Government Technology

The title of Socitm 2009, Re-inventing local services – radical thinking, practical solutions, linked directly the dominant issue for anyone working in the public sector – the depth of future public spending cuts, and whether traditional approaches to change are sufficient to mitigate the crisis.
    
The Socitm 2009 programme provided a series of speakers who referred to this theme or tackled it head on, whether by discussing future technologies or setting out radical ways of re-allocating the increasingly limited resources available for local service delivery.
    
The conference’s opening speaker was Geoff Mulgan, director of the social innovation think tank The Young Foundation. His advice to delegates was that as council IT chiefs, they should be taking a leadership role in the coming period of drastic cuts – which he was anticipating as a period not just of retrenchment but also of technological revolution.
    
UK society was in a ‘twilight zone’ of recession whose length and depth remains unclear and imminent political change. Based on statements from the Conservative leader David Cameron, this could mean significant change for the way ICT is deployed, not least from his promises to use technology to introduce greater transparency to government.
    
Social innovation
These developments were taking place at a time of significant social innovation powered by new technologies. Things like the School of Everything website (schoolofeverything.com/), which brings together people who can teach any skills or subject and Good Gym (www.thegoodgym.org), which joins up people’s fit routines with helping elderly people, are quick, easy examples of IT use. They contrast with IT deployment in local government and Whitehall, which is typically over-engineered and under-delivered.
    
Mulgan predicted that the outcome of the current economic confusion, pain and turmoil would not be a return to the past, but a period of innovation around institutions and regulation allowing existing ‘new technologies’ to be diffused throughout society, their benefits realised and a period of extraordinary growth achieved. As a result in the next 10 or 20 years, even without a great amount of new investment, there will be a revolution in service delivery.
    
The principles that will shape the next phase of development are those of services that are lower cost; modular, incremental, and organic; simple and direct; and draw on peer support and user power, he said. Public involvement in policymaking can be enabled by the new technologies, and so too can citizens taking more responsibility for doing things themselves.
    
Collaboration and people-power can also be enabled within a public sector organisation. The US Intelligence Services have developed ‘Intellipedia’, a way in which any operative at any level and in any location can share knowledge and information about any subject of potential value.
    
Key trends
Another key trend will be the rise of ‘hyperlocal media’, online information being grouped and gathered around communities the size of just a few neighbouring streets or a US city block. Up to now it has been easier to find out national information online than details of what your neighbours were doing, he said, but “in the next few years we are going to see  interesting competition between people to get into this hyperlocal space, with councils, citizen-led initiatives and local media all trying to do the same.”
    
Ultimately, the biggest driver of innovation will be money – or lack of it. Top managers in the NHS know the health system has to change radically in the next 10 years, away from hospital models. They are starting to support social enterprises, make radically different use of IT and networks, move more IT into homes for use by individuals, and to reduce pressure on the centre.
    
Approaching things from a more directly technical background, Adrian Joseph, managing director of Google Enterprise EMEA spoke about the possibilities of cloud computing. It will be the most disruptive force in technology in the next five years or so, he said, but with compelling benefits.
    
Cloud computing is a network model whereby a third party holds all an organisation’s data and software on  servers remotely – ‘in the cloud’ – to be accessed online from any device or location: software used is ’software as a service’, maintained and upgraded centrally in a ‘thin client’ model. Tough economic times will drive more and more businesses into the cloud, thanks to three main benefits.
    
Savings
The first is a potentially huge reduction in costs, stemming from savings in software installation and productivity (computing any time, any location, and over any device), and side-benefits such as better environmental sustainability. The second is a greater facility for innovation, with software updated more frequently centrally. And the third is user empowerment: the cloud computing model underpins most of the collaborative successes already seen online such as wikipedia, Joseph said.
    
Outsourcing IT is increasingly cited as a way councils can save money and improve services – but not if the relationship between contractor and supplier breaks down delegates heard.
    
Andrew Unsworth, head of e-government at Edinburgh City Council, said Harvard University research had discovered that if a poor relationship exists with a supplier, contractors lose on average 15 per cent of the value of a contract. Conflict means a greater need to monitor and audit supplier activity; lower satisfaction levels; and ineffective execution. In contrast a good relationship creates time and frees up resources.
    
David Wilde, CIO at Westminster City Council, told how, when he started there in 2008, the council was six years into a 10 year ‘big bang’ deal with Vertex, outsourcing a huge package of services from customer service to IT. The IT side was not going well, however, with customer satisfaction at 22 per cent, and costs running at double what they should have been.
    
With activity driven by change requests and relationship management by conflict, productivity was poor and once, the whole service had gone down for six or seven days.

Change began with a ‘critical default notice’ to Vertix: they were given 120 days to fix the situation or face contract termination. A review of the entire IT service, including metrics, budget, structure, and revealed problems beyond the supplier and internal reorganisation, including removal of things that undermined external delivery was set in train.
    
By day 90, a service improvement plan was in place. Micro management was abandoned: Westminster set out the quality of service expected, and left Vertex to deliver. As part of the plan’s implementation support staff from the supplier undertook repeated ‘floor-walking’ exercises to go out and met council IT users. It was expensive, but they fixed problems there and then, and the time was repaid because help desk calls went down.
     
The turnaround has been dramatic, with customer satisfaction currently up at nearly 80 per cent, and around £1 million of savings being realised annually, and the supplier now winning further profitable business from other parts of the council.

Helping communities
A completely different approach to local service delivery called ‘Total Place’ was outlined by Jason Lowther, director of policy and delivery at Birmingham City Council.
    
Total Place, now being piloted in a number of UK locations, involves working closely with other