E-Government

Snow patrol: how small steps can lead to big changes MP Matthew Hancock on the thousands of little observations paving our digital paths JULY 2015

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supplement

Public sector transformation

It’s May 7, 2020: time to plug in your ballot box John Bercow on bringing out the e-vote for the next general election

What Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf tells us about e-voting KEIL HUBERT

Transforming public services with the power of digital innovation ROB KENYON DISTRIBUTED WITHIN THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, PRODUCED AND PUBLISHED BY LYONSDOWN WHICH TAKES SOLE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONTENTS

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Opening shots Shane Richmond

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USTERITY is here to stay, that much was clear from George Osborne’s July Budget, which saw billions cut from the government’s welfare bill. The continued pressure to save money on public services makes it even more important to press on with E-government.

The digitisation of public services began some time ago but can go further by connecting services together to improve efficiency and by using data analysis to deliver services that are better than their offline predecessors. Health data, for example, can be used to improve service provision and prevent developing problems becoming more serious.

There are challenges, of course, such as the problem of exclusion. It might be possible to help the elderly stay healthy through the winter by monitoring a connected thermostat, but many pensioners don’t even have internet access.

Meanwhile, government and local authorities often cannot make sense of the data they do collect, let alone connect them together to bring about smarter delivery. One local government IT executive told me that residents tend to assume that the local authority knows everything about them. He said they would be shocked if they knew just how little the authority collects and how unconnected it all is.

It’s also possible to be a victim of your own success. Making a service available digitally can

THE ESSENTIALS

Publisher Bradley Scheffer | Editor Daniel Evans | Production Editor Dan Geary

Why IT companies must learn that they have to sell outcomes, not merely services sometimes create new demand, leading to more work for back office staff that can offset the savings of providing digital services in the first place. Add to that the risk of data breaches and the difficulty in linking services on incompatible systems and you can understand why the public sector has not progressed as some have expected.

The private sector’s earliest ventures into government IT created an image of projects that were delayed and ran over budget, but the industry has learned a lot since then. The IT firms that will drive E-government forward are the ones who can bring not only their own expertise but that of their private sector clients and partners. With national and local government so stretched, it is hard for staff to set aside time for gathering intelligence and ideas from elsewhere. Smart IT companies will bring those in continually.

Another thing IT companies must learn is that they have to sell outcomes, rather than Twitter: @ software suites or cloud services. It’s an easy shanerichmond

slogan to subscribe to but it’s easily forgotten.

For some companies, whatever the client asks for, the answer is always to buy the same solution.

Different public services have different needs, as do different local authorities, so the best digital government tools will come from companies who can create bespoke or hybrid solutions.

Finally, public sector priorities are under constant review. The pressures are increasing and priorities constantly change. Government IT people don’t want to be locked into a five-year service contract that will be a millstone by year three. IT firms need to think of themselves as entering a flexible partnership in which the terms are constantly up for negotiation.

E-government can, and should be, better government and the austerity era might be a good opportunity to ensure its delivery. After all, as one of George Osborne’s predecessors as Chancellor, a certain Winston Churchill, said: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

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By Joanne Frearson

A GOOD E-government system should improve government process, help connect citizens to services and assist in building relationships between public and private institutions. An important part of a successful E-government strategy is making data open.

By opening up government data, authorities become transparent. Tax payers can see how their money is spent, what services need improving and what still has to be done. Citizens can make an informed decision about public policy.

Making data more open is an area which World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a big campaigner for. He founded the Open Data Institute with Sir Nigel Shadbolt with the view of using data to create economic, environmental and social value.

Speaking at the Open Data Awards 2015, Sir Tim says the value of open data is “the economic benefit of the country running better. It is easier to run a business in a country where there is open data.”

By the government making data more open, services become more efficient.

For example, train and bus data can help transport systems run better, while opening up postcode data could provide a key to what services are needed in an area.

“The classic [example] is when you go to a strange city and you pull out your map to find out how to get to one place or another by public transport,” Sir Tim says.

“In London you are used to doing this. It will say, jump on a tube and hop on a bus.

But in some countries this is not offered.”

Sir Tim explains that in some cities, not all companies involved in the public transport system make their data open, and that this results in people getting bad instructions.

Open data is something the government has been working hard on, though. The UK is currently ranked first out of 86 countries in regards to open data initiatives, according to the Open Data Barometer.

But Sir Tim believes the UK still has some way to go before it could be described as fully open. In late 2014 the ODI launched its Open Data Roadmap For The UK, which outlines nine recommendations for the government, including the creation of a new chief data officer. In March 2015, Mike Bracken was appointed to this role to develop, advocate and progress all aspects of this strategy.

The big area where Sir Tim wants to see more change in opening up in the UK is the Postcode Address File (PAF). The ODI has been campaigning that companies need access to the PAF to drive business and domestic services, logistics, customer relationships and advertising. Currently,

The E-government is…

More open data will revitalise creaking government services and help the public stay better informed, says Sir Tim Berners-Lee accessing existing address files in the UK tends to require a fee or licence. But early this year the ODI set up Open Addresses UK to provide a free and up to date national address list. Open Address UK is the first UK address list published as open data, with the aim of enabling people to focus on using the data, rather than having to think about whether they can afford to do so.

It is an area which all the leaders of the ODI feel strongly about. Co-founder Sir Nigel Shadbolt asks: “How many locations are there where services could flourish and benefit from unfettered access to legal addresses in the country?

Getting in shape for 2020 REFORM, the British think-tank, hosted a one-day conference called Public Services: From Austerity To Transformation in London last month.

The conference drew speakers from across the public, private and third sectors and from abroad to identify how government can build a new public service model fit for 2020. Panellists showed unanimous support for public

Public sector transformation

services that meet the needs of users when they need them, where they need them, and how they need them.

The conference agreed on four key approaches that were important to drive public service transformation: digitalisation; data-driven policy making; experimenting to understand what works; and cross-departmental and cross-sector collaboration.

“The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has just announced that within 12 months it is going to make all the data in the department open unless there is a very good reason not to, like security.”

Gavin Starks, CEO of the ODI, says the Met Office and Ordnance survey data is next on the ODI’s list. He believes opening up geospatial and meteorological data to the private sector could potentially change behaviours and have implications for UK plc.

NHS clinical data is also on the top of the agenda, which would be beneficial for research were it to be made open, Sir Tim believes. “It is a bit of a special case,” he says. “It is very sensitive for an individual, but massive amounts of clinical data can be ridiculously useful when you are doing research. When you make the data available you get massive breakthroughs in medicine.

It is such a valuable thing.”

He stresses that fears of where and how the information is being used could be assuaged by patients having access to such details via a hospital portal. “If you can say, yes, we will use your data, we will give doctors and researchers access to your data, and we will give you access to the log of who has done that. This makes individuals much happier with the idea.”

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Analytics for government: where big data and Big Brother collide

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here is rightfully a lot of hype around E-government. The application of analytics in the private sector has had a significant impact on our lives. And at first blush, it seems like a great idea for our governments to be more like Google or Amazon, using data and analytics to deliver improved services more cost-effectively when and where people need them. While many of the benefits found in the private sector can translate directly to application in the public sector, there are hurdles our governments will have to clear that the Googles of the world simply dodge.

A lot is already happening in E-government. The Glasgow Smart City initiative is amazing, applying a combination of advanced technologies to benefit the people of Glasgow. Traffic management, more efficient policing, optimising green technologies, improving public transportation and many other initiatives are all driven by the application of technology and data analytics. We also see examples like Torbay Council and the Borough of Islington using analytics to drive efficiency in delivery of services and increase transparency.

