IT in Use - September/October 2010 issue

Technology & The Transformation of Frontline Services

ITU

UKauthorITy IT in Use September/October 2010

Go Green and Save - The UK leads the way in low carbon IT practice, and saves money on the way

Security and Austerity ITU • September/October 2010

- Inevitable cuts put sensitive citizen data at risk

ITU Live: Focus on the Citizen - A focus on user experience can cut costs in service delivery

ITU Live: Let technology take the strain - Can webconferencing cut travel and meeting costs?

PLUS: News Update, Shared Services, View over Westminster, Emergency Services, Company & Product Notes & Contracts Won.

Contracts

ITU

Features

ITU

Products

ITU

Comment

September/October 2010 ISSN 1368 2660

On the Cover Going green saves money as well as the planet.

Editor & Publisher

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

Contributing Editor

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

Special Correspondent

Michael Cross E: Michael@infopub.co.uk

Advertising & Circulation

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

Design & Layout

Informed Publications Ltd

Printers

DC Graphics

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

See page 11.

©iStockphoto.com/Helena Shlyapina

Contents Comment News Update

ITU Live: Using Technology to Cut Travel Costs

Michael Cross puts the spotlight on spend in our new transparent world.

Informed Publications Ltd PO Box 2087 Shoreham-By-Sea West Sussex BN43 5ZF

Green Saves Money

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. The Editor’s decision on publication of said submissions is final.

Subscribe Now See inside back cover for details of free public sector subscriptions

Special Focus: Customer Experience

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A focus on customer experience can help the public sector to cut costs, says Adobe’s Prelini Udayan.

A Quiet Revolution

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The last time someone said they were the “quiet” man of politics, it proved to be their downfall, says Tim Hampson.

Security in an Age of Austerity

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Tim Hampson fears that inevitable budget cuts will put sensitive citizen data at risk.

Talking and Working Together on Health

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Michael Cross urges local government to play an active part in planning the future of technology in the NHS.

ITU Live: Designing Services for the Citizen

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Helen Olsen asks the ITU Live panel whether a focus on the user experience could help us design and deliver more effective, lower cost services that citizens choose to use.

Company & Product Notes

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Contracts Roundup

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01983 812623 September/October 2010

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The UK is leading the way in adoption of low carbon IT practices, but so much more can - and should - be done, says Helen Olsen.

To advertise in ITU call Informed Publications on:

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Helen Olsen asks the ITU Live panel, can webconferencing technology help the public sector keep connected despite travel restrictions?

Building Transparency

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

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A round up of the news, headlines and trends affecting technology in frontline public services.

Published by

© Informed Publications Ltd

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Evolution, authorities and IT in Use

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COMMENT

NEWS UPDATE

Evolution - IT in Use

Maude’s men target front line

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he landscape in frontline public services is changing along with the technology. What started back in 1999 with a desire for ‘modern’ joined up services gathered speed under first e-gov, then transformation and then Total Place.

Added momentum from budgetary crisis and the new government’s change in focus – in particular the NHS White Paper – will change the shape of frontline services still further.

The boundaries are blurring. The public sector must increasingly work as one – what ever the physical, legacy structure. And technology has a crucial role to play in enabling this evolution in public service delivery.

LGITU magazine first published in 1997. Our launch issue focused on GIS, IT in finance, and video conferencing – astonishingly similar issues to those that concern us today. Indeed, in this issue we have a feature on web conferencing.

However there is one immediate difference between now and then: increasingly sophisticated user experience from ever more powerful and intuitive systems.

Just look at the design of the equipment on our very first cover below! Today’s PCs and mobile data devices are increasingly designed to be multi-functional, ergonomic, user friendly, ‘green’ and aesthetically pleasing. And as our features on web conferencing and user experience show, today’s focus is on making the technology fit for purpose – and productive use.

Back in 1997 people had to be trained to use systems. Our goal should be to remove this expensive overhead entirely and develop intuitive, low cost, online services that citizens actively choose to use – simply because they are better, easier and more enjoyable to use than other channels. Only then will technology finally deliver its true potential.

In the meantime our title, Local Government IT in Use, is increasingly detached from the place-based view of service delivery evolving today. So we are changing our name to reflect our focus on authorities - local government, police, fire and health - and the use of technology to deliver cost saving public services. We are changing our name to simply ‘IT in Use’ and taking the overarching view of our online news service: www.

UKauthorITy.com.

Helen Olsen, Editor

Local Government IT Excellence Awards 2010 Finalists

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our councils have made it through to the final stage for the prestigious Socitm, Solace and Intellect Local Government IT Excellence Awards: • • • •

Connect Digitally, Online Free School Meals London Borough of Redbridge - Ilford Blueprint Online Met Police - The Focus Court Presentation System Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council - E-Buy procurement

Chris Browne, director at award sponsor, Best Practice Group, said, “This year we have seen some outstanding examples of cost-effective eGovernment delivery and we think this augurs well for the future use of ICT becoming central to the delivery of the aggressive savings being demanded of the public sector.” The winners will be announced at the Socitm 10 Conference in Brighton later this month.

UKauthorITy IT in Use

ndrew Stott’s imminent retirement from the role of director of digital engagement is just one of several changes in the heart of government IT policy. The Cabinet Office Efficiency and Reform Group, flushed with success at renegotiating deals with major central government suppliers, is now looking to spread its attention across the entire public sector.

Stott, 55, announced his retirement last month after just over a year in post as director of digital engagement. The former deputy chief information officer was a key figure in the movement to open government data for re-use begun by the Labour government.

His interim replacement is Katie Davies, who joined the Cabinet Office Efficiency and Reform Group (ERG) last month from the Identity and Passport Service.

The ERG, which reports to Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, is emerging as the power house of radical ideas to cut the cost of the government machine, Cabinet Office insiders say. The group includes the Office of Government Commerce, the Office of the Chief Information Officer as well as the government property arm of the Shareholder Executive. Its latest high profile appointment is Ian Watmore, former CIO, who returned to the Cabinet Office at the beginning of September. Watmore, architect of the 2005 Transformational Government strategy, is understood to be leading a work programme covering the entire public sector over the spending round beginning in April next year.

Efficiency-based reforms will fall in to three phases, insiders say. The first, the renegotiation of contracts with major suppliers and government-wide procurement of commodity products, is already under way. The next phase will involve brutal efficiency drives to try to maintain government services under the new public spending settlements, to be announced by the chancellor on 20 October.

Radical rationalisations of government office space are expected in this phase. From 1 April, all government premises in central London postcodes will be brought under the ownership of a new ‘vehicle’, which will allocate space as required, with the emphasis on shared premises - a similar solution to that which emerged as the preference under the local authority led Total Place programme.

In the third phase, the ERG is looking to hand over public sector functions to new owners, from mutualised bodies to conventional outsourcing deals to ‘big society’ solutions. The main problem, insiders say, is persuading the public sector beyond Whitehall to share its enthusiasm for the radicalism and pace of change demanded by Maude and his team.

“We’re moving at the speed of light,” one senior official said.

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NEWS UPDATE

Cross-sector shared services first for Herefordshire

Council to outsource all services

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erefordshire county council and two NHS organisations are to share back-office systems including finance, e-procurement and payroll in a deal claimed as a first for cross-sector shared services.

Under a £1.5m contract the council, Herefordshire Primary Care Trust (PCT) and Hereford Hospitals Trust are to implement a suite of ERP systems from UNIT4. The organisations plan to save £2.7m a year by sharing services.

The Agresso Business World software will replace a system from incumbent SAP. UNIT4 said the new software is “designed to allow fast, ongoing post-implementation changes”.

director of UNIT4 Business Software, said that, “In years to come this undertaking will be seen as a turning point in the way local services are managed.”

However even if the implementation achieves its aims, replication may be tricky elsewhere in the country. Herefordshire has the advantage of sharing boundaries with its PCT (which would be abolished under the government’s proposed NHS reforms) and the two organisations have a culture of working closely together.

Success in striking a joint procurement between NHS and local government is a significant step in the tortured process of sharing back-office systems across the public sector. Anwen Robinson, managing

Elsewhere, obstacles to cross-sector shared services range from disparities likely to arise from the ring-fencing of the overall health budget to the impending demise of government offices of the regions. However the Office of Government Commerce, now part of the Cabinet Office, is expected to promote the idea as a medium-term component of the government efficiency and reform strategy.

ONLINE SPENDING CONSULTATION: Residents will be invited to tell councils how savings should be made in one of the biggest consultations to be carried out on public spending. The Local Government Group is to roll out an online web application which will let residents see exactly how councils spend their money. It will invite them to suggest ways of shaving millions of pounds off their local authority’s annual spend. The YouChoose website and the Local Government Group is inviting all councils across England and Wales to use the software pioneered by the London Borough of Redbridge.

LICENSED TO RE-USE: New licensing terms for open government data could remove bureaucratic and cultural barriers to the re-use of UK government information. The UK Government Open Licence replaces the ‘click-use’ licence, providing a single set of terms and conditions to anyone wanting to re-use government data, says the National Archives. These include a perpetual, nonexclusive, worldwide royalty-free licence to reproduce the data and machine readable terms and conditions interoperable with Creative Commons. Although not mandatory, its use could become the norm.

Walk the talk, surf the surf

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an Livingston, BT chief executive, and Alec Robertson, leader of Cornwall Council, met on Newquay’s Fistral beach (pictured below) to announce a new project that will see Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly become one of the best connected locations in the world.

An ambitious £132m project by BT and Cornwall Council involving £78.5m funding from BT and £53.5m of EU investment will roll out super fast broadband across the area by 2014.

A range of different broadband technologies will be deployed, with fibre broadband the most prevalent - giving between 80% and 90% of local businesses and homes access to super-fast speeds. Those outside the fibre footprint will get faster speeds than today through a mix of alternative technologies such as advanced copper, wireless and satellite broadband.

The network will deliver speeds of up to 100Mps and will be open to all communications providers on a wholesale basis. The overall project will be supported by a major marketing programme, skills programmes and support to ensure businesses make the most of the new technology. www.cornwalldevelopmentcompany.co.uk

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September/October 2010

UKauthorITy IT in Use

uffolk County Council plans to outsource all but a handful of its services to cut its £1.1bn spending by 30%.

The council currently employs around 27,000 people but if the plan goes ahead that could fall to less than 500. The Tory council is looking to put most services, including computing and child protection, out to social enterprises or private contractors, retaining only the role of service commissioner internally.

Councillors voted for the change on the basis that outsourcing will enable Suffolk to reduce costs, reduce its size, cut waste and bureaucracy and give local people a better say on how they receive services. Most of the services will be offloaded from the beginning of the next financial year, with the prime candidates being libraries, youth clubs, highway services, independent living centres, careers advice, children’s centres, registrars and country parks.

The move also aims to give individuals and communities more control over budgets and services. Council leader, Jeremy Pembroke, said, “The amount of money we are going to have to spend on providing services will fall dramatically over the next few years. If we don’t reform the way we deliver those services then the cuts would have to be much deeper – much more painful. By becoming an enabling authority we will give local people the opportunity to decide what level of service they want.”

Brighton and Hove confirmed it will start outsourcing in November to ultimately become an ‘intelligent commissioner’. The council said its strategy is to outsource only if a service could be provided more efficiently and its first choice would be social providers.

INFORMATION BODIES ON QUANGO BONFIRE: A body set up barely a year ago to improve the quality of information exchanged between NHS and social care organisations is to be abolished. According to leaks reported in the Daily Telegraph, the National Information Governance Board is on a Cabinet Office hit-list of quangos ranging from the Audit Commission to the Government Hospitality Advisory Committee on the Purchase of Wines. The information governance board was set up under legislation passed in 2008 partly to allay fears about the security and confidentiality of electronic health records. It promotes consistent standards for information governance across health and social care and is responsible for enforcing the NHS Care Record Guarantee for England. According to the newspaper, other organisations listed for abolition include the National Policing Improvement Agency, the Standards Board for England and the Advisory Panel on Local Innovation Awards.

NEWS UPDATE

Pickles blazes at fire and rescue systems

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he long-running row over new fire and rescue centres has descended into farce with a minister warning that new IT systems have themselves created a fire risk.

