent Michael Cross E: Michael.Cross@infopub.co.uk Advertising & Circulation

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

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In this issue... Comment To Arms and Technology... the election battle cry rings out. News Update

Editorial The Editors welcome editorial information on the use of Information and Communication Technologies in local government and the transformation of frontline services. Please submit relevant material or ideas in the first instance by email to Helen Olsen: helen@infopub.co.uk

Informed Publications Ltd, PO Box 2087, Shoreham-By-Sea, West Sussex, BN43 5ZF Publisher of: LGITU, the Tomorrow’s Town Hall newsletter and www.UKauthorITy.com

© Informed Publications Ltd, 2010 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.

Forecast: Cloudy The clouds are gathering over Westminster, but will G-cloud arrive in time or will a public utility win out?

Engaging with a Digital Britain Next generation eForm technology has a role to play in delivering online services in a Digital Britain, finds LGITU panel.

Set All Data Free Problems with postcodes and the future of Ordnance Survey could cost local government dear as the world moves to free re-use of government data, says Michael Cross.

Special Focus: Cost Saving in an Uncertain World To meet spiralling demand for public services, limited public funds must be carefully measured. Delivering more with less is imperative.

Net Wars In the run up to the election, Tim Hampson reports from Westminster on a sharpening of knives on the battlegrounds of public sector IT.

Social Media Butterflies ‘Everyone is doing it, why don’t you?’ is not a convincing argument in a bankrupt public sector, says Helen Olsen.

Product Notes

Contract Round up

To advertise in LGITU call Informed Publications on: 01983 812623 Subscribe Now - see inside back cover for details

January/February 2010

7-8

Technology on the Campaign Trail With a general election looming, Tim Hampson looks at how technology could shape the campaign.

The Editor welcomes manuscripts and illustrations for consideration for publication, but on the understanding that Informed Publications Ltd cannot be held liable for their safe custody or return.

2-4

Stretched to Breaking Point Helen Olsen finds stress on the front line and trouble ahead for council ICT - and still no place at the ‘top table’.

What Future a Strategy? Michael Cross ponders the outlook for government IT strategy for the second half of the year.

Published by:

Local Government IT In Use

15-17

COMMENT

To Arms and Technology ...the election battle cry rings out or the first time technology has seriously entered the general election battle ground – from party political rhetoric to parties’ use of social media, technology has a key part to play and opinions to sway. Technology benefits are being promised to the excluded and the disenfranchised from one side intent on managing the unmanageable. On the other, the chattering classes are being courted with promised slashing of the ID card, ContactPoint and health plan for IT projects. Another day, another electioneering promise. Either side charges the other with profligacy and misunderstanding of the technology whilst promising to use this panacea for all ills to deliver the efficiency savings that the public sector desperately needs to ride through this recession. However, whoever wins the election will be in an unenviable position technology-wise. There is no money; but there is no let up in demand for service. Heroic attempts across the public sector to ‘do more with less’ have been foiled by culture and inertia and the easy ‘low hanging fruit’ has long since been picked. The next step will be painful. Technology can ease that pain but while its understanding is tinged with party political electioneering the big picture will again be missed. So far, no one is listening to the front line. And frontline ICT is stretched to breaking point, as Socitm’s latest ICT Trends (page 5) attests. Frontline ICT is overwhelmed with the demands, and battered from headcount and budget reductions. To add insult to injury it is also seen as just another service to be pruned and trimmed, not as a potential saviour to the problems facing public service delivery. So why has technology never made it to the higher echelons? A jokey conversation at a recent press conference could be said to have concluded with agreement that councils’ senior management and leadership were just ‘too old’ and of a different generation to grasp the importance of technology for transforming the organisation. But that is not good enough. There isn’t time to wait for this older generation to ‘die out’. It is incumbent upon the technology sector to engage with the rest of the world. Instead of shaking their heads with a wry smile and saying, “Oh, they just don’t get it”, it is time to communicate the whys, the wherefores and, crucially, the evidence based business case for delivering technology driven change. Helen Olsen, Editor - helen@infopub.co.uk

NEWS UPDATE

Government and opposition race to free data ore than 2500 datasets from across government are now free for reuse by the public from a one-stop data shop, data.gov.uk.

“Making public data available for re-use is about increasing accountability and transparency and letting people create new, innovative ways of using it. Government data should be a public resource,” said inventor of the world wide web and key player in the release of this data, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. “By releasing it, we can unlock new ideas for delivering public services, help communities and society work better, and let talented entrepreneurs and engineers create new businesses and services,” he added. However, mayor of London, Boris Johnson, beat the government to ‘free data’ sainthood by launching the London Datastore two weeks before the government’s data.gov.uk launch party. Technically, the government data is available first, as Johnson made his announcement prior to a promised go-live date of 29 January. Politics notwithstanding, the advent of free, reusable ‘non-personal’ government data under an ‘open’ licence is to be welcomed and applauded. Perhaps more so if postcode and Ordnance Survey data had been included in the offering. Professor Nigel Shadbolt, one of the site’s prime instigators, said that the launch “marked an important step forward” in the work prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced last December in ‘Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government’. The aim, he said, was for the release of public data to be “business as usual” across the public sector.

Give Cabinet Office teeth single minister of state post, with a ‘coherent, cross-government IT brief’ ranging from IT security to digital inclusion to industry policy, should be created, finds a report from the Institute for Government think tank.

‘Installing New Drivers’, concludes that ‘the centre’ - the Cabinet Office and/or the Treasury - ‘needs to do more’ to drive public sector IT strategies. Throughout government, states the report, ‘Ministers frequently do not pay sufficient attention to the IT dimension of policy announcements. Coupled with the overriding importance attached to individual ministers’ initiatives, this can lead to the wheel being reinvented across government. IT is often seen as a political after-thought because it enters the decision-making process too far ‘downstream’, when plans and deadlines are already fairly definite.’ www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk Local Government IT In Use

Applications showing the traffic flows and congestion on the motorway network and a ‘postcode newspaper’ are already in preview stage. Others in progress include applications showing school catchment and performance, house prices, local amenities and services, or access to local hospitals. Over at City Hall, the new London Datastore will “unleash valuable facts and figures that been languishing for far too long in the deepest recesses of City Hall,” said Johnson. “I firmly believe that access to information should not just be the preserve of institutions and a limited elite. Data belongs to the people, particularly that held by the public sector, and getting hold of it should not involve a complex routine of jumping through a series of ever decreasing hoops.” Both projects take much from the lead of president Obama’s administration in the US with the esteemed Data.gov open public data site which, according to US chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, contains “more than 168,000 datasets online”. http://data.gov.uk www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk http://data.london.gov.uk

Local spending reports online etails of how councils and other D agencies spend public money will be put online from the summer as part of a shakeup of local spending reports. Communities secretary, John Denham, said that the newlook reports will provide greater transparency, saving people from trawling through a series of reports and statistics on how their taxes are being put to use. Reports are to be published in “a clear and user friendly format”, instead of in “a series of excel spreadsheets” as at present. www.places.communities.gov.uk

PRIZE DRAWS hank you to all those that participated in the research stages of our latest Treports and congratulations to the winners of the prize draws for each: Connecting the Public Sector • £50 Amazon Voucher - David Flintham, Group Manager, Customer & Information Services, Waltham Forest London Borough eForms in a Digital Britain • 3G 8GB iPod nano – Peter Kendrick, Head of Technology, Stafford Borough Council • £50 Amazon Voucher – Karen Whalley, Principal Service Development Manager, Trafford Council Prizes are on their way to the winners. For a copy of either report please email Helen Olsen: helen@infopub.co.uk January/February 2010

NEWS UPDATE

Brown places Cameron hones his Smarter Government power-to-the-people onus on councils message he prime minister’s adviser on data policy, Professor Nigel Shadbolt of Southampton University, has been given the task of opening up local government data for re-use under the ‘smarter government’ strategy.

‘Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government’, published by Gordon Brown before Christmas, says that the government will ‘encourage’ local authorities to release local public data and make it free for re-use. Shadbolt will crack the whip by leading ‘a local public data panel to ensure that data are linked effectively across local authorities, the Local Government Association, government departments and agencies’. Local government features strongly in the strategy, drawn up by Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury. A decade after Labour’s Modernising Government green paper, it revisits some long-held ambitions of e-government enthusiasts, including compulsory e-channels and joined up systems. Most significantly, it announces that the birth and death components of the ‘Tell us Once’ service will be ‘rolled out nationally in 2010’. Change of address will follow, the paper states. As for compulsion, ‘During 2010, we will set out, service by service, how transactions with government will move online as rapidly as possible, starting with student loans, child benefit and Jobseeker’s Allowance.’ The strategy also announces a £30m investment in UK Online ‘to support the development of the National Plan for Digital Participation to get more than one million people online in the next three years’. www.hmg.gov.uk/frontlinefirst.aspx www.number10.gov.uk/Page21633

See pages 9 and 10

he Conservatives kicked off the New Year by publishing the first chapter of their draft manifesto and announcing their plans for the future.