Torbay Council makes available expenditure data on its public website to

increase transparency, while using analytics internally to help budget holders run their services more efficiently. The Borough of Islington was able to save £800,000 annually by combining CCTV data with operational data, to create dashboards that helped them more effectively deploy parking enforcement personnel, as well as reduce ticket processing time from six months to four days. On both grand and more pedestrian scales, analytics is improving public services.

The benefits of applying analytics in government are real, but the public sector should be cautious about simply taking the experience of the private sector and trying to apply it directly. The public sector will need to carefully rethink the often adversarial nature analytics can take in the private sector.

Amazon’s recommendation algorithms are cool, but the algorithms aren’t your friend.

They are there to get you to buy more.

Transparency and privacy are the two key concerns in which the public sector will not be able to rely on the private sector for innovation. Data ownership, as an example, is an area in which companies such as Google and Amazon aren’t good role models. Amazon owns my purchase history, but should the government “own” my health data? Amazon can use my purchase data for any purpose it sees fit

without telling me who is accessing it or why.

Should CCTV data be treated the same?

This isn’t a good model for E-government to follow. In fact, the challenge was highlighted earlier this year by surveillance commissioner Tony Porter. Algorithms are able to predict behaviour and automatically track individuals. It is critical that the public understands how data is being used and participate in managing that process.

This is where the public sector will need to

drive new innovations, educating citizens and empowering them to participate in controlling their data and its usage.

Delivering data driven government, while keeping Big Brother at bay.

Charles Caldwell is Senior Director, Global Solutions Engineering, Logi Analytics +44 (0) 0118 923 1020 LogiAnalytics.com

Budget challenges call for bold changes

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usterity has created profound challenges for the public sector, and chief among them is ensuring frontline services don’t suffer as a result of budget cuts. At the same time, public authorities need to meet new demands from citizens who increasingly want to access services through digital channels.

Through outsourcing as a well-established strategy for driving efficiency, the private sector has played a growing role in addressing these challenges. Take the local government market, for example – arvato’s UK Outsourcing Index found a 15 per cent year-on-year increase in the average value of local government outsourcing contracts in 2014 (£30.3million), as authorities formed longer-term, more sophisticated partnerships. This growth has continued in 2015, with the first three months of the year marking a five-quarter high in the total value of new agreements in the sector, reaching £350million in Q1 2015.

This growth has undoubtedly played a part in the massive efficiency savings local government has already achieved – £10billion since 2011/12 according to the LGA – but the work is far from over. With even deeper cuts looming in the autumn spending review, and much of the lowhanging fruit already plucked, bolder, braver changes are required.

Sharing services across multiple organisations will be a key part of the solution. Central government is setting a precedent with its Next Generation Shared Services Strategy, of which arvato is a key partner – operating Independent Shared Service Centre 1 (ISSC1) in Swansea. By introducing standardisation, underpinned by new technology, across back-office services like HR, payroll and procurement, ISSC1 is delivering

genuine business transformation for a range of government departments.

The economies of scale that can be achieved make this a strategy that must be emulated by local authorities, but it will require all parties to overcome political boundaries, to challenge organisational structures and established processes, and to invest in technology.

Brave choices are also needed when it comes to deploying new ways of working. Some will be evolutionary – using social media to reach younger, digitally native citizens for example, as a successful customer service partnership between arvato and the Dutch government demonstrates. While others will be revolutionary – such as embracing robotic process automation to replace manual work in the back office and free up employees to focus on essential frontline services.

Real transformation requires compromise, flexibility and a willingness to review and, if necessary, change every aspect of the work, including people, processes, and technology.

The solution has to be to create the right culture and conditions in which both productivity and innovation can flourish. This is how arvato approaches its partnerships with local authorities, NHS Trusts and central government departments, by empowering employees to take part in the change agenda and then equipping them with the skills, processes and technologies they need to work in a more sophisticated way.

Transformation has to be at the heart of the public sector’s response to the financial challenges, and perhaps the biggest hurdle it faces is in creating a genuine will to change and collaborate. It’s here the private sector can add the most value, providing the advice, experience and solutions to encourage change and deliver results.

Debra Maxwell is managing director of business process outsourcing partner arvato UK www.arvato.co.uk/telegraph

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Public sector transformation

The inner geek

Cardiff unveils UK’s secondlargest data exchange

Moz & Bradders

South Korea on top, UK eighth in UN survey

By Eleri Evans

SOUTH KOREA is ranked first in a top ten listing of global e-government leaders in the 2014 United Nations E-government Survey – the only report in the world that assesses the e-government progress of the 193 UN member states.

Produced every two years, the E-government survey scores governments on their overall electronic efforts, as well as progress in online public service delivery, e-participation, use of social media, and open government data. It highlights emerging E-government trends, issues and innovative practices, as well as challenges and opportunities of E-government development.

South Korea was named number one in the UN survey for its continued leadership and focus on E-government innovation. Particular reference was made to the country’s Digital Budget and Accounting System (DBAS), which the survey described as an innovative tool that allows a holistic view of public finance.

DBAS consolidates the fiscal processes of 51 central government agencies and links 55 external systems and local governments, public entities and subordinate organisations, enabling real-time information sharing in public finance, such as revenues, expenditures, national assets and public debts.

South Korea was followed in the top 10 by Australia and Singapore, which have both recently established robust telecommunications infrastructure, invested in developing their human resources, expanded usage of E-government facilities and extended service delivery. The leading nations in Europe included France (4th), Netherlands (5th), the UK (8th) and Finland (10th).

Wu Hongbo, under-secretary general for economic and social Affairs at the United Nations, said: “E-government holds tremendous potential to improve the way that governments deliver public services and enhance broad stakeholder involvement in public service.”

With preparatory work on the 2016 survey currently underway, it is worth examining some highlights from the 2014 study.

The survey found that all UN

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there were more than 1.5 billion smartphones in use globally, and this was growing exponentially.

Between 2012 and 2014, the number of 1. South Korea countries offering mobile apps and mobile portals doubled to almost 50 countries. They were often 2. Australia used directly to support poverty eradication, gender equality and social inclusion, as well as 3. Singapore promote economic development, environmental protection and disaster management.

4. France The 2014 survey found an increased use of public kiosks from 24 countries in 2012 to 36 in 5. Netherlands 2014 for use as open-access facilities in public 6. Japan spaces and locations providing free use of online services, especially in marginalised or remote 7. United States areas and where the individual use of ICT was not widespread.

8. United Kingdom Similarly, both over-the-counter and telephone services 9. New Zealand remained fundamental channels with the 10. Finland majority of countries providing at least some member states were now services using these online, more governments were routes. They were expanding e-participation and using often seen as important more mobile and social media tools to reach supplements for individual people, although it also highlighted a lack of problem solving compared with, for resources and a continued digital divide. example, websites, which were generally The survey found that E-government was felt to be better at providing information. “entering a new episode” with all 193 UN member The report noted wide disparities among countries using national websites for the first regions and countries in E-government, with time, and with government officials using their more developed countries continuing to outpace online presence to add public value to people’s developing neighbours. The level of a country’s lives in an inclusive manner. The use of social economic, social and political development media by governments had more than doubled, was one of the main factors contributing to with some 118 countries using some form of social E-government development, which was also media, including Twitter, either for e-consultation influenced by investment in telecommunication, or E-government generally. human capital and provision of online services.

Although the use of email increased only The report argued it was imperative for slightly between 2012 and 2014 to just over government managers to leverage the different two-thirds of countries, the report said it was advantages offered by various channels to find likely to continue to grow in the future, smart ways to increase usage of online services especially for notification and information and to reach out to disadvantaged and vulnerable provision. Similar uses were seen for SMS groups for social inclusion.