Vital equipment used to give firefighters details of emergency calls cannot be installed - because of the risk it will overheat and become a fire risk, a Commons select committee heard last month. Meanwhile, systems designed to get fire engines to their destinations quickly are fitted with out-ofdate maps which cannot be updated.

Taxpayers are paying out around £100,000 a month in rent for each of the empty regional control centres, dotted around England.

The latest twist for the ill-fated £1.4bn scheme - which is already five years late was revealed by communities secretary, Eric Pickles. In comments to the local government select committee, he said that relations had become so bad with supplier, EADS, that fire service officials had been banished from the firm’s UK base. He claimed that, instead of fixing the problems, EADS had employed lobbyists to convince the government to change the terms of the contract. However a spokesman for the firm insisted: “EADS is scheduled to deliver a system as a part of Community and Local Government’s FiReControl programme and is on track to provide the final system.”

The Conservatives had pledged to reverse the ‘regionalisation’ of the fire and rescue service, describing it as a ‘white elephant project’ that had wasted hundreds of millions of pounds. However work on the new control centres has continued since the formation of the Con-Lib coalition, after ministers apparently concluded the project was too far advanced to axe.

Time to rethink choice

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hoice in public services may fall by the wayside in the change sweeping across the sector.

“Choice is neither desirable nor efficient,” says Jos Creese, Socitm president, head of IT at Hampshire and member of the CIO Council. “The public have to learn to transact in standard ways if public services are going to be able to reduce their costs.

Moreover, the public don’t want a myriad of competing public service offerings - just basic things done well, in ways which suit them. That’s what I want anyway!”

Creese believes that technology is critical to the business of public service delivery and key to meeting the challenges ahead. Council CIOs, he said, need to be seen in this light. If councils are going to make 25% to 30% cuts “we need to look at new ways of working.

This involves mobile and flexible working reducing headcount through advanced management systems and interventions, managing property costs and estates – all of these are dependent on technology.”

Not, he admits, a traditional strength of public sector CIOs: “But we must be able to demonstrate that we can think around the council and the problem, and not just around the technology.”

Creese says that CIOs have “got to become confident at communicating” the essential and transformational nature of technology.

Change, he concedes, will be difficult for frontline services. However, the financial restraints now facing the sector will force its hand; and the former government’s mantra of choice may well be one of the first casualties of such change.

CENTRAL MAPPING: Communities and Local Government has entered into a commercial agreement with Ordnance Survey to pay for the Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) centrally. Public sector bodies will not have to pay separate fees to use Ordnance Survey data provided through the PSMA. Minister, Grant Shapps said that this would allow all parts of the public sector in England and Wales to access national mapping data free of charge, “Which when combined with digital technology will pave the way for an increase in new apps and websites that can improve public services.”

OPEN TO DIGITAL SUGGESTION: Martha Lane Fox, the UK’s digital champion, is leading a review of Directgov aimed at transforming and ‘redirecting’ the site in order to “drive efficiencies in the online delivery of public services”. A consultation asked for views on central government’s objectives in digital delivery, ‘who should do what’, potential sharing of the platform, and trends in digital delivery. Directgov, the central website for public services, moved under the auspices of the powerful new Efficiency and Reform Group in the Cabinet Office in July.

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NEWS UPDATE

Big bang IT in bonfire of the benefits

Deal on government extranet security

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overnment plans for radical reforms in the benefits system are likely to involve a massive IT re-engineering programme on the scale of those launched in the Labour era.

Work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, has won an agreement from the Treasury to claim as cuts ‘a large chunk’ of the £9bn expected to be saved each year from a revolution in the benefits system. The idea under development is for a single ‘universal credit’ to replace multiple payments such as incapacity benefit and housing benefit.

Savings are reported to be expected from administration costs and a reduction in

fraud as ‘all of an individual’s details will be held on one system’. Such a new system is expected to take at least three years to set up. In IT terms, much will depend on the new real-time pay-as-you-earn tax system being implemented by HMRC which would then allow officials to micro-manage benefits payments.

Similar claims were made for Labour’s tax credits scheme, introduced in 2003 before the necessary IT systems were ready. The new plans also appear to be based on creating a single database of citizens along the lines of that proposed by the Varney review in 2006, and widely condemned by the Conservatives while in opposition.

ICT increases councils’ productivity £230m a year

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echnology is saving English and Welsh councils millions of pounds a year, says a new report from the Local Government Association (LGA).

Mobile, web-mapping and satellite technology is being deployed to make bin men more efficient, tell people waiting at bus stops where the next bus is and how long it will take to arrive, and keeping people informed about roadworks and planning applications.

In 08/09 this increase in productivity was worth £230m across the sector, with estimates for potential annual savings reaching £372m by 2014/2015. This money could be “ploughed into vital frontline services”, says councillor David Parsons, chairman of the LGA Improvement Board.

“Whether it’s bin men working smarter, fewer phone calls to enquiry centres, freeing up staff from time-consuming checks or reducing parking ticket machine maintenance costs, making the most of modern technology and data sharing has seen huge cash savings across the country,” he added.

As well as financial savings, “tapping into gadgetry” has improved communication with “all members of society, young and old, and raised awareness of the services councils offer and how to get the most from them”, says Parsons. He is urging councils to “strive to keep reaching more residents and improving services ever more creatively, and look at more ways of working together to make these big savings.”

Underpinning the millions of savings identified is ‘location-based technology’ councils linking residents’ locations with services they provide, whether it be meals on wheels, schools, buses, refuse collections or planning applications. This creates clear, accurate maps and provides shareable databases across council departments and between authorities. As residents become more able to access this information via computers and mobile phones, services can be delivered and issues resolved quicker than ever and the need for personal enquiries, paperwork and lengthy reports is vastly reduced. www.lga.gov.uk

Salford addresses crime

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alford Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership is reaping the benefits, and criminals paying the price, of an address-based crime prevention project. State of the art technology and up to date information is being used to reduce crime rates and reduce the fear of crime. At the core of the project is the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) land and property database.

ocal government has come a step closer to full network integration with central government and its agencies through a deal negotiated with the Cabinet Office.

Socitm and the LGA have persuaded the Cabinet Office to relax some security measures previously required for connection to the Government Secure Extranet (GCSx), the network that will allow sharing of data and services across government, and a vital element in delivering efficient electronic services.

The deal appears to settle long-running concerns about the cost of connection to GCSx and its future migration to the Public Sector Network (PSN) by recognising the existence of ‘low threat environments’ in local public services. Modified standards for the Government Connect Code of Connection (CoCo) version 4.1 for these environments will ensure that expensive, new investments are not required, said Socitm.

Find 3.5m missing voters

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own halls will be urged to take part in ‘data-matching’ trials in a bid to find Britain’s 3.5 million ‘missing’ voters. The move to plug the gaps on electoral registers was revealed alongside plans to speed up the introduction of compulsory individual voter registration.

Under the trials, local council registration officers would be able to compare their electoral rolls with other public databases in order to identify missing voters - and urge them to register. Cabinet Office minister, Mark Harper, told MPs: “If it is effective, we will roll it out more widely across local authorities on a permanent basis to help ensure that our register is as complete as possible.” There will be no new databases; however councils will be able to check the information that they receive from people applying to register with, for example, information held by the department for work and pensions (DWP).

MORE TIME BUT LESS MONEY SPENT ON ELECTRONIC MEDIA: The divide between younger and older people’s use of technology is starting to narrow - more older people are getting online and finding that things like email are very important to them. Consumers are now spending almost half (45%) of their waking hours watching TV, using their mobiles and other communications devices, finds new Ofcom research. The growing popularity of smartphones - and the changing way we use our mobiles - is increasing our overall use of communications, and helping us do much more simultaneously.

This is being particularly driven by the under 25s. However, the over 55s are catching up, with half now having broadband at home. www.ofcom.org.uk

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NEWS UPDATE

Poor web services inhibit channel shift

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ouncil web performance must improve to achieve cost-saving channel shift, says Socitm. A report from the society’s Customer Access Improvement Service finds that poorly performing council websites are hampering the mass channel shift urgently needed to reduce the public sector’s costs of service delivery.

Socitm’s latest data continues to evidence how much cheaper the web channel can be than going through an intermediary, such as the phone call or the visit to the one-stop shop. “However,” says Martin Greenwood, programme manager for Socitm Insight, “Channel shift online will only work if websites work right first time and every time.”

Data from Soctim’s Channel Value Benchmarking service puts the comparative cost to councils per enquiry at £7.40 for faceto-face, £2.90 for the telephone and just £0.32 for web enquiries.

However, GovMetric data in Socitm’s report shows that, despite being the busiest channel, the web gives by far the least satisfactory performance - with 42% of visitors rating it as poor, compared with 15% of face-to-face visitors and just 1% of callers by phone. The

main cause of dissatisfaction is failure to find what people are looking for - a very basic function for public sector websites.

Greenwood argues that this is likely to directly lead to repeat contacts as visitors go to other, more expensive channels (predominantly the phone, according to information from the Website Takeup service) for answers to their enquiries. Investment in the web, he says, will reap significant returns because of the potential to reduce the cost of meeting customer enquiries. www.socitm.net SAVE £5 / TRANSACTION WITH PERSONALISED WEB CHANNELS: Local authorities could harness their existing IT investments to set up citizen-centric service portals and websites that deliver savings of up to £5 per individual transaction, says Civica. It says that councils are continuing to invest sensibly in re-engineering core business systems as well as in IT infrastructures for citizenfocused sites – but that these advances now need to be combined with web-based front end platforms to drive much wider take-up of personalised online local services - and achieve drastically lower service delivery costs.

Government IT strategy a brake on change

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overnment plans to cut back on wasteful IT expenditure could be thwarted by bureaucrats; ‘We shall soon see who is more powerful in this country, the elected government or the civil service,’ claims the Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age. Its new report, ‘Better for Less: How to make Government IT deliver savings,’ investigates the ‘quagmire of government IT’. Its proposals, it states, could cut 40% from the government IT budget - currently somewhere between £16bn and £23bn a year.

‘The astonishing lack of clarity over expenditure is symptomatic of appalling failures in IT strategy, procurement, and process,’ states the report. ‘This cannot be allowed to continue, especially during a time of spending cuts in frontline services. The annual cost dwarfs some government departments. It is three times the amount we spend on the army. Worse, it has been designed badly and, unfortunately this time, the process has been built to last. The problems come from ineffective procurement - much of which is waste.’

The previous administration, it states, created a ‘dysfunctional marketplace’ dominated by a group of nine multinational systems integrators holding over eighty percent of government IT contracts, with small firms ‘unfairly excluded’ due to ineffective procurement. The report is the first from the Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age, which is led by Liam Maxwell, IT specialist and

councillor at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, and it presents examples of where their approach has succeeded and a clear plan - a playbook - for implementation.

‘But will government actually be able to put this into action, or will it be blocked?’ asks the report. It says that each year about the same amount of money is spent on the procurement process as is used to run the Foreign Office. Savings just in the procurement process - without even counting the savings from better IT - could finance the entire Sure Start programme; they could fund 50% more school building. And even when the form-filling is done only 30% of projects work.

Indeed government productivity has actually declined since IT was introduced. At a time when dynamic change is required - to reduce cost and deliver better services - one of the principal barriers to that change has become government IT, adds the report. http://pbage.org ICT ‘FIFTH UTILITY’ FOR CITY MANAGEMENT: An Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) study, funded by Siemens, says that ICT should not be considered as a single infrastructure solution, but as the ‘fifth utility’ alongside electricity or water as an essential architecture that underpins all services and activity in an urban setting. The report found that a strong internet network and an ICT savvy workforce are crucial for a city’s competitiveness. www.siemens.com UKauthorITy IT in Use

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ITU LIVE: WEB & VIDEO CONFERENCING

Using Technology to Cut Travel Costs Travel costs were specifically targeted for immediate cuts by the new government, and many local authorities already have travel restrictions in place. Helen Olsen asks whether technology can help the public sector keep connected despite restrictions.