Government through the power of information looks set to figure strongly. However, observers with an interest in the IT agenda will be looking for far more detail than has currently been set out about how public bodies would supply their citizens with data under a Conservative government. Conservative leader, David Cameron, promised “the most radical decentralisation of power this country has seen for generations”. He attacked “Labour’s bureaucracy, running everything from Whitehall, denying people control over their lives and undermining the professionals in our public services”. He also made specific reference to technology: “We will create incentives and use the best technology to encourage and enable people to come together, solve their problems together, make this society stronger together.” Government, he said, “Will enter a new era of transparency”. See pages 9 and 10.

abinet Office promises information assurance: A new paper, ‘Protecting Information in Government’, sets out Cabinet Office plans for a new national information assurance strategy, updating the original one published in 2003, then updated 2007. To be published later this year, it will take in the messages of the Data Handling Review (June 2008) post HMRC personal data loss fiasco as well as those of the ‘smarter government’ strategy, ‘Frontline First’, published in December 2009. www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk

ehicle tracking from V Masternaut Three X has helped councils and

January/February 2010

s LGITU went to press, government CIO, A John Suffolk, finally published the new government ICT strategy, ‘Smarter, cheaper, greener’, with, as the title suggests, a focus on cutting the cost of public sector ICT. Savings to the public purse of £3.2bn annually from 2013/14 are claimed through measures set out in the government’s new ICT Strategy. The strategy reveals a plan for a smarter, cheaper and greener public sector ICT infrastructure and builds on the Smarter Government programme which sets out a raft of ways in which the government intends to halve the public deficit by 2014 – including savings of £3.2bn of technology enabled savings. Cabinet Office minister, Angela Smith, said, “We are committed to putting the public’s needs first. That is why we are innovating and revolutionising our ICT systems to ensure that they are as effective and efficient as possible for those working in the public sector, and at the same time we are able to make huge savings.” Suffolk said that the strategy maps out the “fourteen strands of how we will fundamentally transform the use of public services using technology”, at a price, he said that will be “substantially lower” than that which the public sector is being charged today. Key measures include establishing G-cloud, a government cloud infrastructure hosting services accessible via the PSN, a secure shared network. www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/cio/ict.aspx

hared services in South West: Two district councils have agreed ‘in S principle’ to join up at chief executive and management team levels. South Somerset and East Devon have confirmed they will develop a shared services strategy to look at options for a joint management team under a shared chief executive - who should be in post by April 2010. andate sharing services: Political and cultural resistance is preventing local M authorities from working together to meet

gritting contractors keep the ice and snow at bay on major roads. With dwindling road salt supplies, the Masternaut system enabled managers to monitor gritters live on screen as well as record how much salt has been spread. The bird’s eye view of operations provided by the system helped ensure efficient and economical grit spreading, without sending gritting managers out on treacherous roads.

Government IT strategy

inevitable budget cuts, finds a new report that recommends changes in legislation to mandate cost saving shared services. Consultants at Deloitte say that councils will not reduce costs and make significant savings by sharing back office functions without further government legislation. Their report, ‘Stop, start, save. Shared service delivery in local government’, recommends obligatory introduction of regional or multi-local authority shared services to remove the need to build political consensus and address cultural resistance to the concept. www.deloitte.com Daily News / Daily Headlines www.UKauthorITy.com

Local Government IT In Use

NEWS UPDATE

Legal halt for Easy Council plans arnet’s new fast track planning system - whereby those wanting a faster decision could pay more to jump the queue - has been derailed over concerns as to the legality of the ‘easy council’ approach to this service. The Tory council’s Future Shape redesign of service delivery launched last year by then Barnet leader, Mike Freer, proposed a radical new approach to dealing with the inevitable cuts in public sector budgets. Dubbed ‘easy council’, basic services would be available for all but optional extras would be available for those willing to pay - a la Easy Jet business model. Whilst widely acclaimed as pioneering - and championed by Tory leadership - Barnet has

run into problems with implementation. Just last month (December 2009) a high court judge stopped it from removing 24-hour live-in wardens at sheltered housing. A campaign by elderly residents had claimed the council was acting unlawfully in its plan to scrap wardens in order to save £400,000 a year - citing that existing tenancy agreements and duties under the disability discrimination act precluded this. Current council leader, Lynne Hillan, is said to be determined to carry through Future Shape and is pushing for changes to the law to give councils more flexibility. Meanwhile Barnet is considering whether to appeal the judgement.

Essex gambles on outcomes and a change in government ssex County Council has finally signed a Econtract headline grabbing £5.4bn transformation with IBM with a view to fulfilling its vision of ‘providing the best quality of life in Britain for its residents’. The contract, which begins with immediate effect, underpins the county’s ambition to become a one-stop shop for public services across its area, commissioned by outcomes rather than inputs. IBM will apply the highly fashionable lessons learned from Service Canada’s success in creating a single point of access to multiple tiers of government. Unlike in previous large transformational government deals, IBM and the council are not setting up a distinct business venture through which to sell services. Rather, as ‘strategic partner’, the company will act as the council’s axe-man, trimming back the cost of services. For such an ambitious long-term programme, the immediate target is surprisingly prosaic: £300m worth of savings over two years from rationalising

procurement, property and back-office services. The tools of transformation are familiar. Executives speak of sharing back office services and cutting the need for office space by making more use of flexible and mobile working. In the longer term, the plan is to cut transaction costs by driving more services through a web portal, which for the citizens of Essex will become the main point of contact for all three tiers of government. etting places other systems cannot: G Rural communities and hard to reach areas which do not have access to next generation broadband will benefit from a share of £1bn of government investment, said business secretary, Lord Mandelson. The investment will upgrade the UK’s digital infrastructure to bring super-fast broadband to 90% of the country, essential if the UK is to remain globally competitive as estimates suggest that private investment will reach only up to 70% of the population by 2017.

olverhampton reaches £7.1m settlement with Axon: An aborted W attempt to transform Wolverhampton City Council through a partnership with Axon Solutions has been buried with a £7.1m payment to the supplier. The deal was cancelled by an incoming Conservative administration last year because it could not afford the up-front cost. Since then, a dispute has rumbled on about payment for work carried out. Just before Christmas council leader, Neville Patten, said that the authority had approved a settlement of £7.1m for work on transformation “and we continue to build on that work”. The changes carried out would help the council save up to £10.16m over 10 years, he said. assive fines for data breaches: New powers expected to come into force M on 6 April could cost public sector organisations £500,000 for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act. Information commissioner, Christopher Graham, said, “Getting data protection right has never been more important than it is today... I will not hesitate to use these tough new sanctions for the most serious cases where organisations disregard the law.” www.ico.gov.uk

boroughs share ICT: Lewisham and Bromley are collaborating Lonondon the purchase and supply of IT services issuing joint tenders for five year ICT contracts worth up to £26.5m. Tender one is for IT infrastructure and support services valued at £4.4m a year, tender two for voice and data support services to the tune of £800,000 per annum. The estimated annual value of the contracts for Bromley is £1.9m and for Lewisham is £3 4m. The move could also lead to sharing of exchequer services and a data centre Bromley has also placed a notice for exchequer services and Lewisham one for provision of a data centre. Responses will be considered from contractors who ‘tender for both tenders jointly and or separately’.

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IT TRENDS

Stretched to Breaking Point Still no place at the ‘top table’ and trouble ahead. Helen Olsen finds stress on the ICT front line at the launch of Socitm’s latest IT Trends research. n the day that Gartner announced expectations for a growth in worldwide IT spend of 4.6% in 2010, Socitm launched its IT Trends in local public services report 2009/10 – charting a decline in council ICT budgets of more than 11% since 2008 and predicting a further downward slide in 2010.

The only, rather interesting, anomaly in the downward trend is communications – where a 7.5% increase in spend is expected, no doubt fuelled by Digital Britain and Cloud ambitions and the need to deliver mobile and flexible working in order to deliver cost savings.

This is the 23rd annual IT Trends report – a survey universally acknowledged as being the most comprehensive and ‘real’ assessment of the state of council ICT. Where other market reports extrapolate from relatively small samples, Socitm is in the enviable position of being able to marshal its head of IT membership to complete in-depth questionnaires. For the current report 390 frontline service organisations responded. There is little need for extrapolation when, for example, 93% of all county councils, 85% of London boroughs and 70% of all districts file a response. Indeed, with the exception of Northern Ireland, where only 27% of councils responded, a minimum of seven in ten of every council type in the UK participated.

The report, ‘Stretched to Breaking Point’, finds that sources of external funding have dried up post e-gov era and efficiency savings within ICT are declining. Organisations will, it suggests, ‘either need to find more cash to support the ageing ICT infrastructure or find new lower-cost ways of delivering ICT services’.

Weighty and comprehensive to say the least. All the more cause for concern, therefore, that ICT managers feel under siege and that the current eerie calm is just the nervous inaction before the storm that will be what follows the general election. Whoever wins, post election there will be cuts: the front line is bracing.

The promised land of cost slashing shared services has failed to materialise: ‘Political rather than practical constraints appear to be the main barrier to progress.’

Of equal concern is that ICT managers didn’t see this coming. Despite claims in the executive summary of this latest report that ‘We predicted last year that spending on ICT would be cut’ this is not so. Last year’s summary reported: ‘This year’s results show a further overall spending increase topping the previous record year 2005. The forecasts for future spending are also broadly optimistic.’

Overall ICT expenditure now stands at £2.8bn, and staffing levels are reduced by 10% - but service demands are significantly growing from citizens feeling the pressure of a nation in recession. According to report author, Socitm’s John Serle, “This level of reduction is unprecedented in the 23 years we have now been monitoring trends.”

Says Serle, “Our survey indicates that savings achieved by efficiency programmes are already in decline. We cannot identify how further large scale savings can be achieved without cutting into front line services.” This stark reality contrasts markedly with last year’s report, which was perhaps overly optimistic on the prospects for local authority IT in predicting a 5% increase in spend for this period. Indeed, post e-gov the IT trends reports’ titles have gone from a confident ‘e lift off’ (05/06) and ambitious aims to complete the ‘modernisation of public 5

services’ (06/07) through a reality check of ‘doing more with less’ (07/08) to enter ‘unchartered waters’ (08/09) and arrive at the current assessment that the local government ICT function is ‘stretched to breaking point’.

