Local Government IT in Use - September/October 2009 issue

TECHNOLOGY & THE TRANSFORMATION

OF

FRONTLINE SERVICES

LGITU Local Government IT in Use September/October 2009

Use the Force LGITU • September/October 2009

- Why do councils still put citizen data in the post?

A Future Entwined - Health and social care, joined by a common patient.

Tw i t t e r, Tw i t , Tw h o ?

- E m b r a c e i t o r b a n i t , s o c i a l m e d i a i s h e r e t o s t a y.

P L U S : To t a l P l a c e , e - F o r m s a n d D i g i t a l B r i t a i n , O p e n G o v e r n m e n t , G r e e n N e w s , Vi e w f r o m We s t m i n s t e r, E m e r g e n c y S e r v i c e s , N e w P r o d u c t s & C o n t r a c t R o u n d - U p

CASE STUDIES

IT

FEATURES

IT

PRODUCTS

IT

COMMENT

LGITU

Local Government IT in Use September/October 2009

Local Government IT in Use ISSN 1368 2660

On the Cover Why do councils still put citizen data in the post?

See Pages 11-12.

Editor & Publisher

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

Contributing Editor

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

In this issue...

Special Correspondent Michael Cross E: Michael.Cross@infopub.co.uk

Comment

Westminster Correspondent

Robert Merrick

News Update

Advertising

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

Green News Government claims £7m in savings from greening the government ICT estate.

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Design & Layout

Informed Publications Ltd

Printers

DC Graphics

Total Faith If the public sector is serious about Total Place, bold decisions will be needed, says Michael Cross.

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A Future Entwined Health and social care, separate professions joined by a common patient, says Michael Cross.

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e-Forms in a Digital Britain The success of a digital switchover for public services will depend on user engagement with the service interface, finds Helen Olsen.

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Twitter, Twit, Twho?

Love it or loathe it, embrace it or ban it, social media is not going to go away, says Helen Olsen.

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

Special Focus: Open Government President Obama wants a government of transparency, collaboration and participation.

Editorial The Editors welcome editorial information on the use of Information and Communication Technologies in local government and the development of Transformational Local Government.

GCSX Helen Olsen looks at the results of our security survey and asks, why do councils still put citizen data in the post when secure communications exist?

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Blue Light for 999 Centres Robert Merrick finds the health of government’s new fire and rescue centres is failing.

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Please submit relevant material or ideas in the first instance by email to Helen Olsen: helen@infopub.co.uk

Emergency Services Round up of police, fire and rescue news from the front line.

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Contract Round up

To advertise in LGITU call Informed Publications on: 01983 812623 © Informed Publications Ltd, 2009 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.

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.

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Local Government IT In Use

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COMMENT

Technology’s battle lines are drawn

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s the political elite line up to enter electoral battle, sound bites and promises of dramatic action are guaranteed headlines.

All parties are now standing up to be counted, and the counting they are doing is that of how much money can be saved by cutting large government IT programmes. That many of those in question have been visibly failing for years - or are proving highly controversial to the chattering classes - only adds to the evangelical fervour to cut, cut, cut.

There is, in truth, much wrong with many government IT programmes. But simply promising to scrap projects to save money is little more than pre-electoral attention seeking behaviour.

Scrapping the much maligned ContactPoint database being a case in point. Have its detractors forgotten that it is being developed as a direct result of the Bichard Inquiry on child protection? Have they fully costed specifications for a solution to the very real problem – the inability of professionals from different organisations working with our most vulnerable children to contact each other?

ContactPoint as it stands may well not be the perfect solution. But it is better than no solution as children continue to fall, fatally, between the gaps.

As technology is set to play a major role in a UK general election campaign for the very first time, a white paper from the US looks at the opportunity for a new government to use technology to deliver ‘Open Government’. In the wake of President Obama’s overwhelming electoral success – due in large part to masterful use of social media and technology to underpin his campaign – technology has become both an election tool and an issue.

And, whilst few in the sector would not disagree that suppliers have had things pretty good for an awfully long time and should rightly be reigned in, the very real benefits of technology must not be overlooked.

Technology can make operations more efficient, more green, more transparent and more personal.

As technology advances and the global population adopts its own ‘common denominator’ standards, interoperability, engagement and making the most out of what you already have – not just adding the latest proprietary package – must become the order of the day.

Technology is a tool, not a mystical art. It underpins the running of the entire public sector; it is a necessity, not something to be ‘scrapped’ on a whim.

Helen Olsen, Editor

NEWS UPDATE

Opposition parties have IT projects in sights

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he Conservative Party has outlined plans to scrap the national identity card scheme and the ContactPoint database of 11 million children.

The detailed plans are set out in ‘Reverse the Surveillance State’, a policy paper launched last month by shadow justice secretary, Dominic Grieve.

In addition to scrapping two of the current government’s most prominent IT projects, the paper calls for the Information Commissioner to have greater powers, and for a minister and senior civil servant to have responsibility for the personal data held in each government department.

“No-one is suggesting we should not harness IT or surveillance technology to strengthen public protection,” said Grieve.

“But, the government’s approach to databases and surveillance powers is the worst of all worlds, intrusive, ineffective and enormously expensive.”

The Conservatives say they want to restore public trust in the use of personal data by the state. They are also planning to restrict the storage of DNA records of innocent people, after a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights.

Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) would be rolled back, to stop local councils spying on residents.

It also made it far less likely that councils will be allowed to easily share data with other public - and private - bodies, if the Tories triumph next year.

On data-sharing, there will be no repeat of Labour’s attempt - now shelved - to deny MPs a full vote on which bits of information can be swapped, by using regulations.

In future, data may flow between local councils, the police, NHS trusts, the Inland Revenue, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) - and, perhaps, private companies.

But, Mr Grieve’s 19-page document pledged: “Any new powers of data-sharing to be introduced into law by primary legislation, not by order, so that they are properly debated and scrutinised in parliament.”

The policy package clearly had town halls in its sights. It went further than previous reports in setting out how the notorious

Not to be outdone, Liberal Democrat shadow chancellor, Vince Cable, in a paper published by Reform, has also called for the scrapping of several major IT systems including the ID card scheme, ContactPoint, the NHS IT scheme and the proposed super database - claiming it will save more than £10bn over 10 years.

Americans access government via web

overnment Gateway in media spotlight: G E-government is back in the headlines for the wrong reasons following the arrest

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he internet is becoming America’s favourite means of communication with government. More than 81 million Americans logged on to a government website in July, representing 42% of the US internet audience, and most were happy with the experience.

“The internet has evolved into an important channel for Americans to interact with the federal government and its agencies,” said Dan Lackner, comScore senior vice president.

In January president Obama issued a directive stating that ‘Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public’.

Lackner said that federal and state agencies and departments are now “investing more heavily in their web presence, making their sites more citizencentric and easier to interact with”.

“They are rapidly adopting and adapting best practices from the commercial sector and applying them to their own initiatives,” he said.

Customer satisfaction ratings on government sites ranged from the low 70s to 81% for the Department of Education.

Local Government IT In Use

of a 32-year-old man in London last month in connection with an alleged theft involving the Gateway. The Mail on Sunday reported that ‘criminals managed to steal £1m from the taxman by accessing a government computer system and granting themselves rebates’. HMRC declined to comment; however one of the Gateway project’s architects, Alan Mather, dismissed as “remote” the idea that the system was compromised, speculating instead that an identity fraud may be at the root of the issue.

ouncils must crack down on fraud: C Councils could save hundreds of millions of pounds if they dealt more effectively with fraudsters, says the Audit Commission in a new report, ‘Protecting the Public Purse Local Government Fighting Fraud’. It claims that council taxpayers could be losing almost £2m a week to fraudsters claiming a 25% single person discount on their council tax. www.audit-commission.gov.uk

riminal data sharing adviser: Home C secretary, Alan Johnson, has appointed Sunita Mason the government’s independent adviser for criminality information management. Mason will scrutinise and advise the government on how to improve the sharing of information about criminals between key government departments and frontline agencies.

September/October 2009

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GREEN NEWS

NEWS UPDATE

Greening technology saves government £7m Two e-nations government claims to have saved at £7m over the past year by making Tits ITheleastsystems greener.

Speaking at the Greening Government ICT conference in London, cabinet office minister, Angela Smith, said that simple changes such as extending the life of PCs, making double-sided printing the default option and making sure computers are turned off at night have helped cut the carbon footprint of central government computers by 12,000 tonnes – equivalent to taking 5,000 cars off the road.

Said Smith, “Information technology is one of the hidden causes of climate change – worldwide, computers are responsible for the same amount of carbon emissions as the airline industry, but few people are taking action to improve the situation.”

Britain took the lead last year by introducing measures to tackle the huge financial and environmental cost of ICT. Smith says that “countries around the world are now looking to us for advice on how to follow our lead”.

ICT is responsible for up to 20% of carbon emissions generated by government offices. Departments were asked to take 18 key steps including turning off all machines at night, extending the lifecycle of computers, reusing as much IT equipment as possible and increasing server efficiency.

First year success stories include: • The Department for International Development donating old equipment to charities in developing countries; • The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) saving £2.35m by replacing 9,500 computers and 2,500 printers every five years rather than every three; • The Home Office saving £2.4m a year by removing unused IT equipment and improving efficiency; • The Department for Work and Pensions will save 200 million sheets of paper a year by cutting down the number of printers in the department and changing default settings to double-sided printing.

Will Day, chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), said he was looking forward to seeing levels of ambitions raised further following the success of this first year: “While ICT can provide solutions to cut energy use and emissions, the SDC’s work on sustainable development in government found that government electricity use is still rising, and the proliferation of computers, laptops, chargers and the air conditioning of server rooms is likely to be behind much of this.

“So greening the government’s ICT is an urgent priority, which can save money as well as minimising energy use and www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk emissions.”

heffield surveys energy use: Sheffield reen focus: Senior Ovum analyst, S G City Council is planning to reduce its Warren Wilson, says that the ICT carbon footprint by a further one million industry must focus on the three distinct tonnes a year thanks to a new computer programme, Surveyor, that will monitor and save power on all council computers, both desktops and laptops. Through saving files and ‘powering down’ idle IT equipment in this way the council could also save £100,000 on its energy bill.