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here is no doubting the fundamental change sweeping through the public sector. From here on in, every decision will be decided on cost and target a rapid return on any and every investment.

One key area of expense, rightly targeted for reduction, is travel; and with it the ingrained culture of face-to-face meetings. The question for our panel therefore, was can the latest communications and collaboration tools replace traditional meetings?

During the live interview audience polls suggest that, yes, these new ways of working can bring the sector great benefits – but changing ‘the meetings culture’ would indeed be a challenge.

Why web and video conferencing?

Joel Smith, head of information systems at the Food and Environmental Research Agency (FERA), explains that, when FERA came into being last April, what had essentially been two locations working as the Central Science Laboratory suddenly became over forty, with an additional 200 staff.

“There is a big push to use software as a service. It seemed ideal,” says Smith.

Many were keen to use the technology due to its sustainability credentials, but with the travel ban biting Smith expects to see use of the technology become even more popular within the agency. Hosted solutions can carry information up to IL2-PROTECT security levels, “which is good enough for the majority of things,” says Smith. And feedback from the users has been great: “As good as being in the room themselves.”

Thomson Reuters meanwhile has been using this technology for around four years. Initially, explains learning consultant, Andy Jones, as a learning tool for the organisation’s remote sites. The news organisation has ten major data centres and 142 editorial offices around the world. “We can have a strong culture of cultural virtual teams working around the world,” says Jones. “We couldn’t do it if we did not have some way of working together. It just becomes easier with conferencing.”

It is now normal for Thomson Reuters’ users to be trained by web conference across the globe. Indeed, says Jones, it is “normal for users to work in this environment. It is just Smith says that everybody needed to be part of the normal desktop.” The organisadirectly involved and engaged with the new tion has saved “a huge amount of money” organisation but the budgets required to enable - a conference of ten everyone to travel to cenpeople from around the tral meetings just didn’t AUDIENCE POLL: 92% SAY VIDEO AND exist. Videoconferencing, WEB CONFERENCING TECHNOLOGY COULD world could cost £40,000 therefore, was seen as HELP THE PUBLIC SECTOR TO CUT MEETING including hotels and travel.” the ideal way to enable AND TRAVEL COSTS. the new chief executive Thomson Reuters is again using a hosted to speak directly with all employees. In the solution, with around 50 to 100 meeting rooms first year around 260 hours worth of such available at all times, organisation wide. meetings were held on line. The technology also enables the agency to sell commercial services abroad to help fund its domestic Hosted vs in-house work - it now operates successfully in over 100 countries.

An audience question from Alan Kirkwood, head of ICT at Moray Council, queried the Smith opted for a hosted conferencing solucosts of setting up a web conferencing tion achieving “£30,000 worth of savings for system. High costs, he said, made it imposan annual outlay of £10,000“ with a service sible to start up in an authority like his own, sourced via conferencing specialist, PGi. He especially in the current financial climate. stresses that there were no additional costs Was there really a need for the system to be to FERA in using the solution. so expensive, he asked.

A hosted service was chosen because it involved no upfront investment for the agency.

“Why buy your own servers when there are server farms around the world offering this?

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September/October 2010

Adobe’s Will Cawthorne suggested that using a hosted – or cloud - solution offered a significantly lower financial impact than building the infrastructure to enable this in-house. If UKauthorITy IT in Use

On the Panel Dr Joel Smith, Head of Information Systems, Food and Environment Research Agency Andy Jones, Senior Learning Consultant, Thomson Reuters Will Cawthorne, Adobe Connect Evangelist, Adobe UK Helen Olsen, Managing Editor, ITU and UKauthorITy.com

ITU Live was sponsored by Adobe UK security requirements permit, then hosted, he said, was by far the best way forward as it removed any need for additional broadband or server expenditure.

In response to another question, Cawthorne added that extra bandwidth was not always required. “Adobe Connect is a very efficient way of streaming video down to the end-user.

With a hosted solution in particular, an internet connection should suffice.”

More value from existing spend?

FERA’s Smith is convinced that the technology not only reduces costs but adds value to existing spend. For example, he says, “We didn’t make a saving from a trip to the States, as we were never going to make the trip to the States! However, we did make a sale following web conferencing meetings with our client in the States. So yes, by having the facility we are getting more value from our expenditure. We use it for online meetings within the organisation, around the world and for the chief exec to talk to all employees at the same time.”

Jones agrees, “We couldn’t effectively run as an organisation - we couldn’t share ideas, share knowledge or even presentations throughout the organisation - without web conferencing.”

AUDIENCE POLL: 100% SAY VIDEO AND WEB CONFERENCING TECHNOLOGY COULD HELP THE PUBLIC SECTOR TO CUT COSTS RELATED TO LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT.

ITU LIVE: WEB & VIDEO CONFERENCING

AUDIENCE POLL: 100% SAY VIDEO AND WEB CONFERENCING TECHNOLOGY COULD HELP THE PUBLIC SECTOR REDUCE ITS CARBON FOOTPRINT.

Scale, security and ROI The biggest user of Adobe Connect technology in the world is the US Department of Defense’ Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). Cawthorne explains that DISA has 5.3 million Adobe Connect users across the globe – up to 300,000 at any one time - sharing information and knowledge and rapidly rolling out life saving training. The system is used by operational staff, combat staff and people in theatre as well. DISA uses ‘on premise’ deployments as opposed to hosted for security reasons. And they are using it in some very innovative ways.

For example, rapidly sharing learning about new types of IEDs (improvised explosive device) as they are found on the ground in Afghanistan, enabling a world-wide team to help operatives on the ground. As Cawthorne says, “It’s not so much about saving money, but about saving lives.”

The panel agreed that many people like going out to meetings – the social aspect is key.

And none would suggest replacing all meetings with virtual ones. But a balanced mix could not only save money and time but also enhance relationships.

Many people are simply not comfortable in front of a camera. However, Smith says that behaviour can change rapidly, suggesting that organisations “start with broadcast meetings” and then gradually ask people to interact once they are comfortable.

Cutting carbon That using technology to replace travel for meetings and training can cut carbon is undeniable. Calculating the metrics to prove this, however, can be more challenging. Cawthorne demonstrated an add-in to the technology that can track and monitor attendees and the travel and carbon savings from each virtual meeting. “This type of facility is key in putting together a business case,” he says. “Especially in a pilot situation; enabling rapid calculation of real metrics from first use.”

Jones adds that a face to face connection is AUDIENCE POLL: 75% SAY THAT THE MAIN BLOCK Facing the future always useful for ini- TO THE USE OF VIDEO AND WEB CONFERENCING IN tiating relationships THEIR ORGANISATION IS CULTURE. Smith says that the but that regular video public sector must conferencing can be used to build on the change the way it works in the face of dire relationship – replacing many of the face to financial straits. Hosted web conferencing face elements and giving people the option to provides a way to do this, opening up differparticipate in meetings when flexible-workent ways of working. It will inevitably be “part ing. However, he says, often behaviour will of the toolkit” that will enable the sector to only be changed in times of necessity. “There meet this challenge is no way in Thomson Reuters that we can always travel around the world. Video and Jones agrees, “You will find you start workweb conferencing is the only alternative.“ ing in different ways. You will initially use it for In terms of return on investment (ROI) meetings and presentations but it will change There is no denying that this technology funCawthorne cites an international the way you work, little and often.” He gives damentally changes the learning and meeting pharmaceutical company that invested in onthe example of a colleague he was helping environment and requires a shift in mindset premise rather than hosted deployment of that morning in India: “I could share her deskaway from the traditional presentation. Jones videoconferencing for corporate e-learning. top, she could share mine; and I could show says that the biggest challenge of training or This involved an initial investment of around her what to do, and help her work through the meeting remotely is the possibility of missing £60,000 for Adobe Connect plus £60,000 problem.” ‘visual clues’ and the need to rethink how you in hardware and infrastructure – but an run the sessions: “Interacting regularly with ROI was achieved within just six weeks.

A profound ‘step change’ such as this in the the audience is essential - bringing people in Originally installed for e-learning, the comway we work, collaborate and share knowlby name, so that they feel engaged and feel pany found that as soon as it was in, staff edge with others will be needed if we are to part of it. Have short were finding new ways do “ever more with ever less”. Reducing both of using it – for general AUDIENCE POLL: 89% SAY THAT VIDEO AND nuggets of learning travel costs and carbon emissions are essenand then send them meetings and cutting WEB CONFERENCING WILL BECOME MORE tial ambitions for the public sector. Finding away to work on travel – giving more rapid COMMONPLACE WITHIN THE PUBLIC SECTOR new ways of working and turning them into an exercise, or put ROI than envisioned. OVER THE NEXT TWO YEARS. “business as usual” – regardless of travel groups into different disruption or travel ban – will be key to delivUser uptake and changing culture break out rooms. “It needs consideration... it ering these ambitions. is a big mind-shift from ‘I am going to present’ to becoming ‘the guy on the side’.”

So what was the panel’s advice? Try it, the Both Jones and Smith agreed that, in their return on investment is rapid. Start off with a experience, once people became familiar How easy this shift is depends on the type hosted solution and grow. and comfortable with the technology they of person – and the generation - says naturally use it more and more.

Cawthorne. People under the age of 30 find it View ITU Live now: ‘obvious’ while those over 30 find it less intuiAdobe’s own experience, during the start of www.UKauthorITy.com/ITUlive tive. But either way it is important to invest the financial crisis, was a point of interest. time in the set up and training, adds Smith.

According to Cawthorne, corporate travel restrictions made all staff question whether READER OFFER Jones agrees that getting the introduction travel was necessary – and whether the right is key, but adds that getting the quality – meeting could be held instead using Connect dobe is offering ITU readers an entry of both technology and content - right is also technology. Unexpectedly, travel expendilevel hosted web and video conferimportant for driving uptake. That initial expeture dropped by 50% and the number of encing service package: Twelve months’ rience is the most important one, “so make minutes used in Connect increased by 120%.

Hosted Adobe Connect for six named sure that you have practised it and are clear Surprisingly, as travel restrictions started organisers, each of which can create about how the session will run. Getting this to ease off usage of Connect continues to as many meeting rooms as they want right will make use more natural.” increase. “People have got into the habit of and host up to 100 users. The package, using web and desktop conferencing, and including full Adobe support for the year, Getting this right, leading the cultural shift, working collaboratively on an ad hoc basis,” costs £10,016 plus VAT. There is no cost will require effort upfront. “But it is not a hard says Cawthorne. “It has become just another per minute and the facility is available thing to justify,” says Jones. “If you target a tool that allows you to do what you want to do 24/7. All that is required is an internet ten percent cut in your annual travel budget – on a daily basis.” connection. does this cover the cost of your investment?

It probably does. Especially if you opt for the People like to travel! So how do you change For full details email: Adobe@lgitu.co.uk hosted route.” such entrenched, and rewarding, behaviour?

A

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OPEN GOVERNMENT

Building Transparency Michael Cross puts the spotlight on spend in our new transparent world.

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ast August, Luke Spikes, founder and chief executive of Spikes Cavell, met the then shadow cabinet. On the agenda was the question of implementing a transparency policy for government spending.

“That’s when Spotlight on Spend was conceived,” says Spikes. The outcome was the private sector taking a central role in the effort to publish online every significant item of government spending.

The transparency policy has now taken shape in the requirement for all local authorities to publish items of spending over £500

by January 2011. Guidance (see panel below) that appeared last month from Communities and Local Government (CLG) makes clear that this is a minimum requirement; most are expected to go further: ‘Spending data should be published as part of a wider opendata initiative.’

Of the authorities to have made the biggest steps in this direction, a sizeable number are using Spotlight on Spend. The site, offered free to customers of Spikes Cavell’s Observatory system for internally tracking spending, made national headlines last summer when journalists jumped to mistaken conclusions about council spending items posted. It has also been the subject of fierce criticism in the open data community, which had been alarmed at the prospect of data being freed from government only to end up in commercial clutches.

Spikes says that such fears are misplaced and that he is absolutely committed to the transparency agenda. “We have a very deep knowledge of what is spent by public sector organisations.”