January/February 2010

Last year’s summary continued, ‘Whilst the current financial instability may be having a negative impact on staffing levels in businesses throughout the UK, it is unlikely that the crisis will have a direct negative impact on ICT staff directly employed by local government in the short term.’ Instead, against the backdrop of recession, the picture from the ICT front

line today is one of ‘belt tightening’. Despite the drops in budget and staff numbers, however, there appears to be an ambition to use technology more innovatively and a clear move towards using skilled ICT staff more efficiently – the number of staff using mobile and home working technology is rising. Said Serle, “It is no longer possible to meet the challenge by just doing what we were doing better. We now need to rethink what we do.” Indeed, just as in the private sector, public sector frontline service CIOs are focused on improving business processes, reducing cost and improving workforce effectiveness. Self-service ‘is the most promising avenue for delivering cost reduction and change’. Respondents are now focused on using both established technologies in innovative ways and leading edge technologies to transform services. But this may not be enough, says Socitm – what is needed now is ‘new ways of working that can deliver change and benefit at a much faster pace’. Serle identifies cloud computing, software as a service and utility computing as offering significant potential for delivering savings. But, he says, such new technologies “will introduce new risks” into the equation, such as uncertainty in service standards, issues of data ownership and security, and an as yet unknown ability to control and manage demand. Serle remains convinced that the risks can be managed and the rewards will be worth the effort of doing so. Despite this, Socitm “has misgivings” about ‘G-cloud’ – especially over the likelihood of it delivering savings within the three years specified in Digital Britain. Interestingly, despite the ruffled feathers and strident objections to ‘being told what to do’ by central government, the survey reports a significant increase in focus on security post DWP’s mandating of its CoCo (code of connection) standard for hooking up to the Government Connect Secure eXtranet (GCSX). This mirrors the findings of LGITU’s survey at Continued on page 6

Local Government IT In Use

NEWS UPDATE

Forecast: Cloudy The clouds are gathering over Westminster, but will G-Cloud arrive in time or will a public utility win out? he future is cloudy in more ways than one. Socitm is warning that G-cloud may never deliver in the timescales needed in which to make savings and that the sector needs to look towards the public cloud.

Conversley, government CIO, John Suffolk, is warning that the public cloud will never be a safe place for citizen data. Indeed, the security risks of cloud computing concern many. No doubt technology will soon solve these risks, but in the meantime Suffolk is right to state that citizen data should always be kept on a ‘secure’ G-cloud. But Socitm is also right to voice concerns over the achievability of a secure and workable G-cloud within the timescales dictated by unremitting pressure on the public sector budgets. Indeed, work has yet to begin on this panacea for cheap, efficient, secure ‘technology as a utility’. “It will be horses for courses,” says Suffolk. Public cloud could well be used for non citizen data – “if there are benefits, why wouldn’t you?” he asks. Meanwhile, he assured attendees at the launch of Socitm’s IT Trends 09/10 report on 21 Jan that “work is progressing as quickly as it can” on G-cloud. A first report on the future of G-cloud is due this month. In the meantime, Suffolk reiterates that

“Cash is King” and that cloud technology offers the opportunity to radically cut the public sector’s costly technology infrastructure. It offers, he says, the opportunity to turn technology into a utility: “It cannot be sustainable that we have tens and hundreds of systems and data centres” across the public sector. Slashing this number to “nine to twelve” says Suffolk would deliver up to £900m savings over five years with a further £300m every year thereafter. However, in reality, much depends on where organisations are in their contract life cycle. There is much common sense in the idea of standardising, opening up, sharing and joint procurement when it comes to technology. For example, the new Public Sector Network is being trumpeted as another potential £500m a year saving from the standardisation of communications technology - and its purchasing - across the sector. And shared services? Well, they are inevitable over the next two to three years, agree both Suffolk and Socitm. After all, the biggest cost in local government is people. “And you need to deal with that,” said Suffolk. “The party is over.” The days of everyone doing their own thing are gone.

©iStockphoto.com

With G-cloud, sharing becomes such a cost saving inevitability that it will be hard for the public sector to dig its collective heels in any longer. Indeed, the G-cloud is burdened with so many promises – to slash infrastructure costs, turn technology into a utility, enable re-use of government funded developments via the ‘government app store’ and even open up the market to open source and SMEs that currently struggle to break in to the sector. There is an awful lot riding on this promised cloud – indeed a whole ICT strategy. Let’s just hope that February’s report reveals a foundation substantial enough to carry this burden. Meanwhile, as Suffolk says, “2010 is a year of two halves.” Much depends on the outcome of the looming election and who is in power to make decisions – future strategy, policy and, more closer to home, people’s jobs. The much vaunted (leaked and then crowd-sourced) new government IT strategy has finally seen the light of day, promising clouds, shared services, open source and a government applications store. The test of the strategy, of course, will be its flexibility to accommodate an uncertain, but no doubt cloudy, future.

Continued from page 5

the end of last year, ‘Connecting the Public Sector’. Encouragingly for the citizen, respondents say that ICT services are more secure than ever, and reported losses from ICT failures have fallen for the second year in a row. The main threat perceived today is that from within the organisation Reducing carbon footprint is still a priority. However the focus within this green endeavour has now moved to realising the promised cost savings from virtualisation and the lower support staff requirements from standardisation of the desktop estate. ‘Going green’ has become a cost saving affair.

It is indeed ‘time for a radical rethink about how technology can be exploited for the public’s benefit’. As Serle says, “Transformation will only come about through bold decisions and significant investment, with leadership from the top of our organisations.” However, whilst suppliers and the converted preach technology’s potential to transform services – and radically reduce costs along the way – the chief executives and leaders are yet to endorse and engage in this world view. The root problem here is that ICT has never made it to ‘the top table’. It has never managed to engage with those steering the ship through this Local Government IT In Use

unchartered territory. Why? This has been a long stated aim of Socitm – a 2006 report urged members to step up to the plate as the CIO, ‘an agent for transformation’. It is time for technology to get over itself and break out of the ghetto - to put the potential into language that is recognised by the rest of the organisation. Time to engage internally. Make no mistake, tough times are ahead. Frontline organisations are stretched to breaking point. Someone, please, walk up to that top table before it is too late. www.socitm.net www.gartner.com www.ukauthority.com/connecting January/February 2010

EFORMS IN A

DIGITAL BRITAIN

Engaging with a Digital Britain Next generation eForm technology has a key role to play in delivering online services in a Digital Britain. According to LGITU’s research, ‘eForms in a Digital Britain’ (LGITU Nov/Dec), more than nine in 10 central and frontline public sector respondents believe that eForms can cut the cost of processing customer transactions; reduce error rates and the need for re-keying information to back end systems; and speed up the process of service delivery to the citizen or business.

workflow and case management can be completed within the LiveCycle system and deployed at such a high quality level that the whole process could be more effectively carried out within the new system – the legacy systems are instead due to be switched off. Said Kelly, “We would have switched straight away if we knew then what we know now.”

Over seven in 10 feel that intelligent eForms can deliver standard, accessible, high quality joined up services and enable secure data sharing and joint working – indeed 85% also said that eForms are a tool for pulling together information from multiple back-end systems for one service application form.

However, key to the pilot’s success has been its measured approach of tackling things in “small, bite sized chunks”, ensuring that people are comfortable with the new system and working practices along the way.

However, it was clear from the survey that the full benefits of eForms would not be realised until the technology was fully integrated into back office systems and processes – and this could be difficult to get right. LGITU invited Craig Belsham, head of Point of Single Contact Delivery, EU Services Directive at BIS; Nigel Kelly, e-Working project manager in the MoJ’s Access to Justice Group; Hampshire County Council’s Andy Key; and Adobe’s Berwyn Jones, to meet, round the table and on the record, to explore the research findings. Seventy four frontline and central government ‘virtual delegates’ also joined the live webcast to submit questions to the panel and vote on key questions.

Back end integration The issue of most interest to panel members and audience alike was the integration of eForms with back office systems. It was a complex task, but if done properly well worth the effort. Legacy systems not only cover disparate technology platforms; they also model historical working practices. Indeed, actual data integration with modern eForm technology can be straightforward, but integrating modern, efficient workflow process can be tricky as ways of working have often fundamentally changed. For example, with the MoJ’s e-Working pilot the initial aim was to integrate eForms and case management into the ministry’s legacy case management systems. However the team quickly found that all 7

January/February 2010

Audience member, Rachel Smith, web services manager at East Sussex, asked the panel for advice in demonstrating the real cost benefits associated with eForms when you are no longer comparing similar workflows or processes. Kelly outlined the MoJ approach, which “started from the premise that we were going to change the processes, therefore we needed a baseline of what people did with the old paper system. As we introduced the new systems we could then directly compare the differences and identify the benefits.” The pilot has demonstrated significant time savings and efficiencies, especially for processes that involve frequent reuse of documents once captured. Andy Key’s advice was to always get a solid baseline and then work out whether the reengineering of that particular process would benefit from use of eForms – “rather than approach it as ‘let’s use an eForm’”. He pointed out that it was difficult to compare different processes, but the cost benefits of redesigning a process around electronic communication as a whole still needed to be justified. Hampshire has been reviewing work done under the local e-gov programme, focusing on those transactions they do thousands of times a year. “The e-gov programme basically required us to put all services online, to tick the box, but without considering the appropriateness of doing so,” said Kelly. Complicating factors are expensive legacy requirements (such as two photos and a £2.50 fee for Blue Badge processing) that increase the cost of online delivery, and Local Government IT In Use

The Panel Nigel Kelly, e-Working project manager, Access to Justice Group, Ministry of Justice Craig Belsham, head of Point of Single Contact Delivery, EU Services Directive, Business Innovation and Skills Andy Key, senior IT consultant, Hampshire County Council and member of various Socitm working groups Berwyn Jones, senior manager for government at Adobe Interviewer: Helen Olsen, managing editor, LGITU, Tomorrow’s Town Hall and www.UKauthorITy.com

third party supplier systems. Take school admissions – in Hampshire online primary admissions works extremely well and saves money as every child is ‘new’ to the county. But as the county is unable to alter the schools admissions system itself it has proven cheaper to use paper rather than online options for secondary school admissions. Says Key, “It is out of our hands, we cannot build our own forms into this system.”

Next generation technology Just how far has the technology moved on from the local e-gov days? Would there be a different starting point now for such an e-aspiration? “There are many more opportunities to integrate forms and back end systems now, and also opportunities around CRM, which would be the starting point today.” says Key. “The technology has certainly moved on.” There are indeed many more standard ways of integrating and passing data back and forth - to central CRM systems and then on to individual back end systems. However not, perhaps, as many as there could have been: “Egov should have produced more standards that would be useful to us, but it didn’t. Perhaps because central government was too kind to local government, but there was no clear steer, says Key, and the sector didn’t get as much benefit from the programme as it should have.