Left: UN undervia mobile devices, although still more secretary general To improve E-government, the survey than 80 per cent of countries had not for economic suggested countries establish a clear national yet exploited this potential mass and social affairs vision, supported by committed leadership, channel, showing only a slight Wu Hongbo appropriate policies and collaborative is pushing advance from 2012. As far as the member states governance frameworks, and greater investment use of mobile phones themselves to embrace in telecommunication infrastructure, human were concerned, the report found E-government capital and provision of online services.

World E-government leaders

AN £844,000 investment in an internet exchange in Cardiff has seen the Welsh capital leapfrog similar schemes in Leeds and Edinburgh to post the second-largest number of customers connected outside London.

The internet exchange, IXCardiff, works in a similar way to a telephone exchange. Once a web address is put into a computer, instead of data being sent to London, it is now dealt with in Cardiff.

A regionally-based approach encourages local digital businesses, reduces the dependency of industry on London and provides lower local overheads. More than 30 businesses are already signed up to and using the new Cardiff exchange.

The speed difference may only be milliseconds but the difference is huge for companies who are trading businesses. There is an annual saving of £42,000 for a company with a 10Gb connection.

Welsh Deputy Minister for Skills and Technology Julie James said: “The creation of an internet exchange in the heart of Cardiff will have wide ranging benefits to the business community in Cardiff and across south Wales. It will provide a real boost to local enterprises which would otherwise have had to carry a significant cost burden to access this opportunity.”

The internet exchange is managed by LINX, one of the biggest internet exchange providers in the UK. Cardiff Council Leader Phil Bale said: “As digital technology and high-speed broadband are increasingly essential prerequisites for modern businesses, tourists and residents, the council has sought to accelerate the city’s economic competitiveness and address the digital divide by driving growth, attracting new business, increasing employment and transforming the way high-speed connectivity services are accessed and provided.”

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Following footsteps in the snow MP Matthew Hancock on how thousands of little observations have been used to pave our digital paths. Eleri Evans reports

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MMEDIATELY after a snowfall, town planners in Helsinki, Finland, will visit a local park to examine the footprints because they reveal the paths that people naturally choose to take. These “desire paths” are then formally paved into the park the following summer.

The importance of basing decisions as much as possible on observation rather than prediction is one of the guiding principles driving UK government efforts to transform public services. This was a point Matthew Hancock MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office, made to the National Digital Conference 2015, when he used the story of the Helsinki planners.

Hancock demonstrated how thousands of little observations had been used to pave the paths people travel to improve the Gov.uk pages. For instance, he said: “Registry offices are officially known as register offices. That’s what it says on the forms. But everyone knows in real life they’re called registry offices, so no-one ever really searches for register offices online.

“We’ve paved the path that people travel, so the Gov. uk page comes top of the search results, even if you search ‘registry’ office.” Another example was when people searched for pay council tax. “They don’t usually say where they live. We’ve paved the path so you’re taken from Gov.uk to the relevant page of your local council website in just one click.”

Hancock described the process of making improvements through little observations as iteration. He said: “Iteration is the opposite of the big bang model of policymaking. We’ve all seen it. The big announcement, the big contract for ‘big IT’, the endless delays, the grand launch… the thing falling over when you press the On button.

“Iteration is all about small. Small teams of developers taking small steps, getting a small prototype out quickly and cheaply, watching to see how people actually use it, then incrementally improving the design. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.”

Iteration was more, he said, than just making websites more user-friendly. It had profound implications for policy design. Traditionally, policymakers had relied on a model of human behaviour borrowed from neoclassical economics in which rational well-informed individuals, responding to incentives, always made rational well-informed choices.

But real-life wasn’t like that, he said.

People weren’t rational. “In a digital world we can test our core policy assumptions easily and cheaply, build a representative sample of users, present them with a working model of the new service, then use data and feedback loops to iron out the problems we can’t foresee. We pave the path people travel.”

Matthew Hancock is spearheading the government’s attempts to improve the GOV.UK experience

Hancock also stressed the need for simplicity in digital approaches. “The point of using complex technology is not to make things more complex, but to make them easier, for the public, for frontline staff and for government itself. For the public, when government services are on paper they’re almost inevitably designed for the demands of the machine, rather than the needs of individual users.

“If you want to access a service you have to fill out a form. Many of the questions aren’t aimed at you, but at the small minority who want to exploit the system. Yet everyone has to plough through them. It’s a dragnet approach and it’s why paper government means a one-size-fits-all service.

“Yet in a digital world we’re much better placed to understand and detect those risks. For example, if a welfare claim is being made from a non-UK IP address, that sets alarm bells ringing and we can ask the claimant more questions. The flipside is we

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Harnessing the power of digital innovations to transform public services Rob Kenyon

T Below: recognising searches for “registry offices” rather than the official register offices is one simple way UK E-government sites are being streamlined; right: Online parcel tracking services could be adapted for use in E-government

can then design the system to make life easier for everyone else, with fewer hoops to jump through. And because digital forms talk back, we can also tackle costly error, prompting users: ‘did you really mean that’ if the answer doesn’t look right.

Simplicity doesn’t end with the citizen, however. Said Hancock: “It’s not just that services need to be user-friendly, they also need to be Whitehall-friendly. There are around 700 interactions between government and citizen, many of which could be digitised. Yet one of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption of digital services is that it’s time-consuming and expensive for departments to build the underlying infrastructure.

“That’s what ‘government as a platform’ is designed to tackle. Many of the most successful companies in the world take a platform-based approach, companies like Google, Apple and PayPal. We too are building a common set of platforms, core digital plumbing which can be used by services across government.

“We know citizens care about the status of their transactions. They’ve been able to track their parcels online for years. We should be aiming for the same level of service in the public sector, at the bare minimum. Around a quarter of phone-calls to the DVLA are drivers checking up on the status of their applications.

“That’s why we’re prototyping a status tracking platform that could be used by any service, allowing citizens to track and trace an application, a request, a purchase or a repayment in a few simple clicks. We’re thinking of calling it where‘s my stuff.Gov. “For the first time, we are in a position to build digital foundations made of data not paper, holding up platforms not silos. Common registers, common payments platforms, and common licence systems, all based on common data standards. These are exciting times.

Technology marches on. And we who see the transformative power of technology, we who would pave the path people travel, we have work to do.”

HE DIGITAL genie is well and truly out of the bottle. Social media is now business as usual for communicating with residents and fellow professionals. Smartphones and smart technologies are a regular part of people’s lives instead of being the exception. Technology will continue to advance at a head-spinning pace, new platforms will come and go, and kit, products and tools will continue to be developed that we did not think possible a year previously.

The leadership challenge, therefore, for those of us working in local government, is to harness the power that digital innovations offer to help us transform public services, connect with people and increase the efficiency of our organisations. That is why we in Solace, the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers, have identified digital leadership as a key policy theme.

The days of applying digital technology simply to automate the delivery of services and transactions via local government websites is no longer sufficient. Digital technology is a means to an end, not the end itself.

At the heart of our focus on digital leadership is the need to examine how digital technology can be applied to deliver better outcomes across place.

The drive to use digital technology to support and enable a place-based approach requires integrating local public service organisations, developing simplified and shared digital capabilities, combining their data (for better insights) and opening up these capabilities and data sources (as appropriate) to all partners in a place, whether private, public, voluntary or citizen-based.

The result is better-targeted services and information capable of delivering earlier interventions to change citizen and community behaviours that will enable the development of more resilient and selfsufficient people and communities.