The Spotlight on Spend system draws on historical spend data extracted from the financial management systems run by every public body. Spike characterises such systems as designed by accountants for accounting purposes - they do not present information that the public would find interesting or useful. In fact they usually don’t even have enough data to help a professional buyer of goods and services, he says.

This is where Spikes Cavell comes in. The company claims more than 800 customers in the public sector - including every police force and every fire authority - for its financial observatory system, which provides a breakdown for internal purposes of

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organisational spend. The system extracts data from accounts payable systems and cleanses and classifies it. “We felt we were well placed to take the data, repurpose it and put a web front end on,” says Spikes.

The system incorporates redaction algorithms that can identify individuals whose personal details should be removed; vulnerable adults and foster carers, for example.

The data flow is substantial - a large county council can make 300,000 payments a year.

One early adopter was the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, which went live with Spotlight on Spend in May 2010. “We suggested they enhance the basic dataset with classifications that would make sense to the ordinary citizen; spend on taxis, for example.” The basic idea, says Spikes, is to imagine that the user is a local small business looking for opportunities.

“We now have 32 organisations committed to the platform, and about 50 involved in some sort of discussions.” Most users are district councils; however one large NDPB is expected to sign up shortly, along with two counties. His company is working with the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham: “They’re really keen to push the boundaries of transparency.” This includes publishing internal costs, grant payments and certain salaries.

Publication of raw data is an immediate priority but the guidance adds that ‘there are significant benefits to be gained by councils publishing structured, regularly updated data using open standards’. Spikes says that his system already conformed to the CLG’s transparency guidelines with the exception of the requirement that ‘in all cases, supplier IDs should be published’. That raises the possibility of fraud, he says, but he will conform from now on.

So far, there have been two hiccups. In July, parts of the public sector blogosphere erupted with complaints that Spotlight on Spend was involved in an attempt to grab ownership of spending data. Critics said that the way in which the site publishes spending data did not comply with draft open data guidelines: data was not machine-readable, was presented in a summarised rather than raw form and it could be downloaded only for personal use - rather than under an open licence. Spikes says that the criticism UKauthorITy IT in Use

©iStockphoto.com/Pamela Moore

was a misunderstanding; the product now complies with open data standards and is integrated with the data portal, www.data. gov.uk.

The second hiccup came when local newspapers spotted that Woking Borough Council, a Spotlight on Spend pioneer, had apparently spent £73,040 on clothing, £18,254 of which went on lingerie from a company called Playtex, owned by DB Apparel and based in Glasgow. The cash turned out to be a business rates rebate, but the local press, and online commentators, had a field day.

Spikes blames a process problem: clients are supposed to remove rate rebate data and confirm they’ve done so.

The product continues to evolve with the emerging culture of transparency. New tweaks include publishing all contracts awarded rather than just new ones.

Spikes Cavell is a long way from holding a monopoly - 800 customers out of 3,500 public bodies. Indeed, many will continue to meet the transparency agenda in their own way.

However, Spikes thinks that his company “makes the data a little bit more interesting and useful”.

Too interesting for some authorities’ comfort zones, perhaps? “There’s absolutely still a camp that believes they’re not going to do it until they absolutely have to, and then to do the minimum,” says Spikes. “It’s a small minority, but there are a few like that.”

Local Public Data Panel Guidance

By January 2011:

• Data on all items of spending over £500 (including VAT) should be published monthly, in CSV file format, in individual monthly files accessible via a single web page.

• Meta data about the accounts system should also be published as an accompanying plain text file, or on the web page linking to the data.

•

Council websites should have a dedicated open data section.

•

Data should be published with a licence that allows open re-use, including commercially. The department recommends the new data.gov.uk licence.

GOING GREEN

Green Saves Money The UK is leading the way in adoption of low carbon IT practices, but so much more can – and should - be done, says Helen Olsen.

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ore effective use of the public sector ICT estate could not only save the government millions of pounds but also be an environmentally positive move.

A new report from the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) flags the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) saving of £35m from increasing the lifespan of staff computers from three to five years – at the same time noting the ‘huge contribution’ this approach has made towards achieving the government’s desire to be ‘greener’.

‘Adopting similar approaches to demand management across government could multiply the savings many times,’ states the report.

Indeed, ‘Becoming the Greenest Government Ever: achieving sustainability in operations and procurement’ shows that moves towards greater sustainability made under Labour already save government £60-70m every year.

And the SDC is calling for the coalition government to step up its green ambitions in order to benefit further from efficiency savings – saying that the savings made to date ‘are only the tip of the iceberg’.

Extending the commitment to become the ‘Greenest Government ever’ beyond carbon to a wider range of sustainability issues - including water and waste - would enable the new government to save hundreds of millions more over the course of this parliament, claims SDC. The commission points to analysis of progress already made suggesting that, despite the slow pace of change, improvements in energy and water consumption, waste, recycling and road transport performance are likely to add up to £300-350m over the next five years; even if no further progress is made. It highlights £13.7m in fuel savings from reduced road travel in 2008-09 alone – at the same time saving 1.7 million hours of staff time as well as associated reductions in car purchases, repairs and administration.

“The coalition government’s commitment to become the greenest government ever is a vitally important move if the decisions we make now are to hold good in the long term,” says SDC’s Will Day. “Beyond the general environmental, social and economic benefits of greening government, there is an immediate financial imperative to do so.

“Sustainable development is no peripheral, nice-to-have concept for prosperous times.

It is the best way of delivering more for less, while ensuring that the drive for efficiencies doesn’t cost more in the long run.“

The UK’s success at carbon reduction comes despite it having ‘the toughest carbon reduction and reporting process’, according to Fujitsu. According ©iStockphoto.com/Helena Shlyapina to its ‘Global Benchmark’ report, this tough regime - coupled with a high level of green ICT awareness – directly leads to the UK coming out top on the company’s global benchmark index. A rating of 61 out of 100 beats both the US and Australia and leaves India trailing.

According to Fujitsu, the areas that show the most green progress globally are data centre management, networking, communications, cloud computing and end user efforts. The report notes that ‘more work needs to be done gathering metrics on IT departments’ energy use and responsible practices for procurement and disposal’.

Salix meanwhile has published details of 297 energy efficiency projects that have been completed across the public sector, saving an estimated 13,700 tonnes of CO2 and reducing energy bills by over £2.2m annually. These projects have been completed just one year after the launch of the interest-free Salix Energy Efficiency Loans (SEELS) fund, which uses government money to fund basic energy saving initiatives.

Eleven IT related energy efficiency projects have been completed, involving network PC power management, thin computers and virtualisation; saving an estimated 1,257 tonnes of CO2 and reducing energy bills by more than £191,696 annually, including: virtualisation at Wiltshire College saving 394 tonnes CO2 /£66,731 annually; network PC power management at City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust saving 223 tonnes CO2/£28,004 annually; and thin computers at Eastleigh College saving 124 tonnes CO2/£16,450 annually.

Approximately 1,500 energy efficiency projects will be completed with SEELS funding across 218 public sector organisations - with a projected total of 1.45m tonnes of CO2 and £244m in reduced energy bills over their lifetime. All Salix funded projects must use proven technologies that get quick results and continue to operate effectively for many years. Most pay back their costs within three and a half years. www-s.fujitsu.com www.salixfinance.co.uk www.sd-commission.org.uk UKauthorITy IT in Use

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SPECIAL FOCUS: CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Focus on Citizen Experience The commercial world has linked the customer’s experience directly to profitability. Prelini Udayan, head of public sector marketing at Adobe UK, asks if the same focus on experience can help the public sector to cut costs.

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new white paper on the future of the NHS places patients at the heart of all that the health service is. The new mantra, “No decision about me, without me,” places a clear emphasis on where health service managers should focus their attention.

At the same time the move to put public health responsibilities over to local authorities’ domain is accompanied by an acknowledgement that local government is leading the field in personalisation and choice in social care.

Placing the citizen at the heart of public services is, intuitively, the ‘right’ thing to do.

But as research from the commercial world suggests, it is also the right thing to do to increase bottom line profits; or, in the public sector world, bring down the costs of service delivery.

Forrester has long promoted the concept of Customer Experience as a discipline aimed at delivering excellence and reducing costs.

Their research shows a direct correlation between high levels of ‘customer experience’ and organisational success.

Customer Experience, says Forrester, is a trackable indicator derived from three key metrics based on the customer’s interaction (any interaction) with an organisation: • • •

How useful was that experience?

How easy was it to interact?

How enjoyable was it to interact?

In the public sector a focus on those same three key factors – usefulness, ease of use, and how enjoyable the experience – could deliver invaluable insight into the redesign of efficient, effective and engaging public services. Such focus will be essential to the development of online transactional services that the citizen will use, ongoing, as a matter of choice over other channels.

The former National Indicator 14 usefully started raising the profile of ‘services from the citizen’s point of view’, and much has changed in terms of customer focus. Indeed, the talk today is all around ‘Citizen-Centric Services’. But what do we really mean by this? And can we take that customer insight focus further? What can we learn from the

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commercial world’s focus on ‘experience’ to directly impact the cost of service delivery?

For there is no doubt that the goal today is cost-reduction.

The public sector has evolved over generations. Much has been developed to suit the needs of the organisation rather than the needs of those the public sector serves.

Consequently both physical and cultural silos separate the sector’s many parts. This legacy infrastructure means that breaking down the silos to drive up service standards and deliver much needed efficiency savings is hard – or prohibitively expensive.

In today’s budgetary constraints, the budgets for ‘rip and replace’ or even traditional large scale IT projects will be few and far between. However, new technologies such as Adobe LiveCycle can exploit the information held in these legacy assets. These technologies can weave systems and processes together in order to create services that ‘fit’ the citizen and can be accessed in a way that the citizen chooses.

These technologies can protect the citizen from the complexity of government. They can help staff to capture the right information once, and reuse it in future interactions with the citizen as they serve them face-to-face or over the phone. The same technologies can enable the citizen to apply for services online – complete with step by step help and guidance, and automatic verification of the citizen’s answers to ensure that the right information is given, in the right order, to deliver the service as quickly as possible.

In Southwark, Adobe LiveCycle provides the interface that customer service representatives use to process citizen interactions. It used to take months to train operatives on all the different services offered by the service centre – from housing benefit to parking permits and library cards. However new intelligent electronic forms incorporate the instructions for interacting with the citizen, including prompts for scripts and validation that the correct information has been collected in order to process the request.

These forms then interact seamlessly with back office systems and trigger automated process workflows. Apart from dramatically UKauthorITy IT in Use

©iStockphoto.com/Vernon Wiley

reducing the time taken to apply for and receive services (housing benefit can be completed within hours) the council has also dramatically reduced staff training times, from months to less than a week.

Crucially, the whole process was driven from the perspective of the citizen. And the goal was to develop an engaging experience such that the citizen was happy to undertake more than one transaction during the contact. This success in delivering multiple services at just one touch has delivered significant savings to Southwark.

Importantly, Southwark used the same technology, Adobe LiveCycle, that drives many of the systems that citizens are already familiar with in the commercial world – including banking and retail services. Delivering solutions that live up to citizen expectations is also key to driving engagement and uptake of these low cost online channels.

One of the pillars of Customer Experience is that companies must recognise that EVERY interaction – not just each touch – a customer makes with an organisation through every channel is a ‘moment of truth’ that builds on the overall experience.

For the public sector this translates into how can you make every citizen experience intuitive and engaging so that citizens do not need to make repeat contacts, chase progress, or ask for clarification.

In the public sector, getting the best, most efficient citizen service could be the key to surviving the coming cuts. From now on, any investment in new technologies must not only aim to unleash the power of existing assets but also to deliver the necessary step change in process efficiency – in other words, deliver a rapid return on that investment.

Taking the customer experience perspective could turn service delivery on its head, build systems that work for both citizen and state, and help the sector make much needed savings along the way.

To learn more about Citizen Experience from Adobe email: Adobe@lgitu.co.uk

VIEW ON WESTMINSTER

A Quiet Revolution The last time someone said they were the “quiet” man of politics, it proved to be their downfall, says Tim Hampson.

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ain Duncan-Smith never recovered as leader of the Conservative Party after he used the “quiet” word. The nadir being when Labour MPs would shush him as he entered the Commons.