EFORMS IN A

But what can the technology do today that it couldn’t do back in 2005? For starters, says Adobe’s Berwyn Jones, the range of possibilities is far greater. “eForms can be very simple; they can be available online or offline and can use barcodes to integrate into workflow systems... They can also be incredibly complex online transactions involving the citizen and various branches of government where the form is integrated with back office systems.” The next generation of eForms, he said, “Have rich, wizard based experiences within them - in the US they are even embedding video to help users navigate through the process. The improved user experience available today will deliver ever more benefit to the public sector.” Kelly, meanwhile, was keen to highlight the intelligence that can now be built into forms to “both help the user to fill in the form but also deliver the information that then drives – even automates - the process and captures this directly into the system”. Belsham agrees that the technology has moved on, “which has helped us. When we were negotiating this directive we bought the ticket that said e-government had been done. But the landscape wasn’t quite the one we had hoped it was.”

Adobe AIR A member of the audience from the Department for Transport was keen to find out what experience the panel had had using Adobe AIR for both offline and online eForms transactions. Adobe AIR, explained Jones, was the platform used to deliver the immensely popular BBC iPlayer site. The latest figures show that around 46-47% of all consumers currently have AIR on their desktop compared to 97-98% with pdf. He agreed that using AIR to deliver forms is “the next generation” as it gives online capabilities in an offline environment: “The South African Revenue Service has an EasyFile application on its website, which allows you to conduct all your tax affairs from a single application, offline.” This gives an enhanced user experience that Jones expects to see used more in the UK in future. Indeed, the MoJ is currently using the AIR application for its Court Reader. According to Kelly, judges are already viewing forms and documents in court this way. “We are starting to integrate tasks through AIR too now, and are also looking to make this available online to parties who need to view the documents.”

The budget and capability gap The panel agreed that eForm technology could certainly help the sector meet the challenges ahead. “But it is going to be tough, as it is costly to do the reengineering of processes, and we have a

DIGITAL BRITAIN

Audience Poll

Yes No

1. eForms are difficult to back end integrate to existing/legacy systems

86%

14%

2. There is a clear business case for eForms within public service delivery

95%

3. In a landscape of savage cuts in public sector budgets and aspirations for a Digital Britain, eForm technology has a valuable role to play

100% 0%

Point of Single Contact, EU Services Directive - Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) he EU Services Directive is a legal requirement for all EU countries to have a ‘Point of Single Contact’ for businesses wishing to establish themselves in another member country – enabling them to find not only find out what licences and permits they require but also to apply for them, electronically. Driven by legislation rather than business case the programme involves 433 local authorities, 70+ other public bodies, and covers 300+ potential ‘formalities’. The directive assumes that the future is electronic. BIS is using eForms to provide a standard set of auditable and accessible, genuinely electronic forms in a format that the customer is familiar with - but that is also compatible with electronic signatures and for which BIS can retain version control. Single Contact went live 31December 2009.

credibility problem in local government in justifying more spend on technology,” said Key. “I think that no, not all services will be online in all instances, but the business case will show that the ones that most people need, most of the time, will be.” Crucially, Key says that, in contrast to the days of e-gov, service managers “get the web; they understand it, work with it every day and they will be building the business case, not the IT people”.

Digital signatures In the EU many organisations are already using digital signatures within electronic processes; however UK law is slightly different. Walsall’s Matt Lowe asked the panel for examples of working with digital signatures in eForms. At BIS, the team is aware that the availability of ID cards in Europe has led to Digital Signatures being more common, says Belsham: “Our approach in the UK has been driven for usability, you can use a digital signature if you have one but it is not a necessity.” The MoJ pilot is also exploring digital signatures, says Kelly. However they are “keen to ensure that security doesn’t get in the way of usability”. Jones agreed that digital signatures could be seen as a barrier in the UK. “But security can also be seen as part of the solution here in the UK - many government organisations are using the Government Gateway and authentication can be employed to certify that a form has genuinely come from the issuing organisation when you download it.” Local Government IT In Use

e-Working, Access to Justice Ministry of Justice (MoJ) proof of concept pilot enabling law firms and court users to file A documents to the courts service and manage the case management process electronically – encompassing lawyers, court users, support staff and judges in an end to end process. Feedback from users to date is enthusiastic. Law firms are generally already using technology to run their practices, and both court clerks and judges are enthusiastic about the electronic case management process - no more lugging large case files around. Significant reductions in turn around are being realised. In the past, filing an application and subsequent court order could take a week or two. This can now be done, 24/7, in an hour and a half - with the form automatically validating itself and informing the user of a success application.

Online services from 2012 Delivering services fully online by 2012 “is a challenge,” says Kelly. “We are only just starting a five to eight year cycle now of getting that level of take up. Mandating is difficult as we have to ensure that the service is open and accessible to all.” Indeed, switching citizen and business to online channels will be key. “We won’t get the benefit unless we give the user a reason to do this,” says Belsham. “It has to be useful and easy to use, as well as delivering a benefit to the department.” The public sector is not like the insurance business, agreed panellists. It can’t say “if you don’t go online we won’t talk to you”. As a sector it must keep all channels open. So, do eForms have a part to play? The panel, and 100% of the audience who voted on the day, say yes. There was consensus too that the business case for eForms, although challenging, was clear. And although back end integration was challenging and complex, the effort was deemed well worth the rewards.

The ‘eForms in a Digital Britain – Intelligent forms and efficient service delivery’ research project was undertaken by LGITU magazine with support from the Tomorrow’s Town Hall newsletter, UKauthorITy.com and Adobe. For a copy email Helen Olsen: Helen@infopub.co.uk January/February 2010

STRATEGY

What Future a Strategy? Michael Cross ponders the outlook for government IT strategy for the second half of the year. ©iStockphoto.com/Sebastian Duda

gainst expectations, it’s been a bumper year for government IT strategy announcements. From official quarters, we had the Digital Britain plan, with its ambitions for universal broadband. We have a new refreshed Transformational Government strategy, ‘Smarter, cheaper, greener’. More importantly, perhaps, we had the ‘smarter government’ strategy ‘Putting the Frontline First’, which pulled together many interesting ideas - and put the prime minister’s stamp on the result.

The question now is what elements of these strategies will still be in place in six months’ time, assuming (as nearly everyone does) that there will be a change of government. History offers a worrying precedent - the fate of the Government Direct strategy announced in the last six months of John Major’s government. Although only a faltering and little noticed step towards e-government, it proposed several good ideas. Yet the supposedly modernising Blair government threw it out with the bathwater, and took nearly two years to put the e-enablement of public services on the agenda. Will history repeat itself? Certainly there will be temptations to announce a clean sweep of the past year’s strategic announcements. Some underlying themes, however, are likely to survive. One candidate for an early chop looks likely to be the Digital Britain levy of 50p a month on fixed lines to pay for nextgeneration broadband. The latest voice in a mounting chorus of opposition is the Conservative-leaning think-tank, Policy Exchange. Its report ‘Changing the Channel’ condemns the levy as an ‘unfair tax’, stating that the case for investing in next generation broadband ‘seems to be based on consumer uses not yet proven’ and ‘social inclusion in as yet unproven uses’. If the case can be proven, Policy Exchange says, next generation networks should be funded via general taxation, as wider social benefits such as more cost effective public services are likely to turn up in greater GDP and/or reduced government spending in the future. Which leads us to the new ICT strategy, ‘Smarter, cheaper, greener’. Although an incoming Tory government would no doubt bin the title and the first few pages as symbols of Labour over-centralisation, 9

January/February 2010

many of the underlying themes will survive. Not least because of their costcutting potential.

little enthusiasm for the strategy’s aims to move transactions such as student loans online ‘as rapidly as possible’.

Top of the list is a move to shared services based on cloud computing, though the survival of CIO John Suffolk’s vision of a ‘Government Cloud’ is very much open for debate.

Of course there are places where smarter government very much chimes with Tory policy. Ideas like more freedoms for local authorities, reducing the number of national indicators for local areas and above all ‘stepping back from the day-today management of public services’ could have come straight from Conservative central office.

The Tories have already committed themselves to another of the strategy’s big ideas, a stronger commitment to open source, and appear to believe that this alone will deliver free applications that will be shareable across the public sector. As a result, the Cabinet Office sponsored ‘government app store’ could face the axe. Also under scrutiny will be the strategy’s plans for ruthless centralisation to put into effect the Varney review and Operational Efficiency Programme targets for savings. While the idea of moving all government IT activities to ‘10-12 highly resilient strategic data centres’ may make economic sense in the long term, its upfront costs will be a natural candidate for swingeing cuts. Plans for 80% of central government desktops to be procured through ‘a shared utility service with increasing levels of adoption by the wider public sector, including local government’ may clash with wider Tory plans for more local autonomy. One target in the strategy that may find its way into the Conservative election manifesto is the commitment to more transparency in IT project management. The target that by 2020 ‘we will follow the lead of the Office of Management and Budget and public sector CIO community in the USA by publicising the objectives and progress of our major projects, including naming the leaders and the results of all external assurance reviews’ is crying out to be brought forward, from the safety of opposition. By contrast, we can expect a Conservative government to distance itself dramatically from the more overtly political line of the smarter government strategy. The Tories are lukewarm at best about the ‘Tell us Once’ service, which after a decade of dithering finally received the go ahead in the strategy. Likewise, from opposition there seems Local Government IT In Use

However, political pundits have long observed that it is easier to call for local freedoms when you’re in opposition than when you are in government. It’s not impossible that a new administration, for all its decentralising, ‘small is beautiful’ and open source rhetoric, may see some virtue in a strong central IT directorate. For the reasons, look at the Institute for Government’s ‘Shaping Up’ report on the future of Whitehall. The institute says that in tackling the combined challenges of eliminating departmental silos and cutting government spending ‘the centre could play a crucial facilitating and coordinating role’. Although otherwise highly critical of the Cabinet Office, the report points out that the department ‘is often best placed to tackle issues where the current use of IT inhibits government effectiveness: for example, to standardise the patchwork of systems that have grown up across central government, operating to different standards and frequently unable to talk to each other’. The institute even has a good word to say for the CIO Council, which it says ‘has succeeded in sharing best practices across government and developing strategy’. However difficulties arise because the council has no capacity or authority to enforce its decisions - while the report calls for a strong central presence overseeing and coordinating the use of IT in government, enforced with intervention ‘when necessary’ on the front line. Whatever promises appear in the manifestos, it is almost certain that a new government will eventually come around to the need for a strong central IT strategy – perhaps more prescriptive than those of recent years.