An example of this is a project that has significantly improved the lives and wellbeing of a group of isolated and lonely older people with long-term conditions in Leeds. Through the application of digital technologies, together with training, the group has been able to better network with each other, link to their interests, connect with their neighbourhood and track aspects of their conditions online,

Leeds City Council is pioneering the use of social networks in interacting with citizens

thus avoiding unnecessary use of care services.

This project was the result of collaborative working across health and care organisations (data analytics) and the co-production and design of solutions from within the group. The prototyping, testing and deployment of the scheme led to significant improvements in behaviours that enabled the group to live better lives while, at the same time, avoiding excessive use of expensive care services.

The need to simplify, standardise and share digital approaches in a bid to deliver a place-based approach has seen Solace work together with other digital leaders in local government, including the local CIO Council, Socitm and the LGA, to progress the transformational approach of applying digital platforms to place-based approaches in delivering outcomes. We are terming this Place As A Platform (PAAP – excuse me!).

Examples of well-known technology platforms are the proprietary Apple iOS, which powers iPods, iPhones and iPads alike, or the more open Google Android, which powers the majority of today’s mobile devices. These platforms have stimulated whole ecosystems of organisations to build products and services, attracted by the volume of demand that they generate.

Such platforms can drive astonishing rates of innovation, investment, choice and competition.

This place-based approach to delivering outcomes not services in times of austerity has provided us with an opportunity to deconstruct siloed, paper-orientated processes and proprietary technologies in a bid to design simpler, open and shared services that can be reused and applied across different places.

As such, the first step is for chief executives and business leaders across local and national government to consider how, through collaboration across places, we can execute and implement this new approach and accept individual organisational tradeoffs in the development of more generic business and service capabilities.

A central investment into the simplification of common capabilities through co-production with communities and localities, together with the joint working of organisations such as Solace, the local CIO Council, Soctim and so forth, could be transformational.

Rob Kenyon is chief officer, health partnerships at Leeds City Council and Solace deputy policy spokesperson on digital leadership

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The big interview John Bercow EXCLUSIVE Joanne Frearson

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N THE general election due to be held on May 7, 2020, instead of going to a polling station to cast your vote, you could have the option to vote online. That is what John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, wants to see happen.

The Digital Democracy Commission, set up

by Bercow, has examined how Parliament could use digital technology to work more effectively in a way that people would expect in the modern world. It made numerous recommendations back in January, such as ensuring the availability of parliamentary record Hansard as open data by the end of 2015, making Parliament fully interactive and digital and securing online voting as an option for all voters by 2020.

“It had become increasingly clear to me that the world was changing,” says Bercow when I ask him about how the idea took hold.

Indeed, he adds, it had already changed out of all recognition in terms both of technology and of how the public connects to its democracy.

“While many changes have helped to move the House and its processes in line with the demands of modern life, there was, in my opinion, still much further to go. The challenge we faced was to reconcile traditional concepts and institutions of representative democracy with the technological revolution which has taken place over the past decade or two.

“One of the main things that we discovered when gathering evidence was how difficult people found it to navigate the systems and locate the information that they wanted. Using digital technology well can have a massive impact on improving this user experience.”

With the 2015 general election just behind us, the possibility of having an option of e-voting for the 2020 election has been the big topic of conversation following the Digital Democracy Commission. Although there was no e-voting in 2015, citizens were allowed to register to vote online. There were 2.6 million applications to register to vote and additions to the electoral register increased by 1.5 million as a result.

Overall, voter turnout was relatively high compared with previous elections.

“Voter turnout is one indicator of the health of our democracy,” Bercow says. “In the recent 2015 election, 66.1 per cent of the voting population exercised their democratic right. This was the highest percentage in the UK since 1997, but still represents just under two thirds of the electorate.

“The commission felt that implementing a system which would allow people to vote online would be likely to have a very positive impact on the number of people who turn out to vote.”

People who took part in the commission suggested having to vote in person was offputting and that online voting could help to overcome barriers to making a vote for Britons living abroad, military personnel posted overseas and those with disabilities. Although the Digital Democracy Commission has called for the implementation of e-voting by the 2020 general election, at the moment there is still some work to do before a system is implemented. Bercow says: “The commission found that there were important issues around security and privacy that would need to be carefully discussed.”

Pilot e-voting systems undertaken by local authorities in the early 2000s were stopped

Why the Speaker of the House is backing e-voting for 2020

Case study: e-voting pilot reveals issues to be considered MORE THAN 10 years ago a select number of local authorities were a part of pilot programme on e-voting. Rushmoor, which covers the Aldershot and Farnborough areas in the UK was one of the first borough councils to put an e-voting system in place.

Andrew Colver (below), head of Rushmoor Borough Council, says: “We started our modernisation process about 15 years ago, when engagement was at an all-time low. Participation had fallen and we wanted to find ways where we could improve engagement.

“We established a series of principles and wanted to assist electors to vote in a way that suited them. We got 8,000 military personnel and their dependents. We saw it as a way of encouraging them to take part in the election process. In 2003, 3,300 registered of which 85 per cent voted.

In 2007, 6,700 registered of which

58 per cent voted.” Overall, a wide spectrum of voters, from 18 to 96 years of age, used the system, and although overall turnout did not increase by much, there was some evidence, Colver explains, that people who would not have normally voted decided to use e-voting.

From Rushmoor’s experience of e-voting, Colver believes a system takes time to develop and embed. To get an e-voting system right, he explains, we have to do things again and again.

“There is a whole series of issues to be considered,” says Colver. “There has to be a balance between accessibility, ease of use and security. There are a lot of elements to build a framework that works for the electorate. There are also some things that we can start looking at in terms of personal data, possibly with the use of biometrics or something similar.”

in 2007 after the Electoral Commission recommended certain elements be put in place.

These included individual registration, making sufficient time for planning e-voting pilots, developing a central process to ensure security and transparency of e-voting systems, and having a comprehensive electoral modernisation strategy to outline how transparency, public trust and cost effectiveness can be achieved.

Even though some work needs to be done before an e-voting system for the public is put in place, the UK government has made some progress toward online voting in Parliament.

Bercow says: “Here in Parliament, we are making our first tentative steps toward electronic voting by giving our clerks iPads to record the names of MPs as they vote in the division lobbies.

This will improve accuracy and speed up the process, allowing us to know the results of a division sooner.”

The Digital Democracy Commission believes that as time goes on it will be increasingly

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What Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf tells us about e-voting Keil Hubert

Portrait: Stefan Rousseau

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difficult to persuade younger people to vote using traditional methods. Once a system is developed for e-voting for the public, it is expected having a system would increase votes among young people.

While e-voting is likely to help encourage young people to vote, Bercow also believes there needs to be increased efforts in voter education and politics in the national curriculum.

“The commission recommended that the Department for Education improve the provision of political education within schools using digital means,” he says.

“The commission heard from a range of young people, many of whom felt that the political education they were provided with in school was not sufficient to enable them to understand the system, or make an informed choice about who to vote for. Parliament has a role to play in engaging young people with their democracy.”

On top of an e-voting system, the commission also recommended that a “results bank” be set

Above: Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow is currently heading a commission that is looking into bringing the way we practise our right to vote up to date.

up to give people easy access to the outcome of an election. “Finding the results of an election is not always as easy as you may think,” says Bercow. “It seems rather obvious that, having voted, people want easy access to the results and would expect them to be presented in a userfriendly and understandable manner. Yet, as the commission discovered, there is no single official online resource which provides information about election results.

“There is also a particular lack of consistency in the way that local authorities communicate their results. A digital results bank would compile all the results and transmit them immediately and electronically to that one central repository. This would ensure that there was one indisputable source providing credible and accurate results.”