Sheffield is also recycling IT equipment under its new green plans. Paul Green, director of information services at the council, said, “This scheme is a very positive start and ICT’s contribution to enabling carbon reduction will continue to be a prominent theme in our future IS strategy.”

and critical roles technology has to play in addressing climate change: energy efficiency; substitution of low-carbon technologies for traditional, high-carbon functions (eg virtual meetings); and using ICT to monitor, measure, analyse and minimise the impact of manufacturing, buildings, vehicle fleets and operations that account for the majority of energy consumption and carbon emissions.

o choice but green: Organisations will N soon have no choice but to comply with green IT principles because of

market forces, according to a BCS debate.

Smart IT organisations must include lowcost software solutions in long-term strategic plans in order to survive in a marketplace which is moving towards cloud computing and commoditisation of computer resources. www.bcs.org/video Green desktops: 93% of IT professionals say that desktop power management has the potential to reduce overall IT costs. In fact, for IT professionals who manage computer power, desktop management has surpassed data centre power management in importance, finds a www.kace.com survey by Kace.

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Local Government IT In Use

ne fifth of web users now pay their O council tax and other council bills online, finds Oxford Internet Surveys’ latest snapshot of online Britain.

The Internet in Britain 2009 contains a mixture of good and bad news for ministers looking back at a decade of efforts to promote e-government.

For the first time since the survey launched in 2003, the proportion of web users who have gone online to government at least once has exceeded 50% - it is now 59%, up from 46% in 2007. The survey comments that the increase was ‘considerable’ across all interactions measured. Interestingly, users looked for information about local council services (35%) and central government services (33%) more than they looked for information on schools and education (27%).

However the institute’s Helen Margetts points out that the percentage of internet users interacting with e-government remains lower than for e-commerce or general information-seeking. Likewise, the figures do not suggest any internet-fuelled revival of interest in politics. “In general, UK figures contrast with the US, particularly with soaring online participation in Obama’s highly innovative use of the internet.”

The report also shows the digital inclusion gap to be as wide as ever. Between 2007 and 2009, the percentage of people with higher educational qualifications using the internet increased from 90 to 93% - but the percentage of users among those with only elementary education fell from 55% to 49%.

Meanwhile, disability remains a strong cause of digital exclusion, despite the proportion of people with a disability using the internet rising from 36% to 41%. As for use, the largest increase since 2007 was in looking for news - 75%, up from 69%.

Women were more likely than men to look for health information (73% to 63%). www.oii.ox.ac.uk/microsites/oxis

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ector dependent on Microsoft: Most PCs in local government are operating in a Microsoft environment, finds new research.

Of the council staff surveyed, all but two percent said that their PC used Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Microsoft’s dominance on the council desktop was also evident when respondents were asked which software they used for word processing - with 95% stating Microsoft Word. It also found that around two-thirds (64%) of those surveyed believe that their organisation must increase its use of open source. ‘Open or closed?’ a report from Public Sector Forums, states that ‘aside from web and IT teams, the majority of local government staff are currently unlikely to interact knowingly with open source in the workplace’. http://ukgovoss.org

NEWS UPDATE

Basic lack of information

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ouncils are basing important decisions on unreliable information, finds the Audit Commission.

It’s report ‘Is there something I should know?’ finds councillors complaining that they receive lengthy reports that don’t contain the information they need. Indeed, less than five percent of councils have ‘excellent’ quality data and 65% face ‘problems’ sharing data externally.

However, with tough financial times ahead, councils know they need to act now to improve the quality of their data: nine out of 10 think good quality information is a top priority.

Steve Bundred, Audit Commission chief executive, says that giving decision makers the information they need will help councils make savings while improving services. “This is all the more critical in recessionary times and some solutions have little or no extra cost.”

But the watchdog fails to highlight technology as a potential answer to the problem of lack of solid evidence to inform decision making.

SAS head of government affairs, David Waltho, warns that councils will not be able to achieve many of the commission’s suggestions without focusing first on the ‘Information’ inherent in their ‘Information Technology’ spend.

Meanwhile, Communities and Local Government also published ‘Effective Partnership Data Management’ (EPDM) over the summer. The EPDM project aims to develop strategies and approaches to facilitate data sharing across Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) and demonstrate the ‘tangible benefits’ from doing so.

An overriding, and laudable, aim of the project is to significantly improve service delivery and outcomes across an LSP. The idea is to proactively target service need

using business analytics to identify people in ‘intervention campaigns’.

Spotting, and tackling, benefit fraud is also a key priority. The report estimates savings of more than £1m in housing benefit overpayments and fraud from trialling EPDM in just five LSPs. Within the LSPs EPDM data hubs will enable records held in partner databases to be linked and analysed via ‘controlled searching’. The idea is that improved data sharing can support LSPs in four key areas: strategic management, performance management, operational delivery and citizen engagement.

Whilst the legality of data sharing in this way remains to be clarified the report found a broad and deep consensus across central, regional and local government that improved data sharing is at the heart of transforming government services. In line with the ‘Total Place’ pilots there is much to see of advantage in this approach – using information to inform decision making and cost effective service delivery.

But there is much work to do to cross the cultural and legal barriers in doing so.

According to Waltho the report “addresses

some key gaps in the otherwise excellent Audit Commission report, which deliberately chose to ignore the capacity and capability challenges in IT, and in particular business analytics, that its research uncovered.

“In contrast CLG highlights the vital role improved data quality, data integration and predictive analytics technologies can play in reducing the costs, delay and inaccuracy involved in the current, largely ‘manual’ approaches to extracting, analysing, reporting and disseminating data from multiple operational systems. “ Predictive analytics says Waltho, is “critical to helping local government transform out of reactive ‘fail and fix’ and into proactive ‘predict and prevent’”. www.communities.gov.uk www.audit-commission.gov.uk

taying connected: In the midst of recession, people are four times more S likely to cut out holidays or eating out than

to cancel their broadband connection. And canny consumers are taking advantage of the recession to use their communications services more but pay less for them, according to Ofcom’s sixth Communications Market Report into the £52bn TV, radio, broadband, telecoms and mobile industries. www.ofcom.org.uk

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apping our coastal heritage: New Forest National Park Authority is using SeaZone HydroSpatial detailed marine mapping aerial photographs, many dating back over 90 years, to undertake an archaeological assessment of its coastline in response to changing sea levels. Part of a nationwide programme of Rapid Coastal Zone Assessment Surveys supported by English Heritage, the study will help with the development of long term coastal management plans by identifying archaeological and historic sites, and protecting them where possible or making provision for their recording where protection may not be possible.

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OPINION: TOTAL PLACE

Total Faith If the public sector is serious about Total Place, bold decisions will be needed, says Michael Cross.

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et’s get the important bit out of the way first. To anyone who cares about localism, the Total Place initiative is welcome - and extraordinarily exciting, with it. What is there not to like about putting local government in the driving seat of the next phase of reform, across the entire public sector.

signs on public lavatories saying ‘Closed

by Denis Healey’s spending cuts’?

Whatever political colour of chancellor is wielding the IMF axe this time round is going to be a figure of national opprobrium - however much we tell pollsters that we want government spending to fall now.

To borrow the words of the New Local Government Network, Sir Michael Bichard’s scheme looks like a localist’s dream come true.

The trouble of course is that if we were serious about Total Place for its own merits, rather than as a means to cut spending, we should have created it in the boom years. When there was cash around for new infrastructure investments, and when workforce morale was running at (believe it or not) an historic high.

As always, there are reservations. I shall raise them not to cast doubt on the value of the initiative, but to try and get them onto the agenda throughout what, politically, looks like being a very interesting year. These reservations also lay the groundwork for a radical policy proposal, which I shall come to at the end.

The first reservation is about local and democratic accountability. Central government is not currently designed to ‘think place’, so vertical and siloed are its departments. Carving up a central government agency’s operations inside geographical boundaries will be nothing more than a cosmetic exercise unless that central agency can learn to let go of the way its services work on the front line.

All our experience of front-office shared services schemes involving benefits, criminal justice and the NHS is that this is an extraordinarily difficult cultural change. To make it will require leadership from the top, and very thick skins when the ‘postcode lottery’ stories start flying about.

The second is the question of timing.

Whether or not we accept the IoD’s assertion that the UK is facing a fiscal crisis of historic proportions, there is no doubt that Total Place will forever be labelled the government’s reaction to the IMF’s forecast that government borrowing will reach 13.3% of GDP by 2010.

Bichard himself has said “The impact of the economic downturn means all of the public sector needs to find radical new solutions to not only deliver better value for money, but also better local services more tailored to local needs.”

To those of us who lived through the mid 1970s, this is worrying. Remember those 5

September/October 2009

The answer of course is that it took a crisis to get Whitehall thinking along these lines, but that doesn’t help us now.

The third reservation, one that will be closest to LGITU readers’ hearts, is whether the programme as a whole, and the pilot projects that so far comprise it, is paying enough regard to the information systems that will be key to making it work.

My suspicion is not; certainly if the prospectuses of the 11 pilot projects are anything to go by.

Take Kent, which says it has identified three projects which will delve deeper into specific local issues in order to identify new ways of tackling them.

They are Gateway multi-channel - This strategy was based on the exploration and modernisation of the ‘face to face’ customer service channel, and has more recently extended to include service improvements for telephone and web channel access spanning the wider public sector and the full range of public services. It builds on previous operational development and investment made by Kent County Council with district and borough council partners.

Single asset management strategy - This will test the scope for the reduction of duplication of back-office transactional activity and the simplification and convergence of business processes generating a reduced requirement for property and other physical assets. (Exact parameters still to be specified, but suggestions include local government, health, police, fire, government Local Government IT In Use

departments and agencies, churches/ faiths and voluntary sector.)

Margate Task Force - A number of key local partners have come together with a commitment to radically different approaches to joint work in two of the most deprived wards. Co-located resources will be pooled in a single management ‘task force’. Key principles include an ‘invest to save’ approach focused on shared intelligence, prevention, better use of resources and customised services.

All of these depend massively on information systems, yet the project documentation, no doubt from the sincere desire not to be seen as an ‘IT project’, glosses over this aspect.

The same goes for Birmingham, another pilot authority with the scale and the political will to really make Total Place happen.

And here’s the real problem. Even if Kent and other authorities with commitments to radical change make a go of the Total Place pilots, there is no guarantee that others will follow.

In fact, with the usual perversity of local politics, Kent and Birmingham’s very success may act as a disincentive. After all, most local authorities are not Kent or Birmingham.

The solution? Take a leaf from the Apollo space programme in the 1960s. The moon mission depended on a massive new multi-stage rocket, the Saturn V. The conventional approach creating the new booster would have been to test every single component and stage in preparatory missions, then bring it all together when faults had been ironed out.

But NASA realised that no amount of testing and piloting could ensure the rocket was fail-safe in time to meet John F Kennedy’s target of a man on the moon by 1970. Instead, it opted for the risky ‘all-up’ test – building a complete rocket and launching it.

In the case of the Saturn V, it worked, and history was made. My feeling is, if we are serious about Total Place, we must be equally bold.

NEWS UPDATE

Implementing Digital Britain

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ollowing a tediously lengthy reshuffling of the ministerial and digital responsibility pack, August saw both Stephen Timms appointed minister in charge of Digital Britain and publication of the Digital Britain Implementation Plan.

Perhaps wisely, in light of an imminent general election, the plan does not set out timing around every item of the programme - some actions are due for completion by the end of 2009, some though stretch to ‘2012 or beyond’. A number of the proposals require legislation and the implementation plan proposes taking these forward in the Digital Economy Bill ‘subject to parliamentary time’ this autumn.

Of particular interest are two of the plan’s projects: digital inclusion and digital government.

Digital government, led by John Suffolk, promises ‘establishment of G-Cloud’ and identifies the Cabinet Office’s Sarah Fogden as leading on the digital switchover of public services in 2012 inviting every government department ‘to identify at least two such services’ to lead the process.

A ‘double lock’ will also be given to the government CIO for sign off on IT procurement and accountability. And there are firm plans for the Office of Public Sector Information and the Office of Fair Trading to ‘review progress with Ordnance Survey’s strategy’ on a regular basis.’

On the digital inclusion front, Martha Lane Fox, champion for digital inclusion, is to review existing activities to help six million socially and digitally excluded people get online and drive a programme of activity to ensure that all have the motivation, opportunity, and capability to benefit from using the internet. Ask Consumer Expert Group is to report on specific issues encountered by the disabled and Digital Participation is to be driven with £23m from the Universal Service provision.

Digital Britain remains a joint programme led by BIS and the department for culture, www.culture.gov.uk media and sport.

ICO’s cause for concern

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he Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ordered Coventry City and Ealing councils to reveal statistics relating to the numbers of children taken into care, adopted or placed on a special guardianship or residency order.

A request was made to councils across England for the same statistical information on children. Despite advice from the ICO, Coventry and Ealing refused to release the information, maintaining that the material was personal data. Coventry also maintained that the information had been provided to it in confidence.

David Smith, the deputy information commissioner, said, “These are common sense rulings. They highlight the fact that public authorities cannot refuse to release properly anonymised statistical information just because the statistics come from personal information.”

The notices follow a continuing stream of data breaches and data losses across the public sector. Recent recipients of the ICO’s wrath include the London Borough of Sutton (details of children and individuals in social care lost on two unencrypted laptops and a package of documents), Wigan (theft of laptop with details on most of the council’s school children), Sandwell (loss of a memory stick containing sensitive personal information relating to four families), Neath Port Talbot (memory stick with children’s data lost), Highland Council (theft of two laptop computers containing the personal details of approximately 1,400 individuals, including www.ico.gov.uk medical information).

hieves have taken digital inclusion into own hands by breaking into the office of TDigital Inclusion and stealing a number of computers. Digital champion, Martha Lane Fox broke the news on Twitter: ‘O bloody hell the #digitalinclusion office has been broken into and all computers taken :((‘

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aling council’s IT system was brought to its knees in May after a PC was infected with the Conficker D virus via a USB stick –costing over £0.5m in recovery work and lost income while systems were down.

Knowsley joins up ublic health consultant, Liz PGaulton, has taken

up the new post of service director family support and children’s health in Knowsley. The trailblazing joint Knowsley Council and NHS Knowsley appointment brings together responsibilities for both health and local authority services for the support of families and children and young people.

“The role recognises that effective support needs to cross organisational boundaries,” said Gaulton. “It’s an important move towards greater integration in the strategic planning, commissioning and delivery of services, with emphasis on enhanced support to children and families.”

Knowsley was one of the first boroughs to make ‘director of public health’ a joint NHS-local authority appointment.

Intellect Socitm Solace IT Excellence Awards The 2009 finalists, in what has been a strong field, have been unveiled for this year’s Local Government IT Excellence Awards.

Winners will be announced later this month at the Socitm conference in Edinburgh.

This year the awards have been broken down into three categories: Sustainable ICT, Customer Access, and Service Transformation.

The finalists are: • Hampshire County Council • Flintshire County Council • London Borough of Hackney • Cheshire West & Chester • Crawley Borough Council

HEALTH & SOCIAL CARE

A Future Entwined Health and social care, separate professions joined by a common patient, says Michael Cross.

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he Conservative Party has nailed its colours so firmly to the cause of attacking public sector IT that it comes as a shock to discover in its policy documents a proposal to create major new information systems. In August, a policy statement from the party said that a Conservative government would ‘Coordinate IT strategies between health and social care so that the patient (sic) can benefit from a joined up approach to care across the two sectors.’

The statement appears as the last of seven ‘policy commitments’ made in response to an independent review of NHS IT. Predictably, most of the commitments deal with the woes of the National Programme for IT in the NHS in England: they promise among other things to ‘dismantle’ the programme’s central infrastructure and to investigate the use of web-based personal health records.

However the independent review - carried out over a year by an expert panel under Dr Glyn Hayes, former chair of the British Computer Society’s health informatics forum - had a much wider remit. Unlike the NHS national programme, whose architects largely ignored social care, the review recognises that a large and growing component of health care is provided outside NHS institutions, by people who are not NHS employees.

The review paints a bleak picture of the IT that currently supports such arrangements.

Disconnection begins at the top. The review points out that the transfer of national policy responsibilities for children’s social care from the Department of Health to the Department for Children, Schools and Families has led to ‘significant differences in the national policy frameworks’ through which local authorities have had to develop systems to support adult and children’s social care.

For adults, this means the (Department of Health sponsored) Common Assessment Framework and Whole Systems Demonstrator sites to improve services for clients with long-term conditions.

For children’s social care, the ‘Every Child Matters’ strategy attempts to integrate a much wider range of services, supported by the development of three separate information systems: • ContactPoint (which the shadow justice minister, Dominic Grieve, has pledged to scrap as part of a programme to ‘reverse

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the rise of the surveillance state’); the • Common Assessment Framework supported by the eCaf IT system; and the • Integrated Children’s System.

The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services told the Hayes review of a ‘lack of clarity of leadership’ in information strategy.

Social care has no equivalent to the chief information officer for health, for example.

Attempts to integrate electronic records across health and social care in England go back to the South Staffordshire ERDIP project in the late 1990s as well as the Epic EC-sponsored programme (for which much pioneering work on systems was carried out in Northern Ireland’s system of combined health and social care trusts).

Such initiatives revealed several levels of obstacles to integration, from differences in terminology to differences in information governance. The evaluation of ERDIP, for example, found that ‘In social care information is available unless instructed not to, whilst in health the opposite applies’.

Witnesses to the Hayes review, including the LGA, agreed that this state of affairs cannot continue. And despite the current political panic about security, there was strong support for more sharing of information. In its evidence, the LGA pointed out: ‘Concerns about misuse or loss of personal information can easily obscure the benefits to both individuals and local communities that can flow from proportionate and careful sharing of information between health and social care.’

So, assuming this is what is meant by the Conservative commitment to coordinated IT strategies between health and social care, where do we go from here? Good ideas abound, including: • Mobile technologies for inputting data and accessing records. The London Borough of Greenwich’s Digital Pen project may show the way.

• Client-held records, such as those piloted by the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services.

However, as countless local pilots have shown, cultural tensions still run high. The British Medical Association told the Hayes review: ‘Social care would need to reach agreed standards of competence [in standards of record keeping] prior to greater sharing.’

Local Government IT In Use

The review also points to the sheer complexity of the matrix of organisations involved - 150 local authorities with social services responsibilities, 239 NHS trusts, three central government departments - as an obstacle.

What it does say is that demographic change, increasingly personalised forms of care and the rising tide of long term conditions such as dementia will require the NHS and social care to work together more closely. ‘Information sharing will need to become the life blood of this relationship.’

The review says it should be given higher priority in the information strategies of both sectors.

It urges the creation of a high level mechanism through which the Department of Health and the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the NHS Management Board share their plans and strategies for information systems ‘so that at the very least there is a shared understanding of each other’s programmes’ and opportunities to create consistency for example the essential core data items to be held within a personal health record.

It also calls for stronger leadership from the Department of Health to build on the commitment of local government by strengthening arrangements for information governance. ‘Mandatory guidance would enable the development of nationally consistent data standards and definitions across all 150 councils with adult social care responsibilities.’

Finally, information-sharing between health and social care should be a mainstream part of whatever strategy is adopted for the future of the NHS national programme. This recommendation is presumably the inspiration for the paragraph about social care in the Conservatives’ policy statement.

But there is another recommendation that will perhaps be even more widely welcomed in the local government IT community. While highly critical of many of the decisions taken by the NHS national programme, the Hayes review is unequivocal about the need for some central body to accredit systems, support research - and to advise on policy.

‘Currently policy makers do not realise that there are information requirements to almost all they do, and an information strategy must form part of every policy decision.’

E-FORMS

e-Forms in a Digital Britain Success of a digital switchover for public service will depend on user engagement with the service interface, says Helen Olsen.

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s the ‘Digital Switchover of Public Services Programme in 2012’ kicks off, interest in the latest generation of intelligent e-forms looks set to rise.

days and that the current economic conditions “will impact on any plans that departments may have for e-forms, whether new or existing initiatives“.

In essence, the switchover strategy aims to ensure that public service delivery here in the UK both keeps pace with users’ expectations of new technology and ensures that the public sector is ‘efficient and smart’ in procuring and using ICT systems.

Indeed, cost savings in the face of inevitable cuts – whichever political hue they are from – will be fundamental to public service delivery for the foreseeable future and will inevitably influence the direction of developments. Solutions, therefore, that remove layers of complexity and process – and therefore cost - will undoubtedly find favour.

Work to move all public service content from departmental or service specific websites to Businesslink.gov.uk and Directgov has been under way for some time. And now Sarah Fogden, the Cabinet’ Office’s lead on the digital switchover programme, is inviting every government department to identify at least two services to trail blaze the digital switchover process.

The Cabinet Office is tasked with analysing public sector progress on digital channels to date and developing a roadmap. The ‘simple’ brief is to outline how and to whom digital services will be designed, targeted and implemented, in a multi-channel context which addresses digital inclusion.

A list of potential demonstrator pilots for the digital switchover services is currently being put forward by departments. Criteria state that these must be designed for ‘ease of use’, be wide ranging in their application and ‘improve the customer experience’ – thus encouraging a shift to online channels.

These projects must also be easily replicable by other parts of government, must demonstrate their contribution to streamlining processes and efficiency, and must be available via one of the three ‘supersites’: Directgov, Businesslink.gov.uk or NHS Choices.

Key to the success of engaging those who are digitally able but not yet using online services, plus those currently excluded from the digital world, will be use of widely available technology to deliver engaging, intuitive and trustworthy services.

The latest generation of e-forms technology, on the face of it, look like useful tools for this process.

Bob Kamall, a senior policy advisor, public service reform, at the Cabinet Office says that e-forms could play a key part in delivering on the Digital Britain promise to switch to digital channels from 2012.

However, he is keen to point out that the switchover programme is still in its early

Whoever leads the next government despite the current political posturing over ‘big government IT projects’ - will be hard pushed to denounce this aspiration to switch over to more efficient and friendly online service delivery. Names and policies may well change, but the stark truth is that the public sector must deliver more with less, and common sense dictates that harnessing the ubiquitous technologies of today to deliver services and engage with the population is a necessity.

This is where LGITU’s interest in e-forms rises to the fore. As the first step to a wider poll supported by UKauthorITy.com and Adobe, LGITU conducted short interviews across a number of central government departments.

A key message coming back from these interviews is the view that e-forms ‘was done’ in the e-gov programme. And many views on the technology are stuck in that era. However, those using the latest technology were keen to highlight just how far the technology and its capabilities had moved on since then.

As Kamall says, “Whilst it was true that the 2005 targets got information about services online, there was not a lot of end-to-end service transformation nor integration into back-office systems.”

Online forms tended, he says, to be online electronic copies of existing paper based forms that often required the user to print them out, complete them offline and post back to the relevant service provider.

In contrast, today’s intelligent forms can pull ‘live’ information from relevant sources as needed, no matter the location of the data.

They can ensure security, validate themselves as citizen or business enters their information or service request and, importantly, quickly link into back end systems to record the transaction – inbuilt Local Government IT In Use

workflow can even start the chain reaction to service fulfilment.

But such end-to-end processes bring their own dilemmas. One respondent said that the main barriers to e-form use were legal issues around the need for ‘wet’ signature, identification of the sender, and perhaps most importantly, culture: “Authorities are used to working in a certain way in the paper world and want to translate it wholesale into the electronic world.”

Another added that “the public sector tendency to try to cover every conceivable eventuality in online services delivery” would be a major barrier: “This leads to public sector screens often being complicated with guidance... with notes regarding exceptions/exclusions.”

This perceived requirement for complexity has long been part of the public sector – as any citizen or business that has ever tried to fill out official forms would agree.

However, there are shining beacons of excellence in the sector. The Planning Portal was mentioned by a number of interviewees as an e-forms success story coming out of the e-gov era.

Indeed, since last April it has been possible to submit an electronic application to any authority in England and Wales using a standard national online form, 1App, via the Planning Portal – replacing hundreds of forms unique to individual authorities. In July this year there were a record 15,828 planning applications submitted online.

And BIS is set to help local authorities meet new legal obligations by launching ELMS (Electronic Licence Management System) by the end of this year, when EEA member states will be required to implement the EU Services Directive. An e-form development, ELMS will be the authority facing side of the UK point of single contact which will enable service businesses in the UK or other EEA countries – via the Businesslink.gov.uk website – to quickly get ready to operate here.

The ability of e-forms to provide consistent access to services via third parties and put a common front on joint working such as this is invaluable.

So, can this latest generation of e-forms technology help deliver the next generation of online government to citizen and government to business services?

LGITU’s research is ongoing. To access our quick poll visit: http://lgitu.co.uk/eForms September/October 2009

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SOCIAL MEDIA

Twitter, Twit Twho?

Love it or loathe it, embrace it or ban it, social media is not going to go away, says Helen Olsen.

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ans in Portsmouth and Aberdeen on council workers’ access to Facebook have put social media in the spotlight.

As SOCITM, the society of IT managers, launched a survey into use of social networks Portsmouth announced its ban on Facebook after finding that staff spent an average 400 hours on the site every month. The ban will also see the Bebo, Twitter and eBay sites blocked - YouTube had been banned previously.

Policy previously had been amended in July to facilitate work life balance and allow things like internet banking in staff’s own time, but internet access to social networking sites for non-business use will now be restricted.

And in September, councillors at Aberdeen City Council rejected proposals to allow members and staff more access to internet sites, including Facebook, Bebo and Twitter, during work hours. Aberdeen already restricts access to a number of types of website at all times, including gambling, social networking and illegal sites. Access to other sites, including news services, is partially restricted.

Jon Mulligan, managing director of OfficeMetrics, said, “This is absolutely ridiculous. Yes, it’s important to ensure that employees are optimising their time at work – but implementing an outright ban on websites such as Facebook is a very extreme measure that will almost definitely be detrimental to staff morale.”

Mulligan claims that implementing a

ommunity groups find web voice: C The BeVocal.org.uk site went live in July showcasing the pioneering work of

Birmingham’s social media community.

Focusing on ‘how social media is being used for social good in Birmingham and using the internet to turn public data into something useful’, the site is supported by Digital Birmingham’s Open City project.

Pictured are Raj Rattu, managing director of community consultancy; John Heaven, project officer, Digital Birmingham; and Nick Booth, social media consultant and founder of BeVocal.

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blanket ban on social networking sites has been proven to have a negative effect on organisational productivity – as many workers use them to gain valuable industry or competitor information, or even to network with contacts and colleagues.

Richard Steel, former Newham CIO and Socitm past president, is also against banning the use of social media: “Not because I don’t think that there is potential for enormous time wastage, but because I think it’s a management and organisational maturity issue in exactly the same way that chatting at the water fountain, gazing out of the window or reading printed media at one’s desk are.

“As organisations increasingly adopt new ways of working - from home, itinerantly, during unconventional times etc - the fixation with how people manage their workload becomes increasingly irrelevant,” argues Steel. “Performance assessment has to be based on outcomes, rather than hours spent at a desk or logged into the business system.”

However, the greater danger, says Steel, is from reputational damage: ”It is very easy to publish copyright information, libel, reveal confidential information or just make your organisation look plain silly.”

All this should be covered, says Steel, in terms and conditions of use. However, he adds that flexibility is important along with recognition that many employees work longer hours than ‘contractually’ required.

Meanwhile, Socitm Insight is asking local authority IT managers for their views on the use of social media within local authorities and the degree to which it poses security threats, drains bandwidth, or causes other problems to councils’ IT systems and infrastructure.

Social media enthusiasts in local government have sometimes blamed ‘IT’ for blocking access to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other websites they have come to regard as essential to their work, especially for peer networking, communications, customer insight and community engagement. Socitm wants to explore whether these blocking policies come from IT or elsewhere in the council.

It also wants to look at how councils are using social media to improve efficiency and effectiveness, engage with citizens and encourage virtual communities.

Indeed, like many councils, Aberdeen is considering creating a Facebook page.

Local Government IT In Use

Social networking websites such as Facebook, Linkedin and the micro blogging website, Twitter, are playing an increasingly important role both socially and in business. Japanese bank Nomura, for example, used Facebook to find and hire about 60 percent of Lehman Brothers’ former graduate trainees after its collapse.

Martin Warner, of business social networking site, Talkbiznow.com, says that this is no surprise, “Social networking websites have quickly become essential tools in business and this is just the beginning.”

However, a business case put together recently by a Scottish library is interesting, worryingly, for its singular lack of any figures or facts. Little, in fact to prove the value of adopting the proposal other than ‘well everyone else is doing it, it is what the public expects’.

That may well be, but social media proponents should not be above justifying investment - whether money or time - in terms of payback and demonstrable increased value.

Social networking is ubiquitous and unstoppable. The public sector does indeed need to explore the ways in which social media can enable it to engage with citizens and help transform service delivery. But that is no excuse for ignoring the business case and the very real concerns of its use within the organisation.

As the media industry is finding out, the business model ‘everyone is doing it, use all you want, content is free’ is not sustainable. ix in ten (63%) IT administrators are S concerned that employees share too much information on their social network

profile, putting corporate infrastructures at risk. Sophos’ research reveals that a quarter of respondents have been victims of malware, phishing or hacking through websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

ocial networks will be used to track S swine flu. Messages left on sites could help researchers track swine flu outbreaks and other epidemics more rapidly than current techniques allow, say researchers from City University London. The data will allow officials to identify hot spots and provide early warning information.

Researchers point out that using data from GP spotter practices fails to account for people who do not access health services.

SPECIAL FOCUS: OPEN GOVERNMENT

Open Government President Obama wants a government of transparency, collaboration and participation.

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he Open Government mission extends far beyond technology, but the underlying ethos provides an opportunity for examining how technology can empower individuals as they interact with the institutions of government - in the US or anywhere in the modern, first world.

President Obama intends to use Open Government to “strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government”.

Traditionally, ICT has been seen as an enabler for delivering effective, efficient public services. More recently it is also being seen as a tool for delivering citizencentric, eco-friendly services. Hovering in the wings are the issues of participation, democracy and transparency – for all of which technology has enormous potential to help deliver political aspirations. Yet, despite the much hyped benefits of technology many of these goals have yet to be achieved on a mass populous basis.

Why? For Open Government to be realised, all agree that technology needs to be more user-centric than system-centric; but the institutional and historical character of government is not conducive to this. For over ten years the UK government has been attempting to ‘join up’ public service delivery. The technology most certainly exists to do so, but the silo mentality of the many parts to join is a consistent block.

A new White Paper from Adobe looks at the Obama administration’s historic opportunity to use technology to revitalise the operations of government. Open Government, it argues, can be unlocked by technologies ‘evolving before our eyes’.

To deliver Open Government, technology must firstly be user-centric - such that it supports the people who need or deliver public services, rather than simply enforcing the rules and processes that guide them. Empowering individuals, it argues, is key to strengthening democracy.

And technology is the key to empowering people.

This can be done by creating transparency through the use of technologies already broadly in use by individuals, by inducing participation through intuitive interactions, and by enabling collaboration through independent, dynamic technology use.

In this charge for open government the US administration is wrestling with a

conundrum familiar to us here in the UK: open access to information about policies, decisions, programmes and funding enables government to learn and evolve and engenders trust; but openness does not relieve the government of its obligation to robustly protect sensitive, personal and classified information.

A cultural shift is therefore required where technology is seen as the enabler, the means to the end rather than the end itself.

IT systems cannot deliver full transparency, but the employees who run them can.

Government can take advantage of ubiquitous technologies in order to enable public transparency. It can harness technologies that the public already uses, inside and outside of government, to reduce the burden on agencies and increase the value of transparency. Since the advent of the web an entire infrastructure has evolved to enable public access to information: HTML, Adobe PDF and Adobe Flash technology.

Depending on technologies that are neither broadly available nor adopted makes an implicit decision to restrict access to public services to those only with the appropriate access or skill. In Digital Britain, the gap between the digital haves and the digital have nots is closing but slowly. We have a duty to provide access to services at the lowest common denominator to make this bridge as easy as possible to cross.

From rigorous standards for clarity of language through to the use of video, text to speech and voice recognition, the technology exists across a broad base to connect with citizens as individuals. In looking to deliver transparency in open government, the administration must ask itself: Can the public use it? Can the public find it? And, most importantly, can the public trust it?

Meanwhile, knowledge-worker and publishing tools have evolved to a level of sophistication and security that public servants can become the agents of transparency and engagement. Feedback can be solicited and captured across channels from face to face or telephone to blogging, YouTube and Twitter, with learning incorporated and acted on in a constructive and continuous process.

Security, however, will continue to be a thorny issue. Prevailing security models aim to keep sensitive data safe inside the firewall, but this restricts transparency. A Local Government IT In Use

model incorporating encryption or other tools to allow government to keep data private when needed, even when it travels beyond its control, is therefore essential to deliver open and engaging government.

Engagement is something that governments around the world struggle with as they urge citizens to participate in democracy. Whether it be the world of politics or fast moving consumer goods, one fundamental rule should be repeated: people, citizen and civil servant alike, will participate only when an experience is intuitive and engaging.

An excellent example is the London Borough of Southwark, which used open source development technologies and PDF to make housing benefits claims processes more intuitive for staff and claimant. It delivered substantial results: reducing processing time from 36 days to several hours and staff training time for ‘complex’ cases down from two years to two days.

Engaging, intuitive technology will also foster innovation and collaborative working across government. It is critical, however, that this is built on the infrastructure already available. Low-cost, easy-to-use devices have created a growing and heterogeneous set of new technology users – some of which are users of government services, others are delivering those services. This low-cost, pervasively available infrastructure is enabling new service-delivery models and removing barriers for public service and employee productivity.

Bottom-up innovation from such users contrasts vividly with the stereotype of government bureaucracy and unwieldy technology megaprojects designed, or, too often poorly designed, for entire departments. But in collaborative environments, successes can be copied and failures abandoned at much lower cost.

A change that fosters a cultural climate and empowers government workers is required to take responsibility through technology for delivering efficient services, to engage with citizens and enable all to participate in the democratic process.

To request a copy of the white paper, ‘An opportunity for US Government - Enabling open government through technology’, please call 0208 606 1167 or email: Adobe@lgitu.co.uk September/October 2009

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DATA SECURITY

Connecting the Public Sector Why, asks Helen Olsen, do local authorities still put sensitive citizen data in the post?

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s a citizen it is astonishing to learn that, despite almost two years of media headlines covering the most basic and unbelievable ‘accidental’ data losses, local authorities up and down the country still consign sensitive citizen data to the vagaries of Royal Mail - or worse to, unsecured laptops and removable media.

From the clutch of stories on the news pages of this issue of LGITU, the Information Commissioner is no less exasperated. Four councils have had their knuckles rapped in the last couple of months alone.

LGITU’s summer research looked at who was sharing what, and with whom, across frontline services when it came to citizen data. With support from Government Connect and our sister online news services, UKauthorITy.com and Tomorrow’s Town Hall, LGITU conducted two surveys: one in-depth questionnaire and one quick poll among those not participating in the indepth exercise. Both surveys had over one hundred respondents from the breadth of local authority types and from across the country, with a few police, fire and health organisations also participating.

Unsurprisingly, over 98% of these organisations dealt with citizen data - those that did not were in GIS, land charges or land & property gazetteer departments.

Almost eight in ten (79%) shared this information with other local authorities or other parts of the public sector.

What is the corporate attitude to sharing citizen data?

The LGA published a set of Data Handling Guidelines for Local Government last November. These were developed in partnership with Socitm, and endorsed by Solace and the IDeA, in a bid to stem the flow of data loss from the public sector and foster a culture of data protection.

It was surprising therefore to learn that not all councils had an ‘Information Charter’ outlining how citizen data is handled – just 40% said their council did. Researchers wondered at first whether this could be simply lack of awareness on the front line, but 23% were quite sure that there was no charter in place – in direct contradiction of the Data Handling Guidelines. The remainder, nearly four in ten, were unsure.

Over nine in ten (93%) however were sure that all personal information was kept 11

September/October 2009

within secure ICT systems – in accordance with the guidelines.

14% of the sample said that there was not, and 27% did not know.

From the detailed survey, however, a disconnect starts to appear between the central/high-level view and that in the technology and user departments. Looking at items from the LGA Data Handling Guidelines, corporate/chief executive respondents all answered either yes or ‘don’t know’ to questions about ICT systems being specified in line with government data security minimum standards; their council having a Corporate Information Risk Policy, and having all the council’s key Information Assets classified and allocated an ‘owner’. None of this subset answered no to these items.

It is disappointing, to say the least, that so few of those working with sensitive citizen data could answer ‘yes’ to this question.

In marked contrast, few of the technology or departmental respondents said ‘yes’ to the above. This group accounted for 38% of the total sample saying either they did not know or their council definitely did not specify minimum government data standards in ICT systems’ procurement.

A total of 45%, again all technology or departmental respondents, said ‘no’ or ‘don’t know’ to their council having a Corporate Information Risk Policy.

Twenty nine percent said that Information Assets were definitely not classified; with a further 42% not knowing whether or not they were. Thirty four percent said that information assets were not allocated owners, with a further 36% not knowing whether they were or not.

In summary, the chief executive group was saying ‘yes’ to these questions; while the majority of the technology and user groups were saying either ‘no’ or ‘don’t know’.

The intentions are evidently there, but the practice is not filtering through.

One further question highlighted this disconnect from the centre: Do councils have a Senior Information Risk Owner (SIRO) owning information risk? Just one chief exec said no. However, two fifths of the technology group and nearly a third of the departments said no. In total, 30% of the sample said that there was no SIRO at their council; with a further 32% unsure.

Worryingly, in light of the unending stream of data loss and data breach stories in the media over the last few years, whilst the majority of corporate/chief execs said that there was a clear incident reporting mechanism in place for such occurrences, Local Government IT In Use

More worryingly, just two thirds (66%) said that staff were regularly trained regarding the sensitivity of citizen information and the importance of adhering to the correct procedures for its handling.

The answer, of course, should have been 100% ‘yes’ in both the above instances.

Indeed, not one chief exec respondent said that their council did not have such a policy or training mechanism in place. Which, of course, would be the correct answer: all should have both policy and training.

Results from the quick poll verified this finding: 63.8% answered yes to the same question. But that leaves nearly four in ten either not sure or, worse, definitely sure that their council did not have regular training on how to handle sensitive data.

One said that training was “piecemeal at present. GC is changing this as we are required to actively train all staff accessing IT systems.” Another, very honestly, replied: “Policy exists but formal and recurring training does not.”

These results contrast starkly with the finding that 96% of respondents felt that the legal requirements of the Data Protection Act impacted they way in which they handle citizen data. Nearly eight in ten (79%) felt that the Human Rights Act, and 94% the Freedom of information Act, had an impact on the way their council handled sensitive citizen data.

It is clear that the importance of keeping citizen data safe has permeated throughout local authorities. But the practicalities of ensuring that this be so – for example by implementing the LGA Data Handling Guidelines throughout the authority – are not filtering down to the troops.

Is there truly a need to share sensitive citizen data?

Well, 77.1% of the quick poll said that in order to improve the quality and efficiency of public service delivery, yes, there was: “Immensely so – for place shaping, service take up, increased customer insight, offering of value added services and, most importantly, preventative services,” said one.

DATA SECURITY Added another: “There is clearly a need, as all headline cases of child abuse could have been prevented if agencies communicated with each other.”

In the long survey we explored the drivers for secure data sharing. Shared services would obviously require secure exchange of information according to 82%. Mobile and flexible working also required this capability in the minds of 81%. For 67% ‘Tell Us Once’ and for 61% MAPPA (MultiAgency Public Protection Arrangements) required secure exchange.

Interestingly, in the long survey, just 13% felt that the new Total Place proposition would require secure sharing, with almost three quarters (73%) not sure. When the quick poll was conducted approximately six weeks later, however, the situation was reversed – perhaps more was by then known about this new approach - with 76.2% saying that, yes, trusted and secure data sharing would be essential in order to deliver ‘Total Place’ public services.

Stated one respondent: “Total Place looks at how a whole area approach to public services can lead to better services. In order to achieve this it requires data analysis across the whole area. This data will come from a range of service providers on a range of different criteria, ie information on crime and anti-social behaviour.

“Unless this data is shared an informed and holistic view cannot be taken on issues such as where services need to be better targeted. The approach must be evidenced based and cannot be delivered by a single agency or group.

“It needs a consistent and collaborative approach which eliminates duplication and joins up activity.”

It is hard to see how this can be achieved without a secure information sharing platform. GCSX will inevitably play a key role - how else can you uniformly and securely share necessary information or enable secure joint working across the police, NHS, local authority and central government within an area? The common denominator, the secure government infrastructure, will, by 2012, become the next generation Public Service Network. It is hard to see how the public sector could justify missing the opportunity this presents in tough economic times.

However, coming back to the drivers and the LGA Data Handling Guidelines, it is worth noting that just 58% of respondents said that the guidelines would require secure data sharing. Which, feel the researchers, rather misses the point.

Indeed, whilst the value of information was recognised, researchers detected confusion as to what these guidelines were and how they should be implemented – how information security could be aligned with the business process.

Said one departmental respondent: “Information security is not just about confidentiality. It is also about data quality and availability, which is the real key to cost-effective frontline service provision.

Information security also needs to be aligned to the strategy of the organisation and built into its business process.”

to other local authorities. Almost three in ten (28%) and 12% used these methods respectively when sending data to central government.

But, he added, “Please give clear guidance on how to allocate a SIRO.”

Apart from the risk of loss/theft there is also the unreliability of the post to consider - CRB checks stuck in postal strikes will hold people up from starting jobs. The internet goes down, yes, but not as often as the post these days. In addition, the GSCX has back up and business resilience built in to its contracts. There is no reserve postal service waiting in the wings.

So who shares with whom?

Data was currently shared by 78% of the sample with other local authorities, by 74% with the police, 71% with DWP, 64% with the Audit Commission, 59% with HMRC, 56% with HM Courts Service, 56% with health organisations, 51% with schools, 47% with CLG, 42% with DCSF, and 47% the Ministry of Justice.

The organisations’ databases that most would find helpful to have electronic access to in their own office were: National Fraud Initiative (62%), National Blue Badge Register (60%), DVLA (59%), National Pupil Database (54%), Joint Asset Recovery Database (53%), Hospital Leavers & Admissions Database (52%), Persistent Offenders Register (50%), Electronic Patient Care Records (50%). Interestingly, only just under half, 48%, thought that access to ContactPoint would help.

Indeed, the potential for service improvements was not lost on respondents: “If we are to improve health and social care as a whole there will be a need to share data across several organisations.”

One fire authority said that sharing information with PCTs “will help us to identify vulnerable people... and enable us to target them with community safety initiatives to help drive down the incidence of accidental dwelling fire.”

There is a definite opportunity for innovation in the use of data to improve services. Take the DWP’s CIS - finding and fighting fraud is the obvious use, but what about using CIS data to inform a proactive concessionary parking service? It could check the status of invalidity benefit and DLA and simply issue a continuation of a blue badge, rather than making the resident go through the whole application – and proof of eligibility – process again.

And how is this shared?

Whilst it was encouraging to see that, where appropriate, information was being shared, in many cases it was disappointing to see that not all use secure communication routes to share this data.

A frankly astonishing 45.7% in the quick poll shared sensitive citizen data by post/paper or removable storage media. In the long survey, 44% regularly used paper/ post/courier and 22% USB/CD/post/courier combinations to send sensitive citizen data Local Government IT In Use

In light of the constant haemorrhage of data loss suffered by the public sector in recent years this can be described, at best, as unfortunate.

On a more positive note, however, 54% of councils now use the secure government network (GCSX) and 15% a secure point to point connection when sending information to central government. And 41% used the GCSX to share sensitive data with other authorities.

In the quick poll 61.9% said that they used the GCSX to share data. Indeed, from the comments relating to this section it would appear that the programme has gained significant traction in recent months. Many indicated that they would be using the infrastructure more often once everyone was connected at the end of September: “Not yet,” said one, “But we will begin to as we have just had our GCSX connection approved.” Another said that the network was “currently being rolled out throughout this authority”.

From the end of September there should be no excuse for entrusting sensitive data to the post or courier either on paper or removable storage media.

Indeed, speaking as a citizen, for all citizen data the preferred option should be a secure communication channel. Every parent waits nervously for the day those ‘lost’ child benefit disks turn up in a pub car park.

For local-to-local or local-to-central/other frontline services, the secure routes provided by GCSX and the secure government network should be the first option considered.

Apart from the security, just think of the time and cost savings. Add in the carbon reduction element and, again, from a citizen point of view, it’s a winner.

The final report from this research, ‘Connecting the Public Sector’, will be available in October. To request a copy email Helen Olsen: helen@infopub.co.uk September/October 2009

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VIEW

FROM

WESTMINSTER

Blue Light for 999 Centres The health of the government’s new fire and rescue centres is failing, says parliamentary correspondent, Robert Merrick. hey are costing more than a billion pounds, but will be up to five years’ late when they finally arrive... and it’s all the fault of technology glitches.

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decision to set up not-for-profit companies to run the new centres paved the way for part-privatisation of the fire service.

developing the IT system in a way which will meet all our and FRS requirements mean that further time is needed to complete the project.

Now the controversy is, quietly, the target of one of the biggest revolts by Labour backbenchers, with 67 of Gordon Brown’s troops calling for the entire project to be pulled.

The opposition appeared to be draining away until a surprise announcement, just before MPs left Westminster for the summer recess, that the entire project had been shelved for ten months.

“Key Olympic authorities will switch over in time to prepare for the games and the network will provide robust fall-back arrangements for all FRSs over the Olympic period.”

The issue is the government’s troubled attempts to ensure fire and rescue services are ready for modern emergencies on the scale of the London terror bombings.

The new timetable means the first switchovers - those in Somerset, Devon, Derbyshire and Tyne and Wear - will not happen until May 2011.

There was a hint of conflict with the main IT supplier - EADS - when Mr Malik pledged “a new approach to delivery to give greater assurance on short-term milestones and closer engagement with FRSs”.

The solution, according to ministers, is to axe the 46 fire and rescue centres across England in favour of just nine regional command centres, boasting ‘state-of-theart’ technology.

For example, the separate control rooms now used by Merseyside, Cheshire, Lancashire, Cumbria and Greater Manchester fire services will make way for a giant base in Warrington.

The idea has been hotly-fought for years, with trade unions and opposition parties warning that staff attempting to respond to emergencies across an entire region will lack “crucial local knowledge”.

A Commons select committee branded the project ‘high risk’ because of the opposition of most local Fire and Rescue Services (FRSs).

And trade unions protested that a

And those areas last on the list Humberside, Kent, North Yorkshire and South Yorkshire - must wait until the end of 2012. A full three years away.

In many areas, the delay means the new set-up will not be ready for the challenge of the 2012 London Olympics, with all the security challenges that will bring.

Making the announcement to MPs, fire minister, Shahid Malik, said that “good progress” was being made on building the regional centres and installing new equipment in local fire stations.

And there was good news on hi-tech digital radios, which have now been installed in more than two thirds of England’s fire and rescue service vehicles under a separate £1bn programme.

But, on the control rooms, Mr Malik added: “In recent months, it has become clear that technical problems with

Answer on e-petitions soon

W

e are about to find out whether parliament will finally catch up with town halls by allowing members of the public to e-petition for change.

The vexed issue - a committee of MPs first asked the government to allow it 18 months ago - is now wrapped up in wider efforts to restore parliament’s battered credibility, post the expenses scandal.

Gordon Brown asked Tony Wright, a respected Labour backbencher, to lead a quick all-party inquiry to examine how Westminster can better connect with the public, among other dilemmas.

His committee, which must report back by November, was asked to explore ‘how members of the public might be able to initiate debates and proceedings in the House’.

But the stumbling block is cost. Ministers say e-petitioning, as proposed by MPs last year, would cost £4m over the course of a parliament - and will only support a “simpler, cheaper form of online communication”.

The caution will disappoint enthusiasts who point out that the Scottish Parliament allows it - and that Bristol and Kingston councils pioneered it as long ago as 2004.

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Local Government IT In Use

Predictably, the loudest criticism came from the Fire Brigades Union, which condemned “a scandalous waste of public money when fire brigades are looking to make major cuts because of a lack of cash”.

And the Conservatives were quickly on the attack, adding: “It is sadly no surprise that yet another government IT project is over-budget and behind schedule.”

Stewart Jackson, the party’s fire spokesman, pledged that a Tory victory in next year’s general election would spell the end for “this bloated project”, warning: “Contractors should take note...”

But the government may face trouble even before then. The 67 Labour MPs backing the Tories in arguing it is not too late to think again makes it one of the biggest revolts - albeit a little-noticed one.

The motion poses a difficult question for ministers, by pointing out that fire control rooms have been successfully modernised in Scotland and Wales without scrapping most of them.

Labour has been accused of an obsession with “regionalisation” at all costs, having set up development agencies, unelected assemblies with planning powers and giant health authorities.

Meanwhile, what on earth is going on at the nine ‘state-of-the-art’ centres which, by the way, were originally supposed to be up and running by 2007 - for £1bn, instead of the current £1.4bn price tag?

Well, ministers were quick to deny suggestions they were standing empty, at a cost to taxpayers of £1.5m a month.

They are being used for... meetings.

EMERGENCY SERVICES

First for Fife F&RS

Leicestershire goes rugged eicestershire Constabulary has implemented 300 Panasonic CF-19 LToughbooks to provide officers in the field with 24-hour access to exactly the same information as their colleagues in the station.

ife Fire and Rescue Service, the first to benefit from the Scottish Executive’s Fprogramme for communications

technologies, has unveiled its new major incident command unit (ICU) as part of a £5m investment of more than £5m in new rescue equipment and facilities. Developed in partnership with coachbuilder, Cebotec, and technology supplier, Excelerate Technology, the ICU will play a major role in improving the management of major incidents and achieving interoperability with other emergency services.

epura has developed an intelligent software application to help police S officers carry out ‘stop and account’

operations more swiftly and efficiently.

Developed for its SRH and STP TETRA radios, the application transforms required ethnicity data into a Short Data Application message, whilst also sending GPS location and time stamping directly to a central database. Officers’ operational status is automatically updated on the radio display so that they know, just by looking at the screen, the latest status communicated to the control room. www.sepura.com

S

teria has signed a 10-year, circa £45m contract with the Independent Police Complaints Commission to provide ICT and telephony services. IPCC chief executive, Jane Furniss, says, the contract “provides us with modern ICT and critical business systems” that are “crucial to the ongoing restructuring and development of the organisation and will underpin” work being done to provide greater frontline resources.

Systems has unveiled its latest straight-to-server digital recording system Iforndico use within the criminal justice sector.

Indico Streaming Server has been used successfully in Scandinavia and is now being offered on a trial basis to selected UK police forces. www.indicosys.no

trathclyde Police has gone live with the next generation of covert policing S technology from ABM. Abmpegasus enables Strathclyde to have a more centralised view of its entire covert intelligence estate, in addition to enabling valuable covert intelligence to be passed directly to the Scottish Intelligence Database.

Fast and reliable wireless data connection frees officers from having to make journeys back to base to complete time-consuming paperwork – comparable to maintaining up to 200 officers on publicly visible duty per year according to the constabulary. Chief superintendent Jason Masters described the roll out as, “The biggest step forward in police communications since the introduction of the two-way radio forty years ago”.

Officers can now access resources including internal websites, crime records, intelligence logs, command and control logs and update information in real-time whilst in their vehicles.

taffordshire Fire and Rescue Service udit Scotland says that contingencies S A has asked Clarity Information Solutions planning is being hindered by to use Active Navigation to clean up and shortcomings in information sharing, reorganise all its unstructured electronic information. Prompted by the need to retrieve information quickly in response to FoI requests plus information security, version control and network storage issues, Staffordshire has already identified storage savings of up to 100GB from deleting duplicate and redundant data.

including different definitions as to what comprises an emergency, despite guidance in the Civil Contingencies Act, and use of different document security systems. These are in place for the Scottish Government, police forces and NHS boards, but not for some local authorities and fire and rescue services. www.audit-scotland.gov.uk

orth Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service urrey Police is implementing an N S is set to save a minimum of £50,000 enterprise-wide information through a new five year contract with North management system from Memex. All key Yorkshire broadband organisation, NYnet.

The contract, valued at £354,000, will involve the migration of 15 fire service sites in North Yorkshire onto the NYnet network – providing double the bandwidth of the previous supplier.

police business functions will be joined under one platform that will ultimately link all recorded information and intelligence across the force - which includes Memex’s core Intelligence, Crime, plus Case and Custody solutions.

Scottish police to get own gazetteer

T

he Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (ACPOS) is creating a centralised address gazetteer for use by all Scottish police services.

Deputy chief constable Tom Halpin, ACPOS National Command and Control Project Executive, said that the award of the contract to create this resource was, “a key part of the wider ACPOS business change programme and represents groundbreaking improvements for the Scottish police service.

“The new system will help us to identify precise locations and allocate the best equipped and nearest police patrol.”

and partners GGP Systems and Infoshare, will compile data from each of the eight police forces, Point X’s Points of Interest dataset and Experian’s QAS Names.

Matching, cleansing and validation will be done by Infoshare against a primary dataset from One Scotland Gazetteer (OSG) - which is made up of address data from the 32 Scottish councils. GGP’s gazetteer management software will be used to give officers web-enabled access to the system across Scotland and integrate with the new national Control & Command system.

Lothian & Borders Police, on behalf of the eight Scottish police forces and the Scottish Police Services Authority, is overseeing the project which will see the creation, implementation and use of a definitive national location gazetteer detailing every property and the location of all police ‘incidents’ in Scotland.

A partnership led by Buying Solutions prime contractor, Infotech Enterprises, Local Government IT In Use

September/October 2009

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NEW PRODUCTS

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ageOne’s Voiceblast can quickly and simultaneously send a personalised voice message to the landline or mobile number of all staff. Combined with PageOne’s SmartGroups, which allow users to set up predefined groups, it offers a powerful and flexible means of delivering high-volume broadcast information to multiple devices independent of network. www.pageone.co.uk

ayrise Systems has announced the latest version of its mapping M software, MapNow. The release offers an

improved, more intuitive user interface, configurable views and advanced visualisation options for the coordination of street works. It enables users to instantly locate assets and view detailed service information on OS maps or aerial photographs. www.mayrise.co.uk

T claims that its Broadband Enabling Technology is capable of providing B online services across long distances.

Capable of providing a reliable service over lines more than 12 km away from an exchange it could help support roll-out of the government’s Digital Britain initiative.

John Small, managing director of service delivery for Openreach, says that BT is “keen to work with local and regional authorities and other bodies with funding to discuss how the technology can be rolled out to their areas”. www.btplc.com

A

dobe has launched the Adobe Approved Trust List (AAL) enabling users to create digital signatures that are trusted whenever the signed document is opened in Acrobat or Reader 9.0 and above. Both products reach out to an Adobe-hosted web page to periodically download a list of trusted root digital certificates. Any digital signature created with a credential that can trace a relationship ‘chain’ back to a certificate on this list will be trusted by these products.

Organisations already working with AATL include GlobalSign, SwissSign, VeriSign and the US Federal Common Policy Root.

www.adobe.com/security/approved-trust-list.html

Simplifying bus routes obexx has launched Streets Schedule, M a bus scheduling system linked to Google mapping. The software incorporates

on-screen mapping tools for placing bus stops and routes accurately without duplication or overlapping. Efficient schedules can then be built with service levels for regular or holiday services. The scheduler can assign trips to drivers using a simple drag-and-drop action. Compatibility with the Google Transit Feed Specification enables quick production of schedules for web and print and seamless integration with Google Maps gives passengers a onestop source for online trip planning. www.mobexx.co.uk

cKesson and Point Progress have partnered to offer an expenses M system specifically designed for NHS

organisations across England and Wales.

DX Expenses can help trusts to improve back office efficiencies and deliver cost savings. It provides a record of every expenses claim, improving control and enabling trusts to identify trends and ways to reduce expenses. www.mckesson.co.uk

ivica has achieved PA-DSS (Payment Application Data Security Standard) C compliance validation for both its ICON

e-payments managed service and for local authorities to use in-house. www.civica.com

he National Association of Local Councils has joined forces with TOrdnance Survey to extend the BOLD (the

benefits of licensed data) campaign to parish and town councils. NALC and OS are to promote the Paper Map Copying Licence, which allows the holder to copy unlimited amounts of OS mapping in paper form to support their day to day administration; make copies of mapping in either paper or electronic form; include copies of such mapping in print and on web pages; and use copies of mapping as a part of a professional service.

www.nalc.gov.uk

GP Systems has launched the latest version of its geographical information system. It includes advanced spatial data storage functionality, improved data G security and user authentication and support for Windows Vista, Windows 7 and

Windows Server 2008. “In order to maximise the potential of geographic information as a corporate resource, it is essential that large volumes of data can be securely stored and accessed by authorised users,” commented Tim Maxwell, founder and managing director of GGP Systems.

www.ggpsystems.co.uk

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September/October 2009

Local Government IT In Use

new solution from Ubisys will make it A easier for NHS staff to update Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) shared

by local NHS providers such as hospitals and GPs. Ubisys is integrating Anoto’s digital pen and paper technology with SystmOne, a widely used primary care database within the NHS National Programme for IT. Combining digital pen and paper saves staff time as they no longer have to type up handwritten notes.

Instead, the digital pen will capture handwriting as patient forms are filled in and update records in SystmOne.

www.anoto.com/solutions-2.aspx

alend has joined forces with Tadoption Connectage.com to help drive the of open source data integration

solutions in the UK public sector. The partnership aims to help to improve data management within government departments and local authorities and thus boost productivity and efficiency of www.talend.com public sector services.

patial Technology has launched ISM MapView, an entry level web based S GIS which comes with a fast National

Land and Property Gazetteer loader and address search facility. ISM MapView is aimed at local authorities already using high end GIS that would like to make their maps and other data available to all staff at minimum cost. It can access the specialist maps and data already used by an organisation and has all the tool functionality normally associated with an entry level GIS application, including pan, zoom, goto, location search, address search and print. www.spatialtech.co.uk

CONTRACT ROUNDUP

B

laby District Council is using GGP Systems’ GGP Synchroniser tool to provide real-time, corporate wide access to essential planning information. The tool joins back office databases up with front office services such as CRM and council website.

Records held within the council’s planning system are automatically linked to the GIS allowing users across the organisation to search, view and access both current and historical planning information from the desktop.

evon County Council says that it has erefordshire Housing has chosen made significant cost savings by using software from 1st Touch to support the D H Citrix GoToWebinar to 50 staff. Devon management of its responsive repairs estimates it has saved £100 per person in six weeks by reducing travel, venue and refreshment costs. Staff productivity has increased by eliminating travel time and carbon emissions have also been reduced.

service and trades colleagues across five thousand homes in the county. The software integrates fully with HH’s existing Orchard Housing Management system and sends electronic job tickets directly to 25 internal trade colleagues’ PDAs.

strategy for 2007 – 2012 by providing better access to a wider range of information for all members of the community.

whilst the council does not have to comply with DCSF ICS requirements, it wanted to purchase a system meeting the standards.

platform goes live as EA starts consultation on the new by-laws to regulate fisheries in England and Wales. Limehouse uEngage will facilitate internal organisational consultation as well as external stakeholder engagement.

Management 2007 toolset. The council’s IT department is implementing a tailored, structured system of processes and technology to facilitate pipeline management, timesheets for progress collection and resource management.

replace an in-house catalogue to monitor the costs of goods and services from suppliers; and staff had to manually key-in information when placing an order.

eAdmissions service for schools across London. The LGfL manages the admissions service on behalf of the 33 London authorities and Surrey County Council.

protection software, which enables registered social landlords to achieve cost efficiencies by bringing together staff resources such as anti-social behaviour and customer service into one central system for ASB incidents and cases.

Management and Time & Attendance solution, Horizon OneStaff. It generates automated, fair and equitable schedules that accommodate individual preferences and skillsets along with a seamless interface with ESR.

nfield has launched a new website and Google-powered search system.

EDeveloped sle of Man is using Liquidlogic’s

by Jadu, the site supports PROTOCOL Integrated Children’s System I delivery of Enfield’s ‘Access to Services’ solution for its social services division –

Agency has selected eicestershire County Council has Limehouse Software from Objective for appointed Corporate Project Solutions to Eits nvironment L new national e-consultation system. The roll out the Microsoft Enterprise Project

B

arnsley MBC has signed a managed ICT services deal with Civica as part of its Building Schools for the Future Programme.

Civica will also deliver a Virtual Learning Environment for the Barnsley Local Education Partnership to all schools, both primary and secondary, from January 2010.

B

asingstoke and Deane Borough Council is using RandomStorm’s automated vulnerability assessment tool, iStorm, to enable its IT security team to schedule regular automated scans of its IT network.

romsgrove Council has halved the B number of complaints it was receiving since implementing Tagish’s iCasework complaints and customer feedback computer system. The council had previously been criticised by the Audit Commission for having no such effective corporate system in place.

amden Council is using Check Point C Software’s disk encryption product to secure confidential data on its 1400 laptops against theft or data leakage.

C

apital Ambition, the Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership division of London Councils, has worked with Tagish to develop a new website.

armarthenshire and Merthyr Tydfil are C working with Northgate Public Services to deliver enterprise electronic information management services.

entral Bedfordshire Council has selected C the Open Text ECM Suite to deliver document and records management,

integrating with enterprise-wide processes and delivering content over the web.

ommunity Care Providers Scotland, the C association of voluntary sector organisations, is to pilot the Capita Support

web-based outcome monitoring tool to demonstrate the impact their services have on people’s lives.

loucester City Council has cut the time ondon Grid for Learning Trust is using the taken to procure goods by 75% using National Land and Property Gazetteer to G L COA Solutions’ eProcurement system to provide the addresses for its updated

olden Gates Housing, One Vision uton and Dunstable Hospital NHS Housing and The Guinness Partnership Foundation Trust is implementing G L have all signed contracts for Civica’s public McKesson’s eRostering, Open Shift

ampshire and Isle of Wight Partnership cottish Councils are transforming has chosen ntl:Telewest Business for a H S their major incident handling with £90m fully managed network to transform IBM and Frontworks. All 32 councils are public service delivery across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. The project will connect more than one thousand sites, including the partnership’s 15 local authorities, the fire service, schools, colleges and voluntary organisations.

arrogate Borough Council is the latest public sector organisation to take H advantage of the NYnet network. The main council offices will be provided with a super-fast internet connection and vastly improved connections between satellite offices via a dedicated VPN.

arrow Council and shop4support have announced a partnership to implement H an innovative social care eMarketplace

deploying a web-based management application for Emergency Rest Centres, providing a vital information stream for local authorities and the police service to enable them to assist in reuniting people affected by an incident. The new application provides easy-to-use registration and command & control facilities for multi-agency staff such as local authorities, housing associations, the police and, where required, the voluntary sector. Staff can access the latest data at any one time over the internet, which can be made rapidly available even when traditional communication systems are down.

solution in the borough as part of its ongoing development of the personalisation agenda within social care.

art District Council has signed a £9.5m eight year contract with Capita for a H range of managed services including

customer services, IT, financial services, HR and payroll and print services. The service will utilise Capita’s existing service capabilities in Southampton.

Local Government IT In Use

September/October 2009

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CONTRACT ROUNDUP

N

HS Worcestershire Acute Hospitals Trust has selected Xerox to provide an outsourced service for the digitisation and full management of its health records for the next 10 years.

N efton Metropolitan Borough Council’s S Coastal Defence section is using historic aerial imagery from the

GeoInformation Group to gain a clearer understanding of how the coast has evolved over time. By ascertaining the historic position of the coastline identifying historic land use, habitat extents and management activities that could have affected today’s coastline and mapping sand dune evolution the council hopes to be able to predict the types and rates of future coastal change.

Council has signed the first phase of a £44m contract with Civica. As part of Ltheuton QED Wates consortium, Civica will be prime ICT contractor for the town’s £270m Building Schools for the Future programme.

erthyr Tydfil County Borough Council and Wrexham Borough Council have M chosen to replace the former Anite Public Sector’s Pericles system with Northgate’s revenues and benefits solution. Following its purchase of Anite, Northgate is closing down Pericles and offering clients the opportunity to switch to its own system.

HS Lothian is the latest organisation to sign up to the One Scotland Mapping N Agreement, giving it access to a range of OS mapping data to aid the delivery of patient services. It is one of 74 Scottish public-sector organisations to sign up.

HS Mid Yorkshire Hospitals has implemented an identity management N solution from Salford Software, enabling it

to link to the NHS’s Electronic Staff Records providing up to date, same day information on leavers and joiners to the organisation via Novell Identity Manager.

HS National Services Scotland has selected Lumension to enforce security N policies governing the storage of data on

portable storage devices on behalf of the 22 Scottish Health Boards. The service needed a solution that would prevent anyone from storing patient data or any other health board information onto a CD, DVD, USB stick or laptop, without having expressed permission to do so. Where this method of data transfer was sanctioned, it needed to know that the information was encrypted.

HS South Birmingham and Pathfinder Healthcare Developments CIC have N partnered with Aetna Health Services to

develop new ways of working to improve health outcomes. New services include a telephone care management programme and an online health risk assessment tool.

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September/October 2009

orfolk County Council has signed two contracts with BT worth a combined value of £40.2m to provide voice and data services to more than 450 schools in the county. As part of a £32.9m five-year deal BT Global Services will provide a new core voice and IP telephony service, bringing unified communications to 20,000 workers at more than 1,000 sites, including council offices, schools and libraries throughout the county. Some five thousand council employees will also benefit from new, secure MobileXpress flexible working technologies being introduced by BT.

N

orth Ayrshire and South Ayrshire councils have become the latest Scottish councils to adopt Lagan’s Enterprise Case Management solution in moves aimed at improving customer service to citizens and communities and delivering cost efficiencies.

N

orth Eastern Purchasing Organisation has signed a three-year contract with Comensura for the operation and management of the supply of temporary agency workers for member authorities delivering guaranteed savings each year of four percent on participating authorities’ annual budget of £16m.

N

orth Hertfordshire Homes is able to block 93% of spam email, gaining 10-15 hours a week of staff time, by implementing a new Cisco IronPort email security appliance from Nebulas Solutions Group.

R

edbridge has chosen Civica’s moving traffic parking technology as part of its overall CCTV infrastructure to capture bus lane, parking and moving traffic contraventions, streamline administration and simplify communication with motorists via an online portal.

R

eigate and Banstead Borough Council is implementing a log management, log analysis and event management solution from LogRhythm, in order to sign up to the government’s Code of Connection (CoCo) as well as dramatically streamline how it reports on network activity for forensic and audit purposes, and to log data searches.

S

outh Gloucestershire Council is using Dell handheld devices and Mayrise software to improve the coordination of street works and assist with safety inspections. Street works officers and safety inspectors armed with pocket PCs can carry out routine inspections accessing the latest back office information, such as the Street Works Register, in the field. Defects can be automatically recorded via simple drop down menus improving both efficiency and the speed with which defects are resolved.

Local Government IT In Use

S

outhend-on-Sea Borough Council has chosen Civica to implement electronic document management and workflow as part of a transformation project designed to save £15m over the next three years. The EDM and workflow is projected to contribute in excess of £1m to this figure.

S

tevenage Homes has implemented a mobile workforce technology system from 1st Touch for responsive repairs.

T

he London Common Assessment Framework (CAF) Protocol has signed a contract with Me Learning for online training. The protocol was developed by the Government Office for London and Capital Ambition in partnership with London’s 33 local authorities.

T

ower Hamlets has asked Webcredible to undertake a usability evaluation and accessibility audit on its new website.

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ales Audit Office is implementing an integrated financial management system from COA Solutions, incorporating electronic document imaging and data capture software from Version One.

W

andsworth Council, in partnership with Jadu, has launched a standards compliant new website to create greater customer engagement.

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est Berkshire Council has cut property costs by 40% with Timelord, a flexible working scheme designed and implemented by Vodafone.The flexible working framework is governed by mobile policies that are aligned to the needs of teams working on the ground as well as to the council’s overall business objectives.

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inchester City Council has deployed Enterprise SSO from Evidian to simplify access for staff to multiple applications while increasing security.

Supplied by AppSpeed, the Evidian solution is being used together with two-factor authentication to secure systems and application access in compliance with GSi Code of Connection which the council achieved in February.

W

olverhampton City Council, Sanctuary Housing Group and Greenwich Council are using 360 Scheduling and Northgate to efficiently manage their housing repair and maintenance activities.

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