IT ELECTIONEERING

Technology on the Campaign Trail With a general election looming, Tim Hampson looks at how technology could shape the campaign. lmost 50-years ago Labour leader, Harold Wilson, promised that his government would bring to people the white heat of technology, with its own promise of a mass produced consumer society.

is much in it that the Tories are likely to support and even implement.

Back in 1997 Tony Blair envisioned a world which would utilise the potential of new technology.

Meanwhile the prime minister has promised hi-tech efficiencies will drive down government costs and give more power to people. An ambitious £1.3bn saving will be achieved by “streamlining central government”, indicating that certain programmes will have to be delayed or abandoned. He has conceded that the NHS IT system should be scaled back, but technology will be used to communicate with patients: “Using text messages to remind people of GP appointments can help save on the £600m annual cost to the NHS of missed appointments - equivalent to 24 new secondary schools, or over 13,000 nurses.

He promised to wire up schools, libraries and hospitals to the information superhighway free of charge. There would be a national grid for learning and lottery money would be used to improve the skills of existing teachers in information technology. Each leader was a winner and each used technology and its promise of a better life to persuade people to vote for them. So what part will technology play in this year’s election campaigning? Already the political parties, like prize fighters preparing for a bare knuckle fight, are trading insults and shadow boxing haymakers and uppercuts. Unlike previous eras the public purse is threadbare – the country no longer has the money to throw at grandiose technology projects. Both government and opposition parties alike are promising cuts in public services and the mothballing of high profile IT projects. But rather than the white heat of technology - or even the information superhighway – this era could be remembered for a cloud. The government says that it has been working on a new holistic telecoms strategy which could save the country £3.2bn over the next ten years. Labour plans to continue to evolve the online delivery of public sector services through the use of cloud technology and Web 2.0 processes. It foresees a brave new world of multiple services, interoperability and data sharing via a government cloud – or G-Cloud – together with a government application store. These will enable sharing and reuse of business apps, services and components across the public sector. And even though the Tories have said that the plan lacks vision – indeed, shadow Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, said that it was riddled with complacency and “will waste taxpayers money” - there

“We need a rigid insistence on open standards and inter-operability; a level playing field for open source software and for smaller suppliers,” said Maude.

“In order to protect the frontline services we value, at a time when budgets are tighter, it means we need to do what households up and down the country do to prioritise the necessities and postpone the things we can do without.” But he promised that more services would go online, central government would share more services, and departments would have common procurement practices In the next five years, he said, government would shift large transactional services online to save £400m – he quoted the example that putting benefit advice online alone has saved the cost of 7,000 phone calls. High speed broadband would be delivered to every home and £30m would be spent with UK online, “to get another one million online by 2012”. In an eclectic roll call of populist public sector projects in recent months Mr Brown has said that online crime maps would be searchable by postcode allowing people to make choices about safe ways to get home. The Tell Us Once pilot will be “rolled out nationally” for births and deaths and all published service data will be put online “to drive better value for money”. Meanwhile the Tories saw in the new year with the first chapter of their draft manifesto. David Cameron promised to decentralise Britain and deliver a new era of transparency though technology: “We will Local Government IT In Use

©iStockphoto.com/MARIA TOUTOUDAKI

create incentives and use the best technology to encourage and enable people to come together, solve their problems together, make this society stronger together.” The Conservatives are loudly telling the electorate that they will put the identity card, NHS IT and the ContactPoint for children projects on the back burner – all contentious issues for middle England. Shadow immigration minister, Damian Green, also launched an attack on the 28 databases that the government had set up which were undermining people’s freedoms. “We should reform the use of some of the most intrusive databases; such as removing the innocent from the DNA database and reform the E-Borders scheme so that it does not hold information about the completely innocent for ten years,” he said. He also called for an end to the dominance of suppliers which have led to the plethora of big government IT schemes. “We should be more creative and open-minded about how we procure and provide public sector technology, looking to localist and individualist solutions.” He promised there would be no more big government computer schemes, “which these days are precisely the wrong approach. Just because technology has transformed the way government can use personal information does not mean that a sensible government will take that choice,” he said “The bigger the capacity to collect and share information, the greater danger there is to privacy, and therefore to freedom.” However, it is not all cut, cut, cut. The Conservatives have pledged that they will continue the public sector Total Place programme if they win the general election. A Tory government would also allow the public to comment on legislation as it goes through parliament, in a bid to “throw open the doors” of Westminster to people. Shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, said that he wanted to create a “public reading stage” before Bills are implemented so people can express their views online. The party has also said every item of government expenditure over £25,000 would also be published online. As never before, technology rhetoric will play a key role in the election battlechest. January/February 2010

PUBLIC DATA

Set All Data Free Problems with postcodes and the future of the Ordnance Survey could cost local government dear as the world moves to free re-use of government data, says Michael Cross. ©iStockphoto.com

he real hero of the free data campaign, which culminated in last month’s launch of www.data.gov.uk, was not Tim Berners-Lee or Gordon Brown, let alone Boris Johnson. It was Stuart Harrison, webmaster of Lichfield District Council.

While the others were talking of grand policy, Harrison not only saw the big picture but turned it in to action on the ground. Literally - to make location data available on the council’s website without infringing other public bodies’ intellectual property, he went out with his iPhone and plotted the datasets himself. Lichfield’s efforts - which can be seen at www.lichfielddc.gov.uk/data - played a big part in persuading politicians and Whitehall that making public sector data available for re-use is not some abstract concept for egg-heads but of real value to local communities. Particularly impressive is the way the Lichfield’s My Area service makes use of external sources of data including from the county (via OpenlyLocal), Westminster (Theyworkforyou) and the department for education (www.education.data.gov.uk) this last via data.gov.uk. Local government is likely to be at the forefront of the next phase of the free data campaign being led by Professor Nigel Shadbolt of Southampton University. However for all the warm welcome given to the data.gov.uk website, the campaign faces an uphill struggle given the government’s apparent intransigence on two of the stickiest issues: postcodes and the future of Ordnance Survey. Data.gov.uk, launched as a beta version, contains some 2,500 sets of data which are already underpinning third party application such as the School Finder website. The project, which is run under the wing of digital engagement director, Andrew Stott, unashamedly emulates the US government’s data.gov site, officially launched last May by the Obama administration. The launch coincided with that of a new licence model for re-using government data by the National Archives, replacing its pioneering, but little used, Click-Use Licence. The ‘non-transactional Creative Commons approach’ allows data from data.gov.uk to be re-used both for commercial and non-commercial 11

January/February 2010

purposes. The terms and conditions put together by National Archives are aligned to be interoperable with any Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence. They are also machine readable meaning that applications and programs can access and understand the terms and conditions. Carol Tullo, director of information policy and services at the National Archives, described the new licence as “an important step in making more government information available for re-use, in a streamlined and nonbureaucratic way”. So far, so good. The free data announcements however cannot overcome disappointment at central government’s reluctance to tackle two related long-running problems: postcodes and the future of Ordnance Survey. In the very week that data.gov.uk was unveiled, the government responded to the latest online petition calling for Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF) to be opened up for all. The response however was merely a re-statement of the current licensing and regulatory position: ‘Under Section 116 of the Postal Services Act 2000, Royal Mail must maintain the PAF and make it available to any person who wishes to use it on ‘such terms as are reasonable’.’ The response points anyone with concerns to the last public consultation on the issue, under which apparently ‘Postcomm took all the diverse uses of the PAF into account before reaching its decision in 2007, announcing more safeguards for the management of the address information held in the PAF with the aim of making sure that the PAF is maintained properly and made available on fair and reasonable terms.’ The second disappointment was prompted by the publication just before Christmas of the Communities and Local Government department’s consultation on the future of geographical information. The consultation, and accompanying impact statement, make it clear that the government is not minded to make big changes to the structure of Ordnance Survey, despite the strains created by its new ‘free data’ responsibilities announced by the prime minister in November last year. Local Government IT In Use

The consultation outlines three theoretical possibilities: no change, a radical dismantling of Ordnance Survey, or a ‘staged transition’ to a model which retains the existing set-up but makes some datasets available for free. To no surprise, the consultation reveals that the government intends to go for the third. This mind-set was condemned by Locus, the trade association representing businesses that re-use public sector information. While welcoming the exercise, it raised concern that ‘overall the consultation appears to be focused more on finding a sustainable business model for Ordnance Survey than on stimulating the use of location information in a fair way’. The preferred option also comes with a sting for the rest of the public sector. According to the consultation, it would require correcting what it calls the current ‘imbalance’ in the prices charged to private and public sector users. At present, two painstakingly negotiated and procured public sector-wide procurement deals, the Pan Government Agreement (for central government) and the Mapping Services Agreement (for local government) account for one third of Ordnance Survey’s total revenue, some £42 million. The consultation recommends ‘a transition over time to consistent pricing for all public and private sector customers, through greater customer centricity and greater cost transparency’. While in the longer term this might mean cheaper data, in the short term prices will rise: ‘During 2010/11, the contracts in place between Ordnance Survey and central and local government will need to be renegotiated to reflect the impact of Ordnance Survey Free... The PGA might need to be renegotiated once some products within it become included in OS Free and hence are available free of charge to other purchasers.’ To put it mildly, this proposal is unlikely to go down well with hard-pressed local authorities. The consultation invites comments on: ‘What will be the balance of impact of these proposals on your costs and revenues?’ The consultation closes on 17 March: www.communities.gov.uk/publications/cor porate/ordnancesurveyconsultation

SPECIAL FOCUS: EFORMS

Cost Saving in an Uncertain World To meet spiralling demand for public services, limited public funds must be carefully measured. Delivering more with less is imperative. ©iStockphoto.com

hilst the political landscape from the second half of 2010 onwards is unclear, one thing is certain: the public sector must look to ever more innovative ways to make the most out of scarce public funds.