But now deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg - who has been exceedingly hyperactive since the prime minister packed the Factor 45, bucket and spade and smartphone and headed off on his holidays - has been talking about the government’s “quiet” green revolution to create jobs and protect the environment and the public sector.

His political antennae were also firmly set on his party’s annual conference in Liverpool where he received a welcome far more awkward than he normally gets when he has tea with Tory MPs in the Palace of Westminster.

Clegg is made of sterner stuff than DuncanSmith. And he not only has a keen eye for political elephant traps but also knows how to set them too. However, tough times lie ahead. Labour has announced its new leader – and the winner is likely to fill Her Majesty’s Opposition with new resolve.

Meanwhile, around the country Liberal Democrat councillors are far from happy.

In Birmingham and Solihull there have been defections to Labour. In Blackburn and Darwen two Lib-Dems have left the party and become independents. And in Halton four Lib-Dems have torn up their party cards. Elsewhere others will surely follow.

At his party’s annual conference Nick Clegg pleaded for party activists to “stick with” him after he suffered a major rebellion over key coalition school reforms.

Delivering his first party conference speech as deputy prime minister, Mr Clegg mounted an impassioned defence of his decision to do a deal with David Cameron’s Tories.

He said that voters would never have taken the Lib Dems seriously again if they had passed up the opportunity to govern in the national interest at a time of crisis.

And he insisted that “the soul” of the party was alive and well in the coalition, despite members’ fears that they were being

marginalised and suffering serious political damage.

But the life and “soul” of the Lib-Dems party lies in the balance. While he might have one eye on Labour’s leadership battle his other is firmly fixed on the coming cuts which will be announced on or around the 20 October.

Many have gone along with the idea of cuts either because of ideology (Tories) or expediency (Liberal Democrat ministers). But theory and practice are rarely good bedfellows and the coalition will be severely tested if cuts beyond those already planned by councils are announced.

But Clegg is also a pragmatist. He has pledged to allow cash-strapped councils to borrow more money to fund large-scale projects – promising to allow councils to borrow money against the predicted extra business rates they will gain from large-scale building projects. He is clearly enjoying having his feet under a government desk, telling the party faithful, “We confounded those who said that coalition government was impossible. We created a government which will govern and govern well for the next five years.”

On this basis he is urging party members to hold their nerve. And that is normally the worst thing you can ask another politician to do if they think their council seat is at risk.

The cuts programme, to be outlined in full glory in the spending review, would not deliver “smaller government” but “a liberating government”, argued Clegg, allowing people “to run their own lives”.

He stressed that Lib-Dems and Tories remained distinct - despite being in coalition - adding: “But for this parliament we work together to fix the problems we face and put the country on a better path. This is the right government for right now.”

Most Whitehall departments have been told to plan for savings of between 25% and 40%, which means tens of thousands of jobs could be at risk.

Labour’s stand-in leader, Harriet Harman, argues that the government plans could UKauthorITy IT in Use

©iStockphoto.com/S. Greg Panosian

undermine the economic recovery and damage frontline services, hitting the poor hardest. But Clegg is adamant and, almost echoing a battle cry of former prime minister, Tony Blair, he says that the government will be tough on benefit cheats and tough on tax cheats too.

A recent YouGov poll shows the Conservatives leading the Labour Party on voting intentions by only five points - even though David Cameron’s personal ratings have gone up substantially.

However, almost 50% believe that that the Conservatives will form the next coalition government, while 43% believe it would win an election outright.

Unsurprisingly, 43% of the respondents to the poll say this government is doing better than the last one with only 26% marking it worse than the Labour administration.

But when it comes to the services that councils and the rest of the public sector delivers what do people think?

The poll reveals lower expectations when it comes to public services: only 32% believe that this government could improve the NHS or the schools. People like the idea of a ringfencing of the NHS budgets but seem collectively uninterested in the idea of smaller government over which they can take more control. They do, though, like the idea of a smaller parliament with most people giving the thumbs up to the notion that there should be fewer MPs. Electoral reform, however, is a complete unknown; and it could scupper the coalition’s best intentions. However, given all the issues, the government retains the confidence of the public that it will be able to reduce the public sector budget deficit.

So what of Clegg’s “quiet” revolution? He is clearly ready for the inevitable noisy outbursts. From IT managers to probation officers, nurses and fire-fighters, the voices against cuts will be loud and strident.

Few would dare to hush Nick Clegg and, however loud his opponents’ voices get, for now his voice will continue to be heard. He is a positive man who is on a mission, and if he holds it together the public sector could be profoundly changed.

September/October 2010

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SECURITY

Security in an Age of Austerity Inevitable budget cuts could put sensitive citizen data at risk, says Tim Hampson.

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f truth is the first casualty of war is security compromised when IT budget cuts are made? Take your pick – 25% or 40% - cuts are coming as the government prepares to announce its long expected spending review. Almost every day since the announcement of a General Election, the talk from all the major political parties has been about cuts.

undoubtedly been lost by public bodies - including many containing unencrypted personal information.

IT spending in government departments will undoubtedly come under pressure with planned spending cuts of £17bn by 2015.

Other than for the ring-fenced health and overseas aid, this means that all departments will be looking forwards to at least four years of austerity.

The public sector in the rest of the UK has undoubtedly a similar record. Shocking yes, but it must also be put in the context that, according to figures from the US, ordinary citizens lose 12,000 laptops a week while waiting to get on a plane.

The cuts are set to lead to budget squeezes and so spark a further review of efficiency.

The quest for cheaper, cost-effective solutions has already led many public sector organisations to go for outsourcing and shared services; and undoubtedly the next round of cuts will make managers take a serious look at Cloud Computing.

But irrespective of the levels of budget, the public sector doesn’t have the best of records when it comes to looking after data. Recently a USB stick was found in the street outside a police station in Greater Manchester. The unencrypted device was reported to have contained more than 2,000 pages of confidential information, including strategies on combating terror attacks.

The stick was branded GMP POTU, standing for Greater Manchester Police Public Order Training Unit, and the files were produced by the National Police Improvement Agency on the subject of counter-terrorism and tactical deployment.

This latest find is just one more in a long litany of public sector data losses since HMRC’s loss of two disks with 25 million records on them in 2007. In the same year the details of three million candidates for the driving theory test went missing. Names, addresses and phone numbers - but no financial information - were among details on a computer hard drive belonging to the Driving Standards Agency which went missing in the US. And in the last few months scores of computers, USB sticks and mobile phones have

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In Scotland an investigation by the LibDems found that the police, councils and NHS recorded scores of missing items over the last year, including computers, mobile phones, Blackberrys and USB data sticks.

And after this year’s Glastonbury festival scores of mobile phones and other electronic devices were found in abandoned tents or on the ground after the revellers had gone home.

A report by the Information Commissioner’s Office advises all organisations to invest in privacy protection. Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, said that not only is it the law to protect people’s privacy, but there is also a business imperative; whatever the budget available.

The warning is well made as many observers point out that IT security is not at the core of government operations and, unlike the US that is investing more in information and cyber security, most of what our government does is reactive, rather than proactive.

MWR InfoSecurity has warned that any government organisations planning redundancies or significant cuts in expenditure would obviously be at a higher risk of losing data. Director, Alex Fidgen, says that large scale cuts in budgets to government departments was clearly starting to affect the security needed to safeguard the large amounts of private data held within the government. “It’s not just information that might be held by the security services but data that is held on all of us by agencies like HMRC, who have a history of data loss.

“We are now seeing clear evidence of conflict occurring between the teams responsible for ongoing security assurance, the protection of government data, and lack of budget to allow the necessary security checking and protection measures.

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“What is making this particularly hard for these teams is that these checks and measures are mandated via the Cabinet Office but the budget cutbacks currently being enforced are making it very hard to maintain the required assurance measures across government.”

The upshot could be a marked increase in data loss and high profile security incidents in the next six to 18 months as critical systems and information are not properly audited. Indeed, Fidgen believes that if adequate security cannot be assured when managing these risks then affected government departments “should consider whether they are able to continue holding sensitive personal information”.

However, Tony Dyhouse, cybersecurity programme director for the governmentfunded Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Network, hopes that the cloud of anxiety created by budget cuts could have a silver lining.

While there is a risk that austerity measures could siphon money away from information security, the budget cuts could also stimulate innovation. “Against a background of austerity, there will be more demand for cost-effective, innovative solutions, and hopefully academics and policy makers will work more closely with business to develop these,” said Dyhouse. “This could stimulate both economic growth and improvements in the area.

“With fewer resources to absorb errors, and hopefully a greater willingness of the ICO to issue fines for failure, we may even see companies and individuals waking up to the fact that they need to take security more seriously,” he said.

According to Dyhouse, perhaps it will be commonsense rather than big technology which will bring the greatest benefit to anyone concerned about data security.

He says he would like to see security programmes, be they in the public or private sector, focus on educating the public and employees about the value of data and the risks of its loss.

Which means we must all become more aware of where our data is being held. Now, where did I leave my mobile?

HEALTH & SOCIAL CARE

Talking and Working Together on Health OPINION: Michael Cross urges local government to play an active part in planning the future of technology in the NHS.

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ocal government IT managers may be forgiven a sense of schadenfreude about the woes of the NHS National Programme for IT in England. The perceived expensive failure of the £13bn programme (though in fact only half of that has been spent) has cast a long shadow over all public sector IT initiatives under the Labour government.

However this does not mean we will automatically be better off without the national programme.

Over the next year or so, councils and their local NHS bodies will have to take strategic decisions about the sharing of information between health and social care at a time of great upheaval at the centre.

There is an opportunity for social care to assert its rightful role - long eclipsed by the national programme, with its focus on acute hospital trusts. But unless everyone is working to an agreed master plan, there is also a risk of expensive mistakes.

At the moment we are in a policy vacuum, awaiting the publication of a new information strategy for the NHS in England.

Some strategic clues are discernible, however. Last month’s ministerial statement on the future of the programme seems to indicate that in office, the Conservatives are implementing the findings of the independent review of healthcare IT published in August 2009 by a committee chaired by Dr Glyn Hayes.

While health minister Simon Burns’ announcement was widely reported as marking the end of the national programme, in reality it follows the Hayes committee’s recommendations to maintain the general thrust towards electronic health records, while putting the squeeze on major contractors and granting more local control over system procurement.

Burns’ statement said that an (unpublished) Department of Health review had concluded that ‘a centralised national approach is no longer required, and that a more locallyled plural system of procurement should operate, whilst continuing with national applications already procured’.

The new policy looks very much like the Hayes committee’s recommendation to ‘halt or renegotiate’ the local service provider contracts that were the hallmark of the programme set up by former NHS IT chief, Richard Granger, in 2003.

The statement also echoes the Hayes review’s recommendations that centrally operated systems for handling electronic appointment booking and prescribing remain in place - along with, by implication, the ambition to computerise almost all patient records first set out in the Information for Health strategy in 1998. This will be achieved by connecting existing systems rather than replacing them, the ministerial statement said.

However the Hayes committee made another crucial call: that a serious and urgent effort be made to integrate NHS and social care information. ‘Information sharing is crucial to making the best use of limited resources in the whole system of health and social care.’

Specific recommendations include creating a ‘high level mechanism’ for the concerned government departments to coordinate strategies to the Department of Health, supporting local government in developing consistent data standards and definitions, so that information can be exchanged meaningfully and securely.

So far, there has been little sign of the government taking such action. The overall approach seems to be to let integration develop locally. However outside a few trailblazers, this will be difficult to put into effect without more resources. For a start, there is little point in looking to the supposedly featherbedded NHS to subsidise local IT investments.

In the wake of the minister’s announcement, the NHS Confederation warned that the ending of the national programme could hit trusts in the pocket by forcing them to divert local resources to systems that had previously been centrally funded.

“It is important to remember that removing some elements from the national programme is likely to shift cost to local providers,” Frances Blunden, senior policy manager, said. “Good information systems are essential to running a modern health service. They UKauthorITy IT in Use

©iStockphoto.com/mark wragg

improve patient safety and reduce cost; it is vital that every effort continues to be made to get this issue right.”

The Hayes committee also recommended that some strong central direction will continue to be essential if NHS and social care organisations are to implement effective shared systems. It stressed the importance of a central IT agency as ‘the source of technical, commercial, service and programme management support’.

The Department of Health has shown some sign of taking this seriously by avoiding the easy short term option of abolishing the central NHS IT team. The strongest sign of continuity is the decision to retain its current IT chief, director general for informatics, Christine Connelly, as ‘national lead for patient empowerment and the publication of information on quality’. As such, she will play a key role in implementing the plans in the ‘liberating the NHS’ white paper to transfer power to GPs from primary care trusts and strategic health authorities.

However we are still in the dark about the shape of the central IT team that will be left after the inevitable spending review cuts.

NHS chief executive, David Nicholson, has revealed that a new information strategy will be published this month along with a publication on the policy of patient choice.

Consultation on both will run until December.

Local government must make sure it plays an active role in this process - health information is too important a resource to be left in the hands of the health service, or even of doctors.

On this theme, the Hayes review sounded a prescient warning. ‘One of the most important functions of a central IT body is to support the development of policy. Currently policy makers do not realise that there are information requirements to almost all they do.’ The committee was talking about the last government.

The maturity of the strategy to integrate health and social care in England may be the first test of whether the present incumbents have taken the message on board.

Independent Review of NHS and Social Care IT, Dr Glyn Hayes, 2009 www.conservatives.com September/October 2010

15

ITU LIVE: CITIZEN EXPERIENCE

Designing Services for Both Citizen and User In the past, public services were often designed to serve the needs of the organisation. Helen Olsen asks the ITU Live panel whether a focus instead on user experience could help us to design and deliver more effective, lower cost services that citizens choose to use.

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he former National Indicator 14 first raised the concept of reducing costs in service delivery by reducing ‘avoidable contact’. Whilst unpopular, the indicator did a very good job in educating people about the cost benefits of looking at service design from the citizen’s point of view.

The indicator has now gone, but can we take this focus further to not only unblock bottlenecks in service delivery but also to develop self-service channels that the citizen chooses to use - not because we want them to, but because they prefer to?

Danish municipalities work as one Johan Salenstedt, managing director for Adobe Nordics, says that this approach - of focusing on the internal user and citizen has helped 70 Danish municipalities to save more than 1,100 manual processing hours each per year.

The shared development of a standard citizen portal for them all achieved full ROI in less than eight months. Adobe LiveCycle was used to build the intuitive and efficient self-service portal, Borgeronline, providing citizens with easy access to more than 250 dynamic PDF forms that guide them through the process of applying for services.

The municipalities, Salenstedt says, focused on areas where they were subject to the same legislation and serving citizens with the same things. They agreed on a common system so that they could share both information and development, using ‘Software as a Service’.

Borgeronline “was built from a customer centric perspective,” says Salenstedt. It is widely used with people successfully managing their own application process. “If you can actually build an interactive system which is intuitive, which is the way you want, and it’s engaging, you will minimise the errors.”

The project was completed in just under two years as “they actually reused a lot of the old infrastructure. They of course changed the processes and the user experience, but they could reuse quite a lot of the data and the system itself - and that saved enormous amounts of money.”

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September/October 2010

e-Patient records that work Basildon & Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Trust opted out of the NHS National Programme for IT long before the programme’s demise to focus on what Dr Paul Williams, heading the project at the trust, says “is the real problem in hospitals right now: the paper. We’re drowning in it and it has become untenable as a clinical tool.”

Williams is developing and refining a new electronic patient record in collaboration with clinicians and other users. Indeed, the project had deep involvement from users and had a clinical advisory group comprising 14 of the hospital’s most senior clinicians involved right from the start. The group was able to tackle “some of the really big issues that we knew we were going to face in this transformation project” well before the project’s procurement phase.

Consequently, says Williams, the user interface developed “is absolutely unique” with clinicians able to “mine the information that’s contained in the physical case load”.

Importantly, the project placed its focus not just on digitising information, but on indexing it and rendering it back in a usable, intuitive, way. It contains “sticky fingers” enabling rapid bookmarking of information to compare and contrast and has electronic post-it notes that flag up to a clinician that a particular part of a record has multiple comments – which in itself could be an indicator of a problem crossing multiple disciplines. Neither of these developments were contained in the original specification; both came directly from working through the user experience with real users.

of Justice’s eWorking programme. The goal was essentially the same: to take a predominantly paper process to the Royal Courts of Justice and turn it into a usable, and well used, electronic alternative.

Nigel Kelly, a consultant working on the project, says that the concept had been well supported and eagerly awaited for some time: “What they’d been waiting for was the software and technology with the ability to enable this, in a very easy way, to open up the court service for the judges, the court staff and applicants.”

There had long been recognition that there was “far more you could do with electronic records than you could do with a paper based system”, he says. Indeed, the panel agreed that the core technologies - scanning records and electronic document management – have been around for some time.

What had been missing was the usability from the user’s perspective. The latest technologies now enabled this to be addressed.

The eWorking programme, explains Kelly, is based around Adobe LiveCycle intelligent form technology, which pushes data capture and validation out to the end user in very logical forms that are easy to fill in, and that can guide the user through the process. This electronic document then drives and simplifies the process back through the court service: “When you’ve got a complex process with a lot of branch points and that is spread potentially over years, keeping that whole process managed, visible, clear to the customer, clear to the court staff and able to present back the relevant information at the right time, is actually critical.”

Basildon and Thurrock’s business case has two targets - the strategic benefit to the trust in delivering improved patient healthcare, and the delivery of a return on project investment. This last, ROI, is rarely achieved by such hospital projects. However Williams is targeting - and confident of delivering - a 13% to 15% ROI over five years.

Kelly’s team identified three distinct groups of users – judges, court staff, and external court users (from individuals to law firms or bulk users like Revenue & Customs) - and looked at the needs of each to get the ‘user experience’ right. The resulting interfaces are tailored to each group but they all participate in the same underlying processes.

Focus on user at MoJ

If you get this right, Kelly says, getting people to use the system is easy: “You don’t have to drag them kicking and screaming, they will actually start running towards the new solutions, because it is a much easier way of working.”

All system design decisions have been driven by user input, with constant testing and feedback along the way. This user-focused approach was also taken for the Ministry UKauthorITy IT in Use

ITU LIVE: CITIZEN EXPERIENCE

On the ITU Live Panel: Johan Salenstedt

Nigel Kelly

Helen Olsen

Dr Paul Williams

Managing Director Nordics, Adobe - municipalities in Denmark developed shared, common ‘SaaS‘ solutions

Consultant on the Ministry of Justice’s e-Working Programme

Managing Editor, ITU, Tomorrow’s Town Hall and UKauthorITy.com

Heading development of Basildon & Thurrock NHS Trust’s Electronic Medical Records

Watch ITU Live now: www.UKauthorITy.com/ITUlive Return on investment Savings of time and money, and rapid ROI, appear common to all projects. “We very quickly achieved up to 85% effort savings of the first sort of tranche of the case lifecycle; so from the initial claim all the way up to the hearing stage, we cut out all the manual bits of the operation,” says Kelly. This enabled the court service to cope with a huge increase in volumes without increasing headcount.

to classrooms, they’d rather be treating sick people. So our system has to be intuitive.”

Kelly adds that it is essential to understand how a user will use the system. “And you don’t get that from just sitting there trying to think about it and analysing it. You only get that from sitting down with the user, prototyping things, learning from them, feeding things back very quickly. Because then they understand what’s going into the solution. That also cuts around the training issue.”

Also common to all three projects is a very heavy focus both on the experience of the user and on those delivering the service.

Identity

Experience is key

The goal in switching to online citizen service is chiefly to reduce cost. But to transact with people online you need to know who they are, and that they are eligible for the service.

Salenstedt says that with new technologies and a new generation coming into the world of work and services, customer experience is vital. “People have been brought up with Facebook and they just don’t work with the old systems.” User experience, he says, is important, but it’s also difficult to design.

“You want to achieve an intuitive system, that engages and meets expectations. And it’s really, really difficult, both from a technology standpoint as well as a design standpoint, to actually achieve that.

Kelly and Williams agreed that systems were all too often designed in the past from the technology perspective.

“Over the years I have seen many systems try and deliver what we’re now doing for Basildon and it’s quite interesting; they’re built by IT people who’ve never seen a physical case note in their life,” says Williams. And this is why they don’t work, “You need different thinking. You need this new generation.

And we cannot afford to have a huge training overhead because clinicians do not go

The debate around identity still rages in the UK but in Sweden and Denmark having a personal identity number is considered normal.

Says Salenstedt, “We have our personal identity number from the day we are born and that follows us for life.” It is not only acceptable, but also beneficial: “It makes it easier.”

With the Danish Borgeronline project, municipalities agreed to standardise on one of the many digital signature vendors in the market as a national standard. This, says Salenstedt, makes life so much easier “because then you can actually use it for everything, whether it’s hospitals or it’s in citizens services or what ever.”

Security Security, says Williams, breaks into three areas: the confidentiality and privacy issues; the integrity of information; and system availability. And all three can be enhanced in the electronic environment. “Right now I could UKauthorITy IT in Use

ITU Live was sponsored by Adobe UK

walk into probably any hospital in the country and as long as you bluff your way through enough, you could pick up a case note quite easily.” You can’t target a specific paperbased case note, but you can in an electronic system. “But,” he says, “When we have the system in place, we will know who’s looked at individual pages in the case note on the system, and how long they spent looking at it.”

Kelly agrees, “It’s much easier to control security in an electronic environment and to audit trail any access that does occur to records - whether it’s authorised or unauthorised. You’ve got to lock down the bits you need to lock down, but not at the expense of giving people the information they need access to.” He thinks that, for a long time, that balance has been wrong.

User experience key to success Gaining user involvement and engagement in the project from the outset is crucial to delivering a successful system. This undoubtedly adds complexity for the developer: “You have to expect that change from the beginning.

You use that whole process of evolving solutions through the life of the project,” says Kelly. But the rewards are worth it: “You get a much richer product, quickly. People understand how it’s going to work.”

Technology will enable the public sector to meet the challenge of delivering high quality public services that will enable the citizen to interact via low cost, electronic channels.

But, agrees the panel, it is a focus on user experience that will persuade citizens to actively choose these service channels by moulding their development such that they not only do what they are supposed to do, but are easy and enjoyable to use.

September/October 2010

17

COMPANY & PRODUCT NOTES

Threats and opportunities

Procurement freeze starts to thaw

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s the government begins its review of public sector IT contracts one industry analyst forecasts it could cause a massive disruption to the market – in particular if BT Global Services are renegotiated.

Any loss of national public sector contracts for BT Global Services could have implications for the whole market place, says Ovum.

In a new report Ovum points out that BT Global Services, a division of BT, relies on the public purse for nearly a quarter of its business. However Ovum believes that if the company is affected by the new coalition government’s spending review the loss of contracts would not affect just its own bottom line and growth potential.

According to David Molony, the author of Ovum’s ‘BT Global Services: enterprise strategy review 2010’, it would also be bad news for the company’s competitors. “The public sector is undoubtedly important for BT Global Services: contracts such as Connecting for Health or DWP in the UK account for 23 percent of business (10% of overall group revenue). The new UK coalition government spending review now under way may affect all of these contracts....

However, for its competitor service providers, a loss of public sector contracts could be doubly bad news... as the company may turn on them to try and win back local government business especially, in an effort to make up for lost or delayed ICT contracts.”

However, Chris Ainslie, MD of local, regional and devolved government at BT Global Services, says that the company is “very supportive of the government’s spending review and the objectives it is trying to achieve”. Describing BT as a key public sector supplier and partner, he added, “We are proactively working with the government and its departments to find solutions to the cost transformation challenges it faces.

The opportunities to help the public sector transform how it works are considerable and BT is very well positioned to help.”

Lessons in survival from the private sector BT has undoubtedly been through its own tough times, hitting what could politely be termed a financial crisis early on in the recession. However the company has dramatically turned itself round in the last year - reducing operating costs by £1.8bn, significantly reducing its headcount and returning the loss making Global Services business to profitability.

the opportunity to re-skill and then be redeployed. Says Ainslie, “We moved the right people, to the right place, to do the right job.” He admits that this was no easy task but adds, “Harsh realities force change”.

Ainslie believes that that the wider public sector can learn much from BT’s experience.

As he rightly points out, the organisation’s cultural heritage comes from within the public sector. Indeed a surprising number of employees have been with the company since before privatisation: the average length of service is 20 years; the average age over 40.

The process of change is far from over, however: “It is a continuous process of cultural change,” he warns, to move to where “the workforce is empowered and measured on outcomes”. The company is enabling video conferencing, remote and flexible working and changing its own internal working practices to deliver efficiencies. All of which must sound familiar to the public sector.

This focus on outcome, rather than process or input, has been difficult for some and whilst there have been no compulsory redundancies some have chosen to leave the company. Those that remain appear committed and enthusiastic about the ‘can do’ culture.

Ainslie himself views the spending review as “both an opportunity and a challenge”, and a time for radical rethinking on both sides of the public-private equation.

September/October 2010

The supplier expects other government departments to take advantage of the framework. Likely candidates include the UK Borders Agency and the Department for International Development. While the deal is not formally part of the new Public Services Network (PSN) scheme being procured by the Cabinet Office, it “will be PSN compliant in the future”.

Cable&Wireless claims that the highly resilient network would save the taxpayer £90m over five years, and allow the FCO to cut travel costs by enabling more use of video conferencing.

The Cabinet Office PSN scheme aims to create a ‘network of networks’ for the public sector from existing commercial networks.

The idea is for departments, agencies, local authorities and the third sector to buy voice and data services more cheaply.

In a related move, Cable&Wireless has appointed Brian Woodford as public sector managing director. Woodford has previously worked for TATA Consultancy Services and BT Global Services.

Simply speech, simply smart

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ragon has released the latest version of its speech recognition software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Dragon 11 provides a step change in desktop and mobile phone speech recognition technology. Improved accuracy, performance and ease of use – and dramatically reduced ‘training’ times – make speech a viable option, for the first time, for interacting with computers. Dragon 11 gives people a voice to perform almost any task on a computer to create documents, send emails, surf the Web, update Facebook and Twitter and interact with applications – at speeds up to three times faster than typing.

In an ITU review the solution proved remarkably accurate and intuitive to use, proving itself a credible step towards a time when mouse and keyboard work with voice to control everyday computing tasks. Its ability to recognise a wide variety of accents and turn them to text also opens up interesting possibilities for online public service transactions.

Meanwhile, a range of new Dragon Mobile Apps on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch open up new horizons for voice to text messaging and mobile web access.

Of particular relevance to the public sector is that Global Services managed to take its workforce with it on this journey. There were no compulsory redundancies. Instead a central ‘transition centre’ provided staff

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he summer saw a significant slowdown in ‘new contract wins’ compared to previous years. However the post-election freeze on government IT procurements seems to be coming to an end: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has announced an £82m framework telecommunications deal under which Cable&Wireless Worldwide will manage IP services for the department.

www.nuance.com UKauthorITy IT in Use

COMPANY & PRODUCT NOTES

Blears backs benefit cheat tracing software

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azel Blears has urged Communities and Local Government secretary, Eric Pickles, to consider deploying a “powerful and unique” software solution to help councils to trace benefit cheats and council tax dodgers. The LoCTA software system, developed by MAG:NET Solutions in Blears’ Salford constituency, is currently used by around 60% of councils in England, Scotland and Wales to share information in their bid to recover millions of pounds in benefits paid out as a result of error or fraud. “I am advised that this is a unique system and understand that the more councils who use the system, the more effective it is as a tracing tool,” said Blears in her letter to Pickles.

Rapid vehicle tracking on iPhone

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asternaut has launched a webbased vehicle tracking service for the Apple iPhone and iPad. This is the first in a series of free apps for Apple products from the company. The Masternaut Rapide app for iPhone provides the core functionalities of the live Masternaut service to managers on the move. It provides an essential real-time link to important operational information whenever they are away from the office.

The company is also developing versions of Rapide for both Blackberry and Android phones. www.masternaut.co.uk

Social networking can be tracked

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agan has announced an integration toolkit that will enable its 200 local government customers worldwide to receive and action service requests via social networks, mobile applications and third-party websites. The Open 311 Integration Toolkit will enable developers to create apps that link their sites, social networks or mobile applications direct to local government. Service requests received through any of these channels can be seamlessly and automatically integrated into the work order processing system and managed and tracked through to completion. www.lagan.com

NO COST FOR OPEN DATA: UNIT4 has launched an ‘Open and Linked Data Initiative’ for local government to ‘encourage complete financial transparency’. The company claims that its Agresso software allows customers to meet or even exceed requirements of the government transparency programme. It is providing its 90+ local government customers with immediate access to open and linked data for local government at no extra cost.

EXTREME WORKING: Getac UK has launched what it claims to be the world’s most powerful fully rugged convertible notebook, delivering ‘unrivalled’ CPU processing power in even the toughest of conditions. A new Intel Core i7 2.0 GHz processor can handle even the most CPU-intensive software while still performing in demanding field conditions across a range of applications. Its shock mounted 320GB hard disk drive and sealed I/O caps and doors prevent damage from solid particles and moisture and a 12.1 inch convertible wide screen display with QuadraClear technology mean it can be operated in direct sunlight. www.getac.co.uk.

Orange launches new health service

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range has launched Orange Health Gate by iPlato, its second new service specifically aimed at the healthcare sector.

Orange Health Gateway allows hospitals, doctors’ surgeries and pharmacies to use mobile communications to transform patient services and become more efficient through a selection of two-way messaging modules.

The service allows all healthcare organisations to message both patients and employees to remind them of upcoming appointments, improve the communication of test results, speed up the resourcing of replacement nurses or improve patient adherence to medication. The iPlato platform is hosted on N3 and complies with the NHS’s data security and information government requirements. http://business.orange.co.uk/

NO AERIAL DISPUTE: Bluesky has launched a cost effective way to obtain irrefutable evidence for use in boundary disputes and other land based disputes or studies. Priced at £175 the OldAerialPhotos Photopack contains two digital image files; one archive aerial photograph of a location in the past and a corresponding image from the most recent aerial survey. The Photopack also contains A4 printed versions of the aerial photos, a certificate of authenticity, a copy of the archive search details and the supporting flight report from the archive scan (where available). www.oldaerialphotos.com

WEBSITE RESOLVE: GOSS has launched a new knowledge transfer service, RESOLVE, which offers local authorities a defined method of reducing costs in the face of major budget cuts by providing intelligent analysis, informed recommendations and long-term monitoring of website effectiveness. The continuous improvement service analyses a website to identify how users find content, conducts user research to identify users’ preferred methods of engagement, and also audits the online services available. www.gossinteractive.com/online_efficiency

LEGAL COSTS ONLINE: North West Legal Consortium has launched a web portal designed to drive efficiencies and promote greater collaboration between local authorities. The site contains a secure database of all of the tender rates of panel firms and chambers, and its commission facility will enable local authorities to compare rates, then email law firms or chambers to request quotes including fixed or capped fees.

Easy streets

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ligned Assets has released a subscription version of its street naming and numbering module, Symphony SNN. The standalone product is designed to speed up the process of naming a street or numbering a property. User, June Shobbrook at Pembrokeshire County Council, says that before Symphony SNN she had “several Access databases and volumes of paper work. I found it difficult to look up old historical issues, but I am now able to create entries in the summary console and look at outstanding historical issues. I look forward to generating emails with location plans attached – it will be so much easier and will assist the utilities.”

Aligned Assets is also offering smaller public sector organisations a cheaper way to access the National Land and Property Gazetteer. ‘SinglePoint’ enables organisations to hold the NLPG centrally via an annual subscription fee and utilise advanced web services to give all users access to the NLPG data for a fraction of what this would previously have cost. www.aligned-assets.co.uk/singlepoint UKauthorITy IT in Use

September/October 2010

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CONTRACT ROUNDUP

HEALTH BIRMINGHAM HEALTH AND WELLBEING PARTNERSHIP is using a Dotted Eyes Health Portal to facilitate information sharing through its partnership organisations. In the first phase of the roll out, health portal will facilitate internal NHS information access across partner organisations, equipping new and existing partners, specifically new GP Consortia, to easily and cost-effectively share a broad reach of information, for example, lifestyle data, hospital admissions and death from diseases.

CIRCLE has signed a strategic partnership with McKesson UK to deliver a cuttingedge medical imaging solution to its new hospital in Bath. The CircleBath Hospital is fully digital, integrating the best IT solutions available, it is claimed, to create a stimulating working environment and deliver an efficient and effective health service to patients.

COVENTRY AND NHS WARWICKSHIRE PRIMARY CARE TRUSTS have gone live with McKesson’s child health management.

The new system replaces three disparate systems across the region, reducing the administrative burden, creating cost efficiencies and delivering a single vision of child health to facilitate patient care and service redesign. The roll out of CarePlus Child Health, including the migration of 390,000 registration records onto one database, was completed on budget and on time with no interruptions to service.

EALING HOSPITAL has gone live with SRC’s electronic Discharge Summary Solution.

Clinicians at the hospital now complete accurate and legible discharge summaries electronically, which are then reviewed and authorised by pharmacists before prescriptions are dispensed. This is a paperless process. Upon patient discharge, the completed summary is automatically sent via a secure electronic link to the patient’s GP practice. Patients leave the hospital with a printed copy that includes information about their medications.

NHS ORGANISATIONS are increasingly using Cybit’s Fleetstar telematics.

Organisations, including NHS Lothian, NHS Trust Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells, NHS Fife Health Board and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, are all using Fleetstar to increase visibility of their fleets used for patient collection and the transportation of important medical test results. “All public sector organisations need 100 percent visibility of their mobile assets, especially in the NHS, where there are so many vehicles on the road,” commented Jim McIlroy, transport manager at NHS Fife.

NHS SHARED BUSINESS SERVICES, a joint venture between the Department of Health and Steria, has announced five new clients, including Lancashire Teaching Hospitals

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September/October 2010

NHS Foundation Trust to which it delivers finance and accounting services.

FIRE

NHS WALES has taken the pioneering decision to roll out ProcServe xchangewales eTrading across its service in Wales. The Cardiff and Vale University Local Health Board is now using the service and it will be followed by Betsi Cadwaladr Local Health Board and Welsh Ambulance. The first electronic transaction was generated on 28 June.

PETERBOROUGH NHS TRUST has contracted WinScribe, in partnership with Equanet, to supply digital dictation software to over 300 users. The WinScribe solution complies with the HL7 health industry standard that ensures disparate computer systems can communicate with each other.

It allows users to dictate or transcribe inside or outside of the hospital using the LAN/ WAN, internet or telephone.

POLICE GLOUCESTERSHIRE CONSTABULARY has improved its financial management and reporting systems with a £310,000 five-year investment in software systems from Civica.

The authority has implemented Civica Financials software platform to simplify general ledger administration as well as other functions, including debt recovery process, and bring them into consolidated organisation-wide reporting formats. The web-based solution will dramatically improve financial processes across all departments, allowing the constabulary’s financial managers to access key information at any time. The system will also help the finance team to improve cash flow management as it generates payment requests to debtors at pre-set intervals.

NORFOLK CONSTABULARY has selected HTK for Police Direct high-tech e-policing.

Norfolk residents are getting the latest news from their local policing team direct to their email inbox, mobile phone, landline and fax thanks to a newly-launched community messaging system. The system was launched to increase the ways in which the constabulary communicates with the public, encouraging the public to engage with the police. All messages residents receive are free. Registration is simple via a link on the Norfolk Constabulary website, through the constabulary’s switchboard or by filling in a form at one of Norfolk’s public enquiry offices.

WARWICKSHIRE POLICE has selected Sepura STP8038 TETRA hand-portable radios to replace its existing fleet of Airwave terminals. More than 1,200 handportable terminals will be supplied in the coming weeks. The contract, following successful competitive user trials and technical evaluations, was facilitated by Arqiva, Warwickshire Police’s managed service provider.

UKauthorITy IT in Use

HAMPSHIRE FIRE & RESCUE SERVICE has become the first UK brigade to implement OS OnDemand, the web map service offered by Ordnance Survey. It is accessing the service utilising specialist functionality available in OpenWINGS, the brigade’s GIS solution supplied by Bristol based software developer, Innogistic.

OTHER BOURNEMOUTH & WEST HAMPSHIRE WATER is using new software to make informed decisions about pipe repair.

Palisade’s risk analysis software, used in conjunction with Halcrow’s ‘cluster’ analysis tool, enables the company to identify areas of the water distribution network where targeted pipe replacement will result in the greatest benefits for customer service.

FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE has signed an £82m framework telecommunications deal with Cable&Wireless Worldwide. While the deal is not formally part of the new Public Services Network (PSN) scheme being procured by the Cabinet Office, it ‘will be PSN compliant in the future’. The company is hoping that other government departments will take advantage of the framework.

LONDON DEVELOPMENT AGENCY is upgrading its print fleet with Canon. The new contract was signed through the OGC Buying Solutions framework agreement.

Under the new agreement Canon will install eight imageRUNNER ADVANCE C5051 colour devices and eight monochrome Canon iR5065 devices at LDA headquarters.

VISITSCOTLAND is using HumanConcepts’ OrgPlus Enterprise to manage organisational change. Head of human resources, David Anderson, says,“We wanted to build a leadership competency model that we could use for designing organisational structure.

We also wanted to improve our workforce analytics, such as head count, full time employment and salary relativity.”

SPORT WALES has selected Sysec to provide an identity and access management solution for employees located at their offices and national sporting centres throughout the country.

CONTRACT ROUNDUP

LOCAL GOVERNMENT ADUR DISTRICT COUNCIL and WORTHING BOROUGH COUNCIL are implementing NorthgateArinso’s ResourceLink Aurora HR and payroll solution as a key component in a shared services programme. The implementation is one of a series of projects in which resources are being shared to create efficiencies as the two councils move ahead with a formal arrangement of working together. The solution is hosted by MidSussex District Council, which itself uses NorthgateArinso’s ResourceLink solution for HR and payroll.

BIRMINGHAM’S highways infrastructure is using Pitney Bowes Business Insight data management and customer communication management software, data and services.

Amey has chosen Pitney’s highways asset management system, Confirm, to support the 25 year, £2.7bn Birmingham Highways PFI. The initial three year contract is worth £1.1m, with an option to extend for two further years.

BROADLAND DISTRICT COUNCIL has selected Asset4000 from Real Asset Management (RAM) to control its £7m worth of assets in line with the Statement of Recommended Practice (SoRP) and upcoming IFRS legislation. Having struggled to find a solution which could match its comparatively small scale whilst still achieving the required functionality, the council will use the RAM solution to strengthen its audit trail and reduce the time associated with manual data input.

EAST STAFFORDSHIRE BOROUGH COUNCIL has selected Asset4000 from Real Asset Management to control its £47m asset base.

The solution provides the council with the detailed functionality required for Statement TRANSPORT FOR BUCKINGHAMSHIRE is providing live highways maintenance information to the public through a new online Service Information Centre. The result of a real-time web innovation from Masternaut Three X, the system has been implemented by Transport for Buckinghamshire - a partnership between Buckinghamshire County Council and highway infrastructure services provider, Ringway Jacobs. It will provide realtime information and communications, including fault reporting and roadwork monitoring

of Recommended Practice (SoRP) and IFRS compliance, as well as creating a robust audit trail and increasing back-office efficiencies.

ENFIELD COUNCIL has awarded Civica a five year contract worth £2.5m to provide a managed council tax and benefits administration system. Serving Enfield’s 280,000 residents, the OPENRevenues system will drive system-wide efficiencies, helping to drive down costs, whilst improving the level of service Enfield can offer. Enfield took a strategic decision to build a new state-ofthe-art administration platform based on hosted departmental applications and 24/7 system support. This will be provided by Civica as one integrated service. The company will implement the new system later this year.

BRIGHTON AND HOVE COUNCIL has moved to MAYRISE Online software. The provision of software as a service is a relatively new concept and Brighton was the first UK council to benefit from the Mayrise solution with MAYRISE for Street Works going live last year. Since then both MAYRISE Highways and MAYRISE Street Lighting have been transferred to the hosted service.

FIFE COUNCIL is using INCA 2 technology to improve productivity, raise accountability and provide a transparent and efficient service from its gritting vehicles. The system will enable the council to increase the productivity of its gritter fleet and protect itself against fraudulent insurance claims by delivering in-vehicle access to business critical information, and advanced monitoring and control.

ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM has adopted technology to reduce costs in the face of expected public sector cuts. Britain’s oldest public museum has used Power Down technology from Qubic Group to reduce the costs of running its 200 workstations. The museum’s Dr Jonathan Moffett said,“Computers were frequently left on day and night and even over the weekends and understanding that a single PC can waste as much as £50 per year and be responsible for a quarter tonne of C02 if left on is quite shocking. Typically in an educational establishment or public space it is often unclear who should be switching off equipment and we needed something that would address this issue.”

HOUNSLOW COUNCIL’S IT department has selected Sunrise’s Sostenuto software. The software will be used by around 60 staff across the centralised IT department, supporting 3,000 customers within the local authority as well as its ALMO. IT front line support manager, Dave Brockis, led the procurement process as part of a drive to improve service and efficiency within the local authority.

LANCASTER CITY COUNCIL has implemented Asset4000 from Real Asset Management (RAM) to manage its £278m worth of fixed assets. As well as helping the local authority achieve IFRS compliance, the RAM solution integrates with the existing ledger system to achieve streamlined back office processes and provide complete confidence in data integrity.

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LEEDSWATCH COMMUNITY SAFETY team has deployed Vemotion Interactive wireless CCTV solution. Following a £1m investment over the last 12 months, the CCTV section has developed a centre of excellence at its south Leeds location and the services will soon be merged with West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive for coordination of its 250 CCTV cameras covering West Yorkshire’s bus stations.

LIVERPOOL DIRECT LIMITED is deploying Dotted Eyes latest version of its Contractor Portal v2.0. The product embraces new imperatives for organisations to share internally generated asset data, along with OS and OSNI and wider third party datasets.

In addition to providing self-service access to data licensed under collective purchase agreements, from Ordnance Survey and other data suppliers, Contractor Portal enables organisations to share their own, internally generated, data in a secure environment for the first time.

NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL’S contract for a new cashless system for its schools has been awarded to sQuid, working in partnership with Cunninghams and CRB. Parents will have sQuid accounts enabling them to top up with money online, view their child’s transactions and see what they have paid for and when. This helps to support the council’s agenda for providing healthy meals to school children by giving parents online visibility too.

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CONTRACT ROUNDUP

LEEDS CITY COUNCIL and partner Imperial Civil Enforcement Solutions (ICES) are using 3sixty software to issue and process 120,000 Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs) each year. The council has just taken delivery of new generation iPAQ units in a bid to make the service yet more efficient. Parking manager, Mark Jefford, said, “By working in partnership we’ve been able to adopt hardware with lower capital investment where we have responsibility for arranging all repair and maintenance. This wouldn’t suit all authorities - especially those without any in-house IT resource. But, for us it has worked a treat, and the savings have been substantial.”

NORTHERN GRID FOR LEARNING has saved 450 schools in the North East of England a total of more than £20m over three years since installing a 21st century broadband network provided by Easynet Global Services. Northern Grid for Learning (NG) is the Regional Broadband Consortium for the North East of England. Originally a consortium but now a ‘Not for Profit Company’, Northern Grid was set up to improve digital learning experiences for children in the region. It connects schools in Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, North Tyneside, Redcar & Cleveland, Stockton and South Tyneside, giving children high-speed, reliable and safe access to the internet, via a sophisticated filtering system.

ROYAL BOROUGH OF KENSINGTON AND CHELSEA COUNCIL has chosen Whitespace’s Power Suite software to run its commercial waste operations. The software will enable the council to optimise the management and efficiency of its waste operations, covering reporting, invoicing and management. Benefits are expected to include enhancements in operational efficiency, more effective waste collection, income generation and reconciliation.

LUTON BOROUGH COUNCIL is using SEPATON data protection appliances and data deduplication software. It now operates two S2100-ES VTLs with DeltaStor data deduplication and Symantec NetBackup - the first installed at a primary site in the Town Hall with 20 terabytes total capacity and the second in a backup site connected with a single network fabric. Local data copies are retained for up to a month for on-the-fly restores, while physical tapes are stored periodically offsite.

MIDDLESBROUGH COUNCIL’S partnership with consulting and business services group, Mouchel, will continue with a contract extension to 2016. A small number of services will return to the council from June 2011. Mouchel will continue to provide frontline customer and administration services, council tax and housing benefits administration, finance services, payroll and pensions administration, HR and IT services.

SOUTH RIBBLE BOROUGH COUNCIL and CHORLEY BOROUGH COUNCIL are sharing financial management and reporting capabilities with an £86,000 investment in a software system from Civica. Mike Nuttall, deputy chief executive at South Ribble, said, “We have already established an innovative shared financial services partnership with Chorley Council. Implementing Civica Financials was seen as the next stage of developing our partnership and has helped us capitalise on previous investment in systems by driving cost efficiencies, while harmonising functions including general ledger administration, reporting and purchasing across all the different departments.”

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SALFORD CRIME AND DISORDER REDUCTION PARTNERSHIP is using the NLPG. “What we needed was a map based solution with an incident pinpointing tool that enabled us to quickly and accurately locate an incident, identify possible high quality CCTV coverage and the means to request coverage from any camera owner,” said Paul Coward, corporate GIS consultant at Salford City Council. As part of the project, Salford developed an online service - accessible via the council’s public facing website - which enabled visitors to identify and record CCTV camera locations on a map before adding contact and camera information.

SOLIHULL COUNCIL has increased front line customer value and efficiency with Thinspace desktop thin clients in its contact centres, libraries, walk-in centres and social care. The council chose a virtualised thin client desktop infrastructure over new PCs to allow IT staff greater control through centralised administration. Solihull’s contact centre is pivotal in delivering value to customers as a central single point of contact and information.

SOUTH DERBYSHIRE has formed a partnership with Northgate Public Services.

The contract, worth £22m, is guaranteed to make savings to the council of £2.1m over seven-years. This includes an innovative risk-reward scheme where the cost of introducing new initiatives to transform council services will only be paid out of cashable savings. Northgate will also invest £1.9m in upgrading IT systems and services. Under the deal, 84 council staff members, who have been kept fully informed throughout the process, have been transferred over to UKauthorITy IT in Use

Northgate. As well as protecting jobs at the council, Northgate will bring in 100 jobs into the district as part of the contract over the next 18 months.

SURREY HEATH COUNCIL is deploying an Enterprise Document Management Solution. The solution – which facilitates the management of all records from the desktop across all departments – has been implemented by Winchester based Avanquest ProcessFlows.

TEWKESBURY BOROUGH COUNCIL has consolidated its financial management and reporting systems with a £157,000 investment in software systems from Civica. The programme started in June 2010 and the authority’s new approach will help to reduce reporting cycles and provide a clearer and more regular overview of debtors and creditors, avoiding unnecessary duplications while increasing reporting accuracy.

WEST DORSET DISTRICT COUNCIL, Weymouth & Portland Borough Council and, most recently, Purbeck Council have worked with Capita to merge their revenues and benefits teams. The move brings together the expertise, knowledge and resources of all departments responsible for council tax, business rates and benefits. This enables the authorities to operate a unified software solution and share the costs involved - the councils say that this has secured in excess of £1m worth of savings.

ROCHDALE’S highway inspectors are achieving significant gains in efficiency following the introduction of mobile working. Armed with HTC Touch devices running MAYRISE Highways Mobile software, the team is able to spend more time in the field undertaking more routine safety inspections and investigating reports from members of the public. This is attributed to the adoption of mobile working, resulting in less time travelling between inspection sites and the office and a reduced administrative burden.

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