Online voting could be a game-changer for the 2020 general election. Once security and privacy systems are overcome, voting from the convenience of our laptops and PCs could soon become the norm.

MERICA hasn’t been very keen on internet voting. In my town, we’re still voting with felt-tip pens and paper ballots. Every time we’ve tried experimenting with networked voting machines, the resulting foul-ups and leaked security flaws have inspired media panics disproportionate to the actual impact. This has given the rest of the world a good laugh, and our national reputation as technology innovators a black eye. What people outside of the USA might not appreciate is why we’re so irrationally opposed to technology-assisted voting.

Ironically, the main reason that we’re afraid of it is not based on the real and well-established threat that will likely bring down e-voting; it’s based on obsolete fears.

We have a longstanding problem with disenfranchisement in the US. Recently, many states have passed so-called “voter ID” laws. These are ostensibly meant to prevent voter fraud by ensuring that non-citizens don’t get to sway a close election.

In most cases, they’ve been found to actually be racially motivated voter suppression tactics – a way to give one of our two nearly identical parties an unfair advantage over the other. The espoused rationale for requiring official governmentissued identity cards at the polling place is that unscrupulous campaigners might round up a bunch of unregistered, non-citizen, or underage proxies and drive them from one polling place to another to cast as many ballots as possible for the chosen candidate(s). The fact that this isn’t actually happening anywhere in our elections is of little consequence to the people who advocate for stopping it. Or for the angry pensioners who rail about it on social media.

Our political parties and their backers have lost the plot: they don’t appreciate that the world has evolved. Most people’s understandings of election fraud threats are hopelessly outdated.

Ballot stuffing is an obsolete and

largely ineffective way to give your candidate a minor advantage.

Likewise, preventing eligible voters from the other party from casting a ballot is largely ineffective in all but very small, local elections. The demagogues campaigning against internet voting are showing that they fear 18th century fraud in a 21st century context. Yes, some of that may occur, but it’ll likely be statistically insignificant and, given the nature of modern internet culture, largely irrelevant.

There is a legitimate and terrifyingly real danger on the horizon, and we already know what it is: mischievous sabotage. LULZ voting. A snarky rejection of the unacceptable status quo.

We know that this happens.

Back in May of 1998, People magazine held a meaningless online poll to determine the world’s Most Beautiful People. They expected to see the normal, vapid idolisation of celebrities. Instead, some bored and capricious early hacktivists decided to skew the online poll in favour of write-in candidate Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf from Howard Stern’s radio show of the era.

At the end of the poll, Our Hank (yes, I voted for him too) crushed the competition: 230,169 votes to the number two candidate’s 17,145. As author Clay Shirky later assessed it: “Voting for Hank offered people a chance to violate people’s expectations while still playing by its rules.”

That’s what we have in store in future US elections once we embrace modern technology. We have a strong anti-establishment sentiment in the USA that’s often driven to frustrated hooliganism by our collective disgust with and distrust in our elected officials. Given that, and given the opportunity to engage in widespread (but entirely legal) election disruption that doesn’t require physically standing in line to vote, you can expect American Millennials to tear into the establishment candidates with a whimsical lust for chaos. I expect the results will be hilarious.

Business Technology · July 2015

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Public sector transformation

N THE MIDDLE of May, not long after the General Election, a group of senior local government executives gathered in London for a breakfast meeting hosted

by Business Technology and Capita IT Enterprise Services.

While the new government has barely begun its work, it was already clear that austerity will be an ongoing theme over the next five years, with local government in particular likely to face further cuts.

Dealing with those was a major theme of the morning’s discussion.

The challenges faced by local government over the last five years have been tough, said Dawn Baxendale, chief executive of Southampton City Council but, she argued, things are going to get tougher and we might even see some councils go bankrupt.

One way that local authorities can cut costs is by outsourcing services and making better use of the IT facilities it already has.

In particular, that means being smarter about the vast amounts of data available to local authorities. Graham Cadle, of Croydon Council, said that, far from being worried about local authorities having access to personal data, people were surprised to find that the public sector does not do a better job of sharing data. He said people expect their health data, for example, to be available to whichever health providers need it.

Often this problem arises because the data storage systems are not compatible, not joined up or are simply languishing without anyone being responsible for them. Sometimes even accessing the data from your own systems is a challenge – and it is a business challenge, rather than an IT one, said Robert Ling, associate director of technology and change at North Yorkshire County Council.

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The experts’ view: helping local government get to grips with IT demands Making use of data means deciding what you want and then collecting the appropriate information, rather than simply collecting everything. Properly collected and analysed, data becomes business intelligence, which can be powerful when used properly.

Baxendale said that analysis of recycling data in Southampton led to savings of £1million. Ling said that analysis of the registration plates of cars using the council’s waste depot revealed that a significant proportion of users lived in a neighbouring council area, leading to discussions about how best to pay for the facility.

Something else local authorities are doing with existing facilities is renegotiating contracts to ensure that the deals continue to provide the best value. There is also an opportunity to work together better at the beginning of the process. Too often, the supplier’s sales people and the local authority’s buyers are put together too early in the development of the deal. Local government attendees and those from Capita agreed that the “thinkers” from both sides

should come together from the start to define the desired outcome of the project, assess what will be necessary to reach it and only then bring in the people responsible for drawing up the contract.

Tricia Palmer, associate director of Medway Council, said that she wanted to see suppliers who would come in with a solution to their problems. Local authorities have a good understanding of the problems they face but they increasingly lack the skills and resources to solve them internally. And they don’t necessarily want to buy new tools to solve a problem.

The pace of change and the need to innovate is a big challenge for local authorities, particularly since they are already stretched simply in meeting their existing responsibilities. Too often, attendees said, it is hard to take the time to think ahead because the day-to-day pressures of local government are so time consuming.

The relationship needs to shift from client-supplier to more of a partnership.

Southampton City Council’s Dawn Baxendale (below) said the council made savings of £1m by accurate data analysis

This is an area where suppliers can be more proactive, building relationships within local government and helping them by sharing ideas for getting more out of existing tools.

Attendees at the breakfast also wanted suppliers to share more of their experience in the private sector with their public sector clients. They asked the representatives of Capita who were present to look into going further and leverage their relationships with – and the large budgets of – big corporate partners to enable strategic partnerships with local government.

Ian Graham, head of innovation at York City Council, said that local authorities could do a better job of sharing expertise among themselves, too. There was some cautious acknowledgement that buying services as a group, with other authorities, can be a good solution, saving both money and time. However, some attendees pointed out that even neighbouring authorities often have very different needs, based on their populations. One size does not necessarily fit all.

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Inspector Dogberry The Inspector is pleased to see that Martha Lane Fox (below), internet entrepreneur and Business Reporter regular, has received the 10,000 signatures she needs to support her case for creating a new institution to make us in Britain “the most digital nation on the planet”.

Lane Fox, who aired her idea of a new national institution while giving the

Richard Dimbleby Lecture in 2015, has been urging people to sign an online petition to demand that the Prime Minister establishes a new body named Dot Everyone.

The values of the internet have always been a dialogue between private companies and public bodies, believes Lane Fox, and right now the civic, public, noncommercial side of the equation needs a boost.

Dot Everyone should educate people from all

walks of life about the internet and put women at the heart of the technology sector.

There were fewer women in the digital sector than parliament, says Lane Fox. Finally, she argues Britain should aim for a more ambitious global role in unpicking the complex moral and ethical issues that the internet presents.

“Britain invented the BBC, the NHS,” she says. “Let’s not have a poverty of ambition – we can and should be inventing the definitive public institution for our digital age.” Watch this space.

Dogberry is delighted to hear that the Welsh government has announced its intention to appoint a chief digital officer to oversee its digital service transformation.

The appointment is identified in the recently released Digital First strategy paper, which outlines the steps Welsh government needs to take to drive transformational change across the Welsh public sector. The strategy recognises that the need for strong leadership was a point repeatedly made by organisations at the forefront of delivering digital transformations.

Bendigedig!, as they say in the Valleys.

The royal tweetment The Queen sent her first tweet while opening an information technology gallery at the Science Museum. The message, which went out to 724,000 followers of the @BritishMonarchy account, read: “It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R.” Science Museum director Ian Blatchford spoke of how he invited the Queen to harness yet another advance in communication technology. He told her: “You made the first live Christmas broadcast in 1957, and an event relished by historians took place on March 26 1976, when you became the first monarch to send an email during

a visit to the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment. May I now invite you to join me so that you may send your first tweet?”

Twitter: @dogberryTweets

By Sara Tuxworth, web assistant

Government Digital Service https://gds.blog.gov.uk/

This blog is run by the team trying to digitise the government sector, so it’s handy when wanting to find out the latest news. For more information on the GDS team and their blog contributors, follow @gdsteam on Twitter.

Eddie Copeland – Policy Exchange www.policyexchange.org. uk/media-centre/blogs Eddie Copeland’s blog on Policy Exchange explores all avenues of digital government, discussing the potential and the loose ends of a digitised government while keeping in touch by discussing how it affects citizens.

Andrus Ansip https://ec.europa.eu/ commission/2014-2019/ ansip/blog_en “Everybody in Europe should be able to make the most of the

internet revolution, with nobody left behind in the digital age.” Like many European commissioners, vice president for the digital single market Andrus Ansip regularly blogs from the EU website. You can also follow him on Twitter: @Ansip_EU

UK Authority www.ukauthority.com/ Local-Digital-News-Blog.aspx UK Authority is a mine of information for the digitisation of government services. It releases relatively short snippets of news, so is perfect for accessing concise information as and when you need it.

Fujitsu

Flood Risk Finder (£0.79, iOS)

This app may come in handy during more turbulent weather, as it accesses Environment Agency data to locate flood risk for English properties.

Find Pharmacies (FREE – Android, iOS)

Using health service data, this app can locate the nearest pharmacy using GPS, via a placename or postcode search.

http://blog.uk.fujitsu.com/ tag/digital-government Fujitsu has only recently started tackling the topic of a digital government – however, there is a wealth of information to be found and with the growing interest in E-government, more blogs are sure to follow.

Driving cost savings and innovation in the public sector through hybrid cloud

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loud has had a major impact on IT over the last few years. While it’s been slower to adopt than the private sector, a study in April 2015 from EMC, VCE and VMware revealed that 85 per cent of UK public sector organisations are using some form of public cloud.

This could be down to the fact that the public sector has very specific challenges around data and applications. It deals with vast amounts of sensitive information, from health records to police reports and international security. It needs, rightly, to adhere to stringent regulations and legislation around data and privacy, restricting what and where data can be stored and processed in a public cloud environment.

So can the public sector benefit from all the scalability and efficiency of the cloud, while meeting these requirements?

The answer is yes, by taking a hybrid cloud approach. Hybrid is a unified integration between private and public cloud services, enabling the seamless movement of applications and data between the two, using the same tools, processes and

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security policies presently deployed in the data centre. It’s completely changing the way firms think about their IT infrastructure.

Consider the seasonal demand for passport applications or disaster recovery to ensure crucial systems do not fail: switching on public cloud as required means there shouldn’t be expensive servers going unused for most of the year. Instead, you get instant access to compute power while significantly reducing costs.

Hybrid cloud also enables innovation; as the public sector moves more services online, testing and developing these services in the public cloud means only paying for IT when it’s needed. The rise of true hybrid cloud solutions means that the public sector can now take advantage of the agility and flexibility of public cloud with the security and familiarity of existing technologies.

Andy Tait is head of strategy, UK government and public services at VMware Twitter:@VMware_UK vcloud.vmware.com/uk

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Reducing costs and improving services

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It’s raining data: dispelling myths around cloud and government W

hen you say the words “government” and “cloud” together in certain circles, you’re usually met with disapproving looks and head-shaking. Questions about security and data protection will immediately follow those looks, as consumers look to understand what exactly will happen to their personal information as it’s trusted to an abstract “new” technology. But what many consumers and businesses don’t realise at first blush is that not only is cloud technology secure, it’s also a necessary advancement that will allow local and central governments to stay up-todate in a hyper-connected world.

Cloud has become a term used across the world to denote an agile, data-rich infrastructure that is low-cost and available on-demand. However, within the context of local and central government, it often seems hard to see the practical benefits of using cloud.

To start using cloud, organisations

need to take a number of issues into account, including security, choice of public versus private cloud, legislation in regard to where data is held, and integration with existing infrastructure.

But on the flipside, this technology gives organisations a new option and a new set of tools to tackle issues in an increasingly digital world. Introducing cloud to government infrastructure offers a myriad of potential benefits such as efficiency gain, the improvement in outcomes, and innovation.

With a cloud infrastructure, files can be accessed by teams of analysts and approved government officials from multiple locations, allowing them to complete work simultaneously and remotely. Many may ask whether sharing computing resources opens government organisations up to attack and viruses. However, with cloud, it is possible to contain any malware or viruses in a virtual environment, maintaining the integrity of the evidence

chain. If the correct solutions are selected, this virtual environment can be secured, audited and governed in the same way that you would manage on-premises applications. Managing your cloud infrastructure in this way allows you to have complete control and visibility, enabling you to implement access controls to satisfy the diverging demands of IT and government protocol with embedded security.

Rather than panic at the thought of moving government data around, it’s important to take a minute to assess the solutions available and the benefits they can offer. If cloud deployments are managed correctly and assessed with security implications in mind, it is possible to reap the benefits while maintaining a secure infrastructure.

Tariq Hussain is director, government, Dell UK 0844 444 6057 www.dell.co.uk/Security

K councils are under immense pressure to reduce operating costs, improve efficiencies and deliver better services to the citizen.

Many are trying to achieve this by making better use of IT to improve and enhance the delivery of services internally and to the public.

For example, Bath & North East Somerset Council, which serves a population of more than 176,000 in the west of England, recently implemented a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as part of a wide-ranging cost reduction programme.

The objective was to deliver a consistent, highperformance, centralised desktop environment across all its sites while enabling employees to work productively from any office. VDI would also improve service delivery and allow employees to work more effectively in the community by connecting remotely to council systems using tablet devices.

But to make VDI work with its storage area network (SAN) and meet the storage capacity for two data centres and more than 30 terabytes of data in a virtualised environment, the council would have

had to buy 250 new disks.

Choosing Atlantis Computing’s software defined storage (SDS) system enabled it to run up to 1,500 concurrent virtual desktops without buying new disks, while delivering fasterthan-PC performance, nearinstant application launch and super-fast login times.

The system has delivered overall savings of 50 per cent compared with traditional storage, reducing the council’s entire projected storage capital expenditure and saved more than 100 hours a year in storage management time.

Leighton Ballard, IT projects manager at Bath & North East Somerset Council, says: “We are proud of our VDI deployment achievements.

Atlantis software has helped the council operate more cost effectively and deliver more efficient services for citizens.”

David Cumberworth, vice president of EMEA, Atlantis Computing says: “Atlantis technology is the perfect solution to underpin the council’s services while reducing long-term costs and simplifying the management of the storage infrastructure.” +44 (0)20 3642 9080 connect@atlantiscomputing.com

Business Technology · July 2015 · 13

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Pioneering eye experts set sights on more success

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How platforms can help the public sector I

n 2012, the government developed an ambitious digital strategy.

It claimed it could save around £1.8billion annually, by going fully digital. But how can this be achieved across the entire public sector quickly enough? Traditional government programmes are slowmoving, mobilise huge teams, and have a poor delivery track record.

The agile software delivery approach, promoted by Government Digital Services (GDS), is about small, self-organising teams that work autonomously from one another.

Engineers leverage cutting-edge open-source technology, and are historically more inclined to work in a nimble, startup-like environment than for the government.

So, how can this agile approach go beyond a few isolated successes in order to make enough of an impact in the public sector? At Equal Experts, we found that one way to achieve this is by leveraging a Platform as a Service (PaaS) approach. But where vendors are touting the benefits of PaaS mostly from the cloud infrastructure angle, we find it goes well beyond this.

We supported one of our public sector clients to deliver a digital platform that allows more than 35 small, agile teams to release software daily – more than 400 people working across several locations building, deploying and operating digital services.

How was this achieved? By starting small and building a strong delivery culture where individual teams feel ownership of the problems they need to solve. The cloud-based platform is built on a microservices architecture that allows teams to collaborate on dependencies, while sharing common functionality and technologies as well as a continuous delivery pipeline.

This pipeline provides an automated, repeatable path to production.

Instead of PaaS, we think the term “Platform as a Club” is more appropriate.

It promotes the right balance between sharing components and processes while providing the level of autonomy needed for successful delivery.

Members of the club benefit from shared capabilities while conforming to the rules of the club, such as using specific tools, and making capabilities available to others in a standard way.

The approach dramatically shortens

the time taken to deliver working software, at scale. Changes can be made in hours. New functionality is released to users multiple times a day.

Our client is transforming itself into a truly “digital by default” public service organisation, pursuing its goal of shifting more than 600 million transactions per year across more than 50 million customers from traditional channels to digital. And it has now become a place of choice to work for ambitious software engineers.

Other government agencies are now using the same platform, highlighting its reusability. The foundation is laid for a genuine cross-government platform.

It is that kind of success that makes us believe in GDS’s new approach of “government as a platform”.

We like to think that this is digital transformation at its best. Among other public sector engagements, Equal Experts has delivered the awardwinning Visa Application service for the Home Office. We helped HMRC deliver its Digital Tax Platform, and we’re working with GDS directly.

020 3603 7830 www.equalexperts.com

wo extraordinary ophthalmic advances have been pioneered by the London Eye Hospital in Harley Street: the Light Adjustable Lens and the iolAMD Lens for Macular Degeneration.

Mr Bobby Qureshi, medical director of the London Eye Hospital and consultant ophthalmic surgeon, was the first surgeon in the UK to use the Light Adjustable Lens (LAL).

The LAL is the only one of its kind; it can be fine-tuned to give perfect vision after it has been inserted into the eye and has the potential to achieve better than 20/20 vision. Its acuity can be customised to a patient’s needs, whether they are short or long sighted, have astigmatism or suffer from cataracts.

Embedded within the LAL lens are macromers which are sensitive to a particular wavelength of ultra violet light. When UV light is shone into the eye, the lens changes shape and power allowing it to be remodelled to correct long or short sight or astigmatism, or even extend the range of focus.

The iolAMD (the Hubble Implant) is a truly revolutionary breakthrough in the treatment of age-related

macular degeneration (AMD) – the most common cause of blindness in over 55s, with more than four million sufferers in the UK and 500 million worldwide.

Looking to radically improve the previously complex and risky procedure, Bobby Qureshi and Professor Pablo Artal (the first European winner of the prestigious Edwin H Land Award for the advancement of visual optics) joined forces to implement space-age technology that was used to fix the Hubble Telescope when NASA scientists noticed out-of-focus and fuzzy images and needed a way to sharpen them up.

Following the NASA model, Qureshi and Artal developed a hyper-aspheric lens that reduces the distortion that can be associated with traditional mini-telescope lenses. Made from a pliable material, the lens is injected into the eye via an incision so small that there is no requirement for sutures, greatly reducing the risk of infection and postoperative complications.

The iolAMD lens is suitable for both wet and dry AMD and is only available at the London Eye Hospital, Harley Street.

020 7060 2602 londoneyehospital.com

Business Zone

14 · Business Technology · July 2015

Video special

How the right work environment can help an SME grow With a record number of start-ups launching in 2014, we ask how the right premises can aid success. http://business-reporter. co.uk/video/finance/ how-the-right-workenvironment-canhelp-an-sme-grow

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The future Omni-channel self service Channel shift is not just about moving everything to the web – it’s about providing 24/7 self service across all communication channels

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ll UK local councils are committed to developing and deploying a channel-shift strategy that not only meets acute financial and operational targets, but also satisfies the public’s demand for 24/7 communication via any device.

Inform Communications plc (IC) provides multi-channel, 24/7 self-service solutions to more than 150 public sector clients – the firm’s key differentiator is a unique mix of technical expertise and operational experience. IC’s client services team has a broad range of experience across all major service areas including revenues/benefits; environmental/ waste; housing and so on. This enables IC to understand operational and strategic challenges, and work seamlessly with clients to develop bespoke services that meet each client’s requirements, resulting in: • Unified, 24/7 multi-channel self-service for increasingly techsavvy customers • Instant answer/response to telephone, SMS, email, mobile web and social media enquiries, leading to reduced waiting times and better customer service

• Skilled agents released from simple, repetitive tasks, leading to cashable savings, improved productivity/ processing times and increased capacity

“Self service has given us the ability to make substantial cost and efficiency savings across three busy service areas.

I am confident it has played a vital role in getting the delicate balance right between delivering excellent customer service and good business benefits.”

– Keith Paulin, head of customer service at the London Borough of Tower Hamlets In recognition of the global shift to mobile communications, IC’s new designonce, deploy-anywhere architecture uniquely enables one application to be deployed across multiple customer access channels. The channels share underlying business logic and back-end access, while maintaining their own unique advantages. This means that IVR, email, SMS, mobile web and social media channels are all available via one core application, resulting in low development costs and fast deployment (services are typically designed, built and launched within eight weeks, with minimal input from clients).

All services are hosted and managed on dual-site cloud data centres with access to vast numbers of digital channels, providing both

future-proof functionality and resilience.

To enable IC to offer a complete range of contact centre services to complement its self-service portfolio, Aspect was chosen as its global partner – an organisation with renowned expertise.

Aspect’s cloud-based contact centre platform Zipwire supports a true omni-channel customer engagement strategy across voice, email, SMS, and web chat, as well as social media and mobile application integration. Zipwire was voted Best Product on Show at the 2014 industry CC Expo event by the European Contact Centre & Customer Service Awards, and offers market-leading functionality incorporating Inbound/Outbound/Blended Intelligent skills-based routing, recording and reporting, and yet is easy and highly cost-effective for the council to deploy and manage. Aspect is also the world leader by market share in workforce optimisation and proactive outbound communications.

Pre-built applications for surveys, PCI-compliant payment systems and advanced, bespoke services featuring natural language, speech recognition and front/back-office integration can also be provided.

But the real strength of these self service and contact centre solutions is in their ease of deployment and ongoing management. This is the strength of the cloud model – sophisticated market-leading solutions that the council can use as needed without the upfront IT complexity associated with complex premises installations. This gives the council a step-change in agility for the future and the ability to meet the changing needs of the “New Consumer” (self-service/ mobile/social), both today and into the future.

Please contact CEO Chris Owen www.inform-comms.co.uk

In focus Are NHS staffing agency costs out of control?

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ational framework agreements are a great way to ensure quality of supply and agreed “list prices”. However, they do not by themselves secure the best dynamic price. New, more competitive and agile service providers are locked out during the life of a framework and the few large existing suppliers left can hold their “list prices”.

Dynamic eMarketPlaces One way to break this mindset of “list price” is to open up the frameworks to new, more aggressive, agile and competitive providers. The European Commission introduced EU Public Procurement legislation – known as Dynamic Purchasing System – specifically to allow for this.

Dynamic eMarketPlaces allows fast mini competitions to be held between

a large number of qualified framework providers, often over hours or days.

New emerging competitive providers can legally join the framework at any point in full compliance of public procurement legislation.

Dynamic eMarketPlaces are ideally suited to categories where the market is dynamic and new entrants emerge, such as agency staff, social care services or fast-moving technology categories such as IT.

What are the savings potential?

Significant savings have been achieved on categories such as agency staff costs. For example, Amsterdam City in the Netherlands, with an agency spend of €200m, is achieving 25 per cent cost savings on average across their projects. They run fast

“Expensive staffing agencies are quite simply ripping off the NHS. It’s outrageous that taxpayers are being taken for a ride by companies charging up to £3,500 a shift for a doctor. The NHS is bigger than all of these companies, so we’ll use that bargaining power to drive down rates and beat them at their own game.”

– Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, June 2015

competitive procurements, often only for a day, involving up to 100 providers to secure the best market price.

Why not in the UK? If Amsterdam can achieve an average 25 per cent cost reduction, what about the NHS staffing agency bill of £3.3billion? A bill which grows every year.

Surprisingly, there seems to be little widespread use of such dynamic purchasing systems in the UK. One reason could be that NHS users don’t have access to a suitable agile modern platform. Users are under time pressure to secure agency staff in hours or days. They need a system to run fast competitions across a large number of suppliers with a few clicks. A user-friendly interface with pre-configured templates can put the power back with the NHS, rather than the large providers.

EU Supply platform The EU Supply platform is available online to run EU Procurement compliant mini competitions – quickly and easily, across a large number of suppliers within hours.

NHS Trusts and authorities can be set up in a matter of days with their specific requirements, such as bespoke workflows, templates, checklists and libraries of shared or own-standard PQQs and requirements.

In the current climate of austerity and up to 40 per cent departmental budget cuts, Dynamic eMarketPlaces, fully compliant to Public Procurement legislation, could have a major impact on the growing NHS agency bill and social care costs.

Sid Bains is director of solutions at EU Supply sid.bains@eu-supply.com www.eu-supply.com

Business Technology · July 2015 · 15

AN INDEPENDENT REPORT FROM LYONSDOWN, DISTRIBUTED WITH THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Think you know malware?

Think again I Lean vs agile – and why it doesn’t have to be that way L ean and Agile, two of the tech world’s biggest buzzwords, are often presented to us as opposing concepts: Agility, the domain of plucky upstarts with something to burn – principally money, but also the status quo. Lean, the preserve of established institutions – frequently in the public sector – that are tasked with the need to keep things running in the face of spiralling costs and a never ending demand for cuts.

Never mind two choices, leanness and agility can often seem like two entirely different worlds. And in a landscape increasingly characterised by constant bursts of disruptive technology, the organisations that need to stay lean can easily become resigned to being left behind. They don’t have to be.

Being agile saves you money Sometimes, taking the agile path actually makes you leaner. For example, one local authority in Scotland has been able to save more than £1million by implementing a more agile infrastructure – one that has enabled it to migrate seamlessly from

W

hile there has been significant focus on the government’s use of “Big IT”, less attention has been paid to the successful use of existing infrastructure for the implementation of policies and delivery of public services.

Yet these ready-made, proven platforms have the capability to readily support the government’s evolving digital strategy.

The government is the biggest user of the UK’s payments system, with virtually all state benefits being paid through VocaLink’s infrastructure. When the DWP moved to paying benefits electronically into recipients’ bank accounts, it was a case of taking advantage of an infrastructure that already existed.

The cost to the public purse fell from a pound per transaction to just a penny.

HMRC has repurposed the payments infrastructure to collect real-time information, the foundation for a more user-centric and efficient tax system. In banking, the government’s desire for faster and easier current account switching led to the implementation of the seven-day current account switch service, again

Windows XP to Windows 7, eliminate 275 costly servers from its estate and revolutionise the speed at which it delivers IT services across its educational network.

Something worth noting is that when it comes to the IT budget, software reclaim is the ideal source of excess. In a 2014 report, 1E revealed that even in the austere public sector, up to 20 per cent of software goes unused or rarely used – a significant chunk of budget that could be diverted into digital initiatives.

This approach helped one leading system integrator, with an enviable software asset management record, to identify potential savings of £500,000 over the next five years for one ministerial department through targeted software asset optimisation.

The secret lies in having sufficient insight into your IT estate to identify what you aren’t using – and convert it into something that makes a difference.

ndependent government reports indicate the average cost associated with security breaches has doubled since 2013, and while the statistical trend of reported incidents has remained fairly stable over this period, nine out of 10 large organisations continue to suffer some form of security breach, suggesting these incidents are now a near certainty.

Recent research by Check Point Software Technologies, global leader in securing the internet, discovered that employees at 86 per cent of organisations had accessed a malicious site, and over 60 per cent downloaded a malicious file. The study identified significant exploits of vulnerabilities had taken place with open source applications as well as common business tools from Adobe and Microsoft.

A common cause of data breach is deployment of malware, malicious

software code developed by those intent on either creating disruption or stealing data. When malware becomes known it is possible to identify, filter, and block future deployment attempts.

However, the focus of cyber-criminals continually shifts as they look for easier and more rewarding ways to exploit vulnerabilities.

By slightly modifying what already exists they continue to evade detection – in the last year “unknown malware” has launched at an unprecedented rate, seemingly with a singular purpose: stealing data.

Despite staff awareness training, people are as likely to cause a breach as viruses and other types of malicious software. Two separate industry surveys carried out within the public sector earlier this year discovered that 40 per cent of organisations had reported

a data breach, and 64 per cent of public sector workers would not report a datarelated breach if they knew about it, with many admitting to disabling password protection on devices which could be compromised.

So, how do you identify and manage the risks you face?

Security check-ups help identify security risks, providing a threat analysis report and recommendations on how to protect against them. Imerja is currently providing these free of charge to public sector organisations, without obligation, helping to raise awareness and improve security.

To find out more please call 0844 225 2888 or visit www.imerja.com/offers/ security-check-up

Learn more about reclaiming your software spend – and sign up for a FREE savings report at www.1e.com

Spotlight Building a digital government on existing foundations

built on existing payments infrastructure.

This system not only broadens customer choice but was built at a lower cost than alternative “from scratch” systems.

VocaLink’s payments infrastructures include the real-time 24/7 payments system that underpins fundamental societal and economic services. Last year the company processed more than 10 billion transactions with a combined value of £6trillion, more than 3.5 times the UK’s GDP. These systems therefore provide the government with a secure and resilient infrastructure capable of meeting its digital ambitions, allowing it to deliver services that are defined by the needs of the user.

As the government drives forward with its policies for “Digital by Default” we see the use of open data, APIs and the ongoing programme of channel-shift, all requiring the citizen to have trust in the system.

By providing certainty in the resilience of its systems and the safety of the data, VocaLink has already earned this trust.

0203 818 4090 Charles.Southwood@vocalink.com