Within its aspirations for a Digital Britain, government intends to switch to ‘digital only’ services from 2012. Indeed, only by switching to low cost online transactional services wherever possible will limited budgets be eked out to provide additional support to those who need it most. Key, however, to the successful take-up of online services will be citizen engagement. If the process of finding, and then applying for, a required service is not easy, quick and simple then citizens and business - by default - will fall back on more expensive telephone and face to face enquiries and service channels. The potential for the ‘next generation’ of eForm technology to help smooth this process is clear: engaging, interactive, with built in error checking and efficient transfer of data to back office systems, these technologies can streamline existing inefficient and unfriendly processes.

Meeting need at first contact Southwark Council has developed a ‘One Touch’ service with Vangent which enables residents to access up to 10 services in just one contact - including council tax, electoral and GP registration, application for housing and council tax benefits, school meals, children’s clothing allowances, parking permits and library cards. Based on Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite and the Adobe Flash Platform, One Touch has transformed customer service. Automating the process of registering citizens enables staff to deliver more efficient, joined up, proactive and, most importantly, more personal services. “Our aim is to look holistically at citizen needs and address all service opportunities in one interaction, not many interactions,” explains Dominic Cain, head of client services in Southwark. “It’s exciting when an application like One Touch so clearly delivers on its promise... Service representatives have more efficient interactions with constituents and are delivering higher quality services.” Staff also gain a more intuitive experience that guides them through service calls and reduces training requirements. As a result, the borough has seen a three-fold increase

in the number of services that many citizens access per contact, while managing to save over one million pounds in efficiency savings. For example, accelerated processing of housing benefits has cut the process from 36 days to just one and cut staff training from two years to two days. Overall, staff are achieving a 99% accuracy rate on all One Touch forms.

From complexity to efficiency But it is not just in relation to the external customer, the citizen and business, that eForms bring the potential for transformation. Processes both within and between public sector organisations are benefiting too. The Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) housing benefit team is using Adobe forms to underpin the complex process of reimbursing local authorities for council tax rebates, housing benefits, rent allowances and rebate payments. This involves 408 local authorities, £16bn in transfers, and approximately 1,200 claim forms each year. DWP now uses a bulk email to send councils a dynamic form that can be completed and filed back to DWP electronically. Once returned the data is automatically entered into the payment database, the housing benefit team notified of any further checking and approval requirements, and a file then generated for bank payment via DWP’s mainframe. “The new process means that the manual elements have been removed, saving time and money. Equally important, we have a system that will take us into the future,” says Steve Forshaw, project manager, Information Systems Directorate, DWP.

Simplifying to save money Australia’s Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) is using LiveCycle Forms and Reader Extensions to help improve services to schools nationwide and eliminate the need to ever manually create custom forms. DEEWR estimates the combined savings for both the agency and the applicants at approximately $276,000 over three years in forms development, applicant rekeying time, and back-end data processing costs. Apart from significantly improving services DEEWR gained a return on its investment of 38% over the following three years, reduced the time it had previously taken to manually design and develop forms in HTML or ASP by 90% and completely Local Government IT In Use

eliminated all time previously spent re-entering data on forms it received.

Rapid ROI Meanwhile, LiveCycle is helping the Australian Department of Health and Ageing to provide electronic reporting facilities for health professionals working with the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program. The department recouped its investment in LiveCycle in only one month – and estimates a return on investment (ROI) of 923% over the next three years. More importantly to those connected to the programme, however, the deployment has slashed time to catch and correct errors on forms, significantly reduced the time it takes to complete a form and enabled the team to provide assurance to health professionals that forms have been submitted and acted on.

Saving paper and money The US Government Printing Office (GPO) provides a centralised resource for gathering, cataloguing, producing, providing, and preserving published US government information in all forms - at the same time guaranteeing its authenticity. By implementing Adobe LiveCycle Digital Signatures ES and Adobe Acrobat Pro the GPO saved over 20 tons of paper and $1m over five years – as well as being able to protect the documents that travel inside and outside the GPO firewall. Harnessing the power of platform independent and easily integrated eForm technology to simplify and automate business processes offers huge potential efficiency and quality gains for the public sector globally. Replacing paper processes with electronic ones can improve accuracy, speed of service delivery and dramatically improve quality. Replacing paper with electronic processes enables governments to significantly impact carbon footprint and help meet carbon reduction commitments. The focus for 2010 should be delivering savings through making business processes more effective and making people more efficient as they deliver engaging citizen and business services. For a copy of a ‘Benefits Overview of Adobe Customer References’, call 0208 606 1167 or email: Adobe@lgitu.co.uk

January/February 2010

VIEW

FROM

WESTMINSTER

Net Wars In the run up to a general election Tim Hampson reports a sharpening of knives on the battleground of public sector IT.

©iStockphoto.com/S. Greg Panosian

hadow minister Welwyn & Hatfield MP, Grant Shapps, is worried that government employees are spending too much time posting entries on Facebook and selling unwanted Christmas gifts on eBay. Indeed he is so worried that he has placed a series of questions asking ministers which sites are banned from use by civil servants. In reply, secretary of state for health, Phil Hope, made clear that his staff would not be found searching their family trees or sharing photos on social websites while at work. He said that his department’s IT policy makes it clear the types of websites that are deemed unacceptable such as online gambling, operating a personal or

freelance business, selling items on internet auction sites, or participating in political activities. And of course sex was on the proscribed list. But the minister didn’t elaborate what would happen if a member of staff keyed ‘sex’ into the NHS Direct site. Meanwhile the increasingly active Shapps also wanted to know how much the Audit Commission had spent on its Oneplace website. The site, which brings together reports on health, education, police and the justice system on a local basis, cost the Audit Commission a whopping £484,000. In a parliamentary written answer, the commission’s chief executive, Steve Bundred, said that costs included £220,000

Policing in the age of technology ebates on the police are always D welcomed by the commons. For Members of Parliament they are a fertile opportunity for their local papers to take an interest in what they are saying, even better the story might even be picked up by the national media. And with the general election looming MPs hoping to stay in parliament are certainly keen to court publicity with their electorates. The second reading of the Crime & Disorder Bill, presented Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee - a man who is no stranger to generating publicity, an opportunity to wag a finger at home secretary, Alan Johnson. The Labour MP for Leicester East wants the government to speed up the introduction of technology in an effort to reduce police bureaucracy. “There is a need to invest in new technology and give every police officer a hand-held computer, whether that be a BlackBerry, a blueberry, an iPod or whatever,” he said. “I am 53 and I do not know what the technology is; I just know whether it works when I switch it on and I can communicate. We should give the police what they need so they do not have to run back and take statements, but can take them from witnesses at the scene. “We should save time and reduce bureaucracy by investing in technology,” said Vaz. 13

January/February 2010

And banging the drum loudly he urged the home secretary to “get on with it”. However, Mr Johnson declined to march to Mr Vaz’s beat. He claimed instead that the government had made “huge efforts” to cut police bureaucracy. “Thirty-six data collection requirements have been either removed or significantly reduced. Scrapping activity-based costing alone has saved around 260,000 hours of police time. The foot-long stop-andaccount form has gone, saving another 690,000 hours. The Bill will advance that agenda by significantly reducing the length of the stop-and-search form,” he said. Unperturbed Vaz pressed Johnson on why best practice from Staffordshire Police’s experience of cutting bureaucracy had not been shared with more police forces. He added that legislation is not required for this best practice to be adopted. In his reply, Johnson admitted that Staffordshire was a good example, but tellingly he said that it can sometimes take a very long time to share best practice between the 43 different police forces. A long time? The relationship between the Home Office and the country’s police forces is always uneasy and many a home secretary has struggled with how to get police forces to share anything. For 43 different forces also read – 43 different IT strategies, 43 different ways of recording information and 43 different computers systems. Local Government IT In Use

for design and consultation with members of the public to ensure the website meets their needs. The rest of the costs were not explained. The Tories have been quick to seize on this. They are no fans of the website, which promotes Comprehensive Area Assessments - if elected the Tories have said that one of their first acts will be to hit the delete button and transfer the site into the recycling box. Shadow local government spokesman, Bob Neill, said that the CAA was costly, centralist and disconnected between what’s important on the ground. Many local authorities have shown their lack of enthusiasm for the CAA, and are certainly not impressed that the site has had more than 100,000 hits in the two months since it opened. Several authorities are just refusing to play ball with the Audit Commission and have declined to send the watchdog the information asked for.

E-borders ordon Brown has become a huge fan of G e-borders. No doubt he would probably like to find a way of using them to exclude his political opponents from the country. In a statement to the House of Commons, he pledged that all major ports and airports would be covered by the Home Office’s e-borders scheme by the end of this year. Under the programme, passengers must provide detailed personal information when buying their tickets so they can be checked against watch lists before travelling. Mr Brown said that the e-borders system was “a vital component of our strategy to strengthen and modernise the UK’s border controls” and claimed it had already achieved significant successes enabling nearly 5,000 arrests for crimes including murder, rape and assault. He said that by the end of the year the £1.2bn system would be able to check all passengers travelling from other countries to all major airports and ports in the UK against a watch list 24 hours prior to travel: “This will give a better picture than ever of people coming into and out of our country.” But, the ball is not in Mr Brown’s court. It has been handed over to his home secretary, Alan Johnson, who now has the unenviable job of persuading European ministers on the benefits of sharing data with the UK government.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social Media Butterflies ‘Everyone is doing it, why don’t you?’ is not a convincing argument in a bankrupt public sector, says Helen Olsen. ©iStockphoto.com/Matt Jeacock

ocial media never stands still long enough for anyone to actually work out its value. Take OpenSocitm, quoted in Socitm’s report on social media as an example of collaboration building on the value of a conference, October’s Socitm09. Well, there are 54 members. Yes, there was a flurry of posts after the event; but little since. You see, the attendees are all at the next conference, involved in the next group, using a new hashtag. In the world of social media the butterflies are always chasing The Next Big Thing.

Which is unfortunate because, in truth, there is much to recommend social media. The report rightly extols its virtues and its potential to play a role in informing decisions, nurturing participation, and giving people access to the information they need in order to make informed decisions. It highlights the importance of an organisation having a grip on social media and a comprehensive social media strategy. However, overall, the report is not convincing. For a start, the sample base is startlingly small – 57. Secondly, there is no methodology and charts have no scale. This lack of detail and the low response rate is a shame – a solid stake in the social media ground would be useful. Instead it tells us little more than we already know about social media – lots of people are doing it, mainly the younger generation. Lots of innovative and interesting projects are engaging with people in lots of different and interesting ways using the latest social media tools. It tells us that the sector cannot ignore social media; that access should not be blocked; and that its potential to help in hard times is huge. Local government, we find, is most definitely behind, rather than surfing the front of, the social media wave. Where the report fails is that it does not tell us the two key things of interest to decision makers in public sector: 1. What social media tools and channels are important for the future? (Or are they all just fast moving fads?), and 2. How do you build a business case? The first is admittedly difficult to predict but, astonishingly, the second issue is dismissed out of hand by the report’s authors. Apart from it being ‘not the role of ICT managers to block access to social media’ (in which case, exactly who does

have control of the on/off switch?) the report also suggests that neither is it their role to assemble the business case for using social media. ICT managers should, instead, ‘point out the technology potential, and furnish service managers with the appropriate facts about costs... but stop short of building the financial case for proceeding’. A casual observer might argue that it is precisely ICT’s role to put forward the business case for new technology within the organisation. After all, if proponents themselves can’t quantify the value and return on investment, how on earth do they expect the organisation’s non-technical leaders and service managers to do so? Meanwhile, the report states the authors’ belief that CIOs have a responsibility, as the organisations ‘professional agent of change’, to increase awareness of the business potential of social media. As professional agents of change though, surely CIOs also have a responsibility to thoroughly explore the costs involved? The pace of change is clearly increasing exponentially. Which begs the question, what will tomorrow’s fad be? Are we destined to be endlessly chasing the equivalent of the latest playground craze? Indeed, there is a tone of playground cool in the report. As head of ICT, if you block access you risk being seen as a ‘Luddite’ – if you don’t ‘get’ social media you can’t be in with the in crowd. The un-hip head of IT also risks ‘gaining a reputation for restricting opportunities’. Instead, ‘As an early adopter, you will get credit for engaging effectively with citizens in a cost effective way. You will reap the benefits early… you will be best placed to use the potential in order to maintain services whilst those around you suffer draconian cuts.’ Quite. But what those opportunities for the business of the organisation are is glossed over – despite dire warnings that social media ‘will not go away’. Some 90% of these organisations apparently block or restrict access to social media in some way today. The main reasons for this being concerns over security, time wasting, system or data compromise, reputational risk and bandwidth. Curiously - given that Socitm’s own IT trends report suggests that council heads Local Government IT In Use

of ICT are no nearer the top table, and thus the council top decision making team, than ever - the report suggests that ‘it may well be necessary to trade off investment in buildings for investment in network infrastructure’. It must be pointed out that the emperor in this report has no clothes: there is no evidence of any ‘cost effectiveness’ and certainly no evidence of being able to use the medium to maintain services. Of course, many of us agree, social media should offer all these things. It is just that in all the enthusiasm it is disappointing – indeed becoming suspicious even – to find that no one can actually quantify the expected benefits. Social media, or rather people, costs money. To produce anything for the web and to keep the social media engine turning requires a lot of people to do a lot of work – listening to and joining in all those conversations, analysing them, informing decision making etc. In the community you can rely on passionate volunteers. But even passionate volunteers expect to get paid at work. Meanwhile, underperforming council websites are costing up to £132m a year nationally as users turn to more expensive alternatives according to Socitm’s latest Website Takeup briefing. Local authorities, it warns, are failing to reap the benefits of investment in technology as people, unsuccessful in accessing online information and services, turn instead to other, more expensive-to-service channels like the phone or walk-in contact centres. In the introduction the authors note that ‘Social media is changing the way that traditional media functions, for example by driving local newspapers out of business’. Absolutely, however are there no lessons to be learnt? Perhaps the one that ‘free’ is not a business model, and if the public sector, as IT Trends has just reported, is already facing budget cuts in ICT and ‘external sources of funding have dried up’ where is the money to come from to run new social media operations? As one chief executive said at Solace09, “Why should I pay for social media? The community will do it anyway.” With so many competing demands on the public sector purse, this report would do little to change that view. www.socitm.gov.uk January/February 2010

PRODUCT NOTES

Reducing avoidable contact AS has launched SAS for Customer Experience Analytics for the public sector, which helps local government to easily and cost-effectively achieve NI14 goals for reducing avoidable contact by capturing and analysing all interactions on a web page to assess where there are real instances of avoidable contact and proactive action.

www.sas.com/solutions/crm/customerexperience

Get together virtually dobe Systems has made major updates to its Acrobat Connect Pro Web conferencing solution. Organisations can improve customer and internal interactions through more collaborative meetings, training sessions, and web seminars that increase real-time participation and bring people together when and where needed.

www.adobe.com/acrobatconnectpro/

Upgrade to infrastructure itney Bowes Business Insight has announced Confirm v9.0, an upgrade to the its infrastructure asset management and maintenance system for local, regional and central government organisations in response to direct consultation with customers, changes in government directives and industry codes of practice.

www.pbinsight.com

Mobility as a service ade Communications has launched Mobility as a Service, a package enabling public sector organisations to outsource their mobile data communications, instead of deploying and managing their own mobile computer estate.

www.mobilityasaservice.co.uk

Wireless bodyworn camera 02 Global has launched the Samix Camera System, an innovative new wireless bodyworn camera and receiver designed to be used by first responder personnel. Capable of delivering real-time video across an incident-ground to the incident command unit, even in non line-of-sight environments, the system comprises a COFDM Video Transmitter and COFDM Video Receiver unit.

www.802global.com

January/February 2010

CONTRACT ROUNDUP

EMERGENCY SERVICES

HOUSING

evon and Cornwall Police are the first romford Group housing has contracted D B to pilot Airwave’s new Academy ICT integrator Fordway Solutions to training service in Plymouth. install a new ICT network which includes a new MPLS based wide area network azardous Area Response Teams connecting all the group’s main sites, a H across England are being equipped fully resilient and replicated SAN with Motorola MTP850Ex digital TETRA radios which are safe to use in environments such as petrochemical works, industrial areas or accident scenes where they may be explosive gases. Paramedics will now be able to work within the inner cordon of major hazardous incidents.

infrastructure with virtualised servers, and new services including voice over IP (VOIP) and videoconferencing.

ewport City Homes has chosen 1st N Touch Mobile technology to manage, control and support the work of its fieldbased responsive repairs and gas operatives.

umberside Police has partnered with H aklee Housing Association has HR payroll specialist, MidlandHR, in a O chosen DeviceLock to protect its five year contract for its Payroll Bureau sensitive data. The software will establish Service, underpinned by the web enabled iTrent solution. orthamptonshire Police is using a N Vodafone mobile data solution that means up to 900 officers can now spend less time at the station and more time in the community. Frontline officers have BlackBerry smartphones, giving them onthe-spot access to internal computer systems and records. Initial trials show that officers increased time on the beat by as much as 10% with the smartphones being used more than 20 times a day. est Midlands Ambulance Service W Trust has added a new rapid response incident command vehicle to its fleet, equipped with the latest voice, data and video communications systems by Excelerate Technology to provide Mobile Emergency Operations Centre facilities.

EDUCATION olton Council is the first UK LEA to deploy Bloxx Media Filter, to help schools take advantage of YouTube media content in a secure online environment, and improve local collaborative learning and resource sharing.

reenwich and Rochdale have signed G BSF ICT contracts with Ramesys valued at £9m. Ramesys has now secured

comprehensive control over employee access to workstations’ local ports and peripheral devices including printers and personal mobile devices to reduce the risk of data leakage. 010 Rotherham council housing 2mobile organisation has chosen a 1st Touch solution to drive all aspects of repairs and maintenance. Integrated into 2010 Rotherham’s Xmbrace Opti-time software, ROCC Uniclass enterprise database and Keyfax diagnostics repairs, it provides a seamless solution across systems. hames Valley Housing Association has TBusiness awarded a contract to Sovereign Integration to support the implementation of a new housing management system from Civica, providing a regular project assurance service. hames Valley Housing Association has Tinspection chosen 1st Touch mobile technology for operatives visiting its housing sites. The mobile solution, which replaces a paper based system, combines back office management with the latest PDA technology.

over £120m in BSC ICT contracts, with predicted follow on waves expected to bring a further £230m. ings College London has unveiled a K new IT infrastructure based on Getronics’ Your Workspace, Anywhere initiative. The new Global Desktop uses desktop virtualisation technology to simplify and optimise the way IT services and applications are delivered. anchester’s 167 schools are using Groupcall’s parental communication system, Groupcall Messenger, to contact parents via text, multi-lingual voice calls and email, to mobile phones, landlines or computers, in a move to track and improve attendance and enhance communication between school and parent.

Local Government IT In Use

-Link has unveiled its new DES-7200 multi-layer modular switch system, D following a successful maiden deployment at the Charles Darwin School in Kent. The next generation chassis-based switch is ideally suited to the needs of larger campus locations, providing core to edge of network coverage and zero network downtime for critical applications.

CONTRACT ROUNDUP HEALTH orthern Ireland’s Belfast and South East health and social care trusts are to share information using Orion Health’s ConcertoPortal, which is pulling together data from more than 10 systems, including NI’s Health and Care Index, GP systems and hospital data including laboratory, radiology, accident and emergency and patient administration systems.

udley Primary Care Trust has asked Centralis to develop a regional shared services technology infrastructure underpinned by a virtualised desktop environment to allow personnel throughout the Black Country to access key systems and information.

alton and St Helens Community Health Services, in partnership with Sefton Careline, has launched a new telehealth monitoring project using Tunstall Healthcare systems in patients’ homes to monitor their health remotely.

ames Paget NHS Trust has awarded NextiraOne a second major contract to build additional dedicated data centre facilities and provide a resilient communications platform. The new data centre uses Cisco’s NEXUS 5000 range of switches and Cisco ASA 5520 Adaptive Security Appliance, plus a centralised UPS system and new fibre cabling.

ondon’s primary care trusts have asked Hitachi Consulting to provide an online portal for Commissioning Support for London. The secure online portal will provide NHS commissioners with access to a set of tools to help them monitor how their providers are performing.

HS Blackpool has deployed Agfa HealthCare’s IMPAX Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) as extensions to the acute trust PACS in order to provide local healthcare professionals from Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre Hospitals NHS Foundation with access to the diagnostic imaging records of their patients.

HS Great Yarmouth & Waveney has deployed 21C’s Commissioner Accelerator as part of its World Class Commissioning (WCC) programme to promote evidence based decision-making to drive improvements for the NHS and patient care.

HS in Wales has had two context management designs developed by Simpl. Approved for use by the National Architecture Design Board, the designs deliver a range of options for providing 4,500 clinicians working across all Welsh NHS trusts with seamless, single log-on access to new functionality and existing local, clinical portals, workstations and applications – both via the national Welsh Clinical Portal. This will enable more

ent County Council is using software from K Mayrise Systems to manage introduction of the UK’s first Department for Transport approved road works permit scheme. Designed to give the council more power to control and coordinate works, the specially developed software automates the permit application process, maps and schedules proposed works, monitors works, and helps in communicating planned works to road users.

efficient and effective access to patient records and better care for nearly 2.9 million patients per year. HS Nottinghamshire County PCT has deployed 21C’s BI Accelerator to improve operational efficiency. Utilising Microsoft products available through the NHS enterprise agreement, the solution enables the PCT to deliver wider access to more meaningful management and clinical information and share information with managers, analysts and practicebased commissioning clusters.

orthern Lincolnshire and Goole Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has deployed Ardentia’s Data Warehouse and Briefing Books solutions to improve access to data across all hospital sites.

rincess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust has purchased BigHand voice technology through the Yorkshire and Humber NHS Framework.

oyal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust plans to move much of its paper and processes to an ImageNow paperless system from Perceptive Software. HP scanning devices will be used to create a complete enterprise content management solution.

oyal Marsden is using IronKey’s secure, managed USB flash drives to protect data in transit. The hospital will utilise the IronKey certified RSA SecurID Ready software to consolidate encrypted mobile storage and strong two-factor authentication into a single device, enabling easier secure connections to its infrastructure from remote locations.

urrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust is the first to go live with a new electronic patient record system, RiO, from CSE Healthcare Systems. This first go live marks BT’s roll out of new IT systems to community and mental health trusts in the south of England. Plans are for installation at 25 sites across the region over the next 12 months.

olverhampton City Primary Care Trust has implemented Axway’s Secure Messenger solution to enforce secure, encrypted inbound and outbound email communications for all users based at more than 100 remote sites.

Local Government IT In Use

LOCAL GOVERNMENT asingstoke and Deane Borough B Council and BT Openreach have started a telephone exchange upgrade to next generation super-fast fibre-based services that will open up a new world of online products and services for businesses and residents in the town. lackburn with Darwen Council, on B advice from Spirit Data Capture, has upgraded its handheld devices to the M3 from M3 Mobile in order to capture environmental cleanliness data. ity of London has appointed Kcom to C support the evolution of its e-based services, including upgrades to council website and back-end applications. ity of York Council has signed a £13.7m C eight year contract with Pinacl Solutions and H2O Networks for a citywide managed service networking environment. County Council has signed an Eyear,ssex eight £5.4bn transformation deal with IBM to deliver its vision of ‘providing the best quality of life in Britain for its residents’. The partnership has also announced the first steps in plans to transform operations at Essex by diverting £300m away from back-end processes, property management and procurement and reinvesting this in frontline services. loucester City, Cheltenham and G Tewkesbury councils have selected INOVEM Web 2.0 technology to support a consultation exercise. reenwich has installed a new, G managed financial platform from Civica to provide faster, integrated reporting based on web-based general ledger, debtors and creditors software modules for use by approximately 800 staff. avering has chosen Hornbill’s H Supportworks ITSM to support 3,000 council staff. It will roll out Hornbill’s Customer SelfService portal to enable users to check FAQs, log calls and place service requests. Councils has appointed Fujitsu to LTheondon undertake the Freedom Pass reissue. new-style passes combine both Oyster and ITSO smart card technology and have January/February 2010

CONTRACT ROUNDUP

LOCAL GOVERNMENT

(CONT’D)

a photograph of the owner on the card. edway Council has rationalised three M main sites down to one data centre and relocated more than 1,000 staff to its

health, council tax and benefits.

orthamptonshire County Council has N troud Council is saving thousands of enabled BrowseAloud on its website to S pounds a year following an IT help people with literacy difficulties, modernisation project incorporating virtual dyslexia, mild visual impairments or language problems access the site.

new HQ, complete with a high-speed communications network from ntl: Telewest Business. Other public sector organisations in the area can install their servers within the new data centre, which is linked to the Kent Public Service Network via a high speed connection.

orthumberland County Council is N implementing Objective Corporation’s Limehouse content creation, publishing

elton Borough Council has installed Northgate’s citizen relationship management solution in just 12 weeks. Jill Simpson, customer services manager, said: “This solution gives us an easy to use platform for handling citizen queries reliably at the first point of contact.”

ottinghamshire County Council is partnering with OLM Professional Services to create two separate strategies to implement Putting People First.

ilton Keynes Council has signed a M five-year contract with Me Learning for a suite of e-learning courses to help

radio network for both the authority and local businesses. The five-year deal provides capacity for approximately 1,000 radio users across the borough including businesses such as couriers, taxi companies and private security firms.

with training and ongoing support for the council’s Liquidlogic PROTOCOL ICS users. oray Council is the 17th Scottish M council to adopt Lagan’s Enterprise Case Management (ECM) and the first to also include the awiMX corporate mobile working solution supplied by NDL. orth Lanarkshire Council has forged a N five year ICT service delivery partnership worth £6.5m with Northgate Managed Services. orthampton Borough Council has N extended its Macfarlane CallPlus system with a new Choice-Based Lettings application. An extensive range of council services are available through the centre including: housing repairs and customer services, cleansing, complaints, ‘councillor contact’, general enquiries, environmental outh Northamptonshire is using a suite of integrated software from GGP Systems to provide corporate wide access to essential council records. GGP’s NGz gazetteer management software and intranet based eNLPG ensure that all council officers have access to centralised NLPG address data.

and stakeholder consultation solution in its strategic planning department following creation of the new unitary from the former county and six districts.

ldham Council has launched a Public O Private Partnership scheme, implemented by Arqiva, to deliver a digital

ortsmouth City Council has deployed P Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway to securely send information held on its systems to individuals outside the public sector that are not on GCSX. edbridge, working with OLM Systems R on Phase 1 of its personalisation priorities, has deployed a hosted personalisation technology solution linked to Redbridge i, its online community for citizens, allowing people to access advice and information about care. The council aims to provide the tools for people to manage their own care eventually through personal choice and control. cotland’s Central Government Centre of Procurement Expertise has given a four year contract to ScoLocate to provide web hosting services. It will enable central government organisations in Scotland to take advantage of the facilities available at the Data Center.

cottish Government’s Improvement S Service has chosen Citicus’ risk management software to pilot a standard for identification, recording, management and reporting of risk for its Customer First programme. kills Development Scotland and S Scottish Enterprise have awarded an IT contract to Atos Origin for the provision of IT services to a combined staff of 2,400 across 113 sites. All critical business systems will be transferred and run from Atos Origin’s Scottish data centre. It is claimed that the move will contribute to the Scottish Government’s drive for shared services and deliver efficiencies to the tune of £20m over the next five years. Council has kitted out nearly Southwark 400 parking meters with technology

January/February 2010

from RingGo to allow drivers to pay for parking over the phone.

Local Government IT In Use

computing delivered by Commercial IT Services. The virtual desktop could enable the council to reduce its annual electricity bill alone by around £8,000 and use of thin client Citrix devices has cut IT management costs by almost 70% compared with managing desktop PCs. underland City Council has selected S GOSS Interactive to build a new website powered by Goss’s Web Content Management system. GOSS iCM will provide the council’s website with substantial new features and an array of functionality to access council services, whilst increasing ease of use and efficiencies for staff. utton has implemented a centralised, S fully automated, unified data backup process for all its schools and colleges using Acronis. The council can now carry out daily incremental backups on each institution’s server and the six core servers at the LA’s central office, during the day with no impact on server performance. hree Rivers District Council and Tfinancial Watford Borough Council are sharing a management system. The new COA Solutions FMS will enable staff at both councils to access key information from the same system. Security restrictions will prevent staff from viewing information which they are unauthorised to access whilst providing management with the ability to view and compare data across councils, improving financial transparency. ttlesford District Council has selected U House-on-the-Hill’s SupportDesk IT Service Management software to further improve its customer service. The authority will initially use the tool as its ICT support desk system but plans to extend this to include a corporate back office function, handling issues such as customer feedback and office moves. elsh Assembly Government has W commissioned Socitm Consulting to deliver extended benchmarking services to up to 140 public sector bodies in Wales. Benchmarking of organisations’ HR, finance, ICT, estates and procurement functions will be against the Audit Agencies’ Value for Money indicators. estminster City Council has selected W RAM’s (Real Asset Management’s) Asset4000 to manage its £2.3bn worth of assets and provide a centralised asset register. entrall Shared Services, the X partnership between Darlington and Stockton councils, is to implement Certero’s AssetStudio and Software Metering for Decision Makers tools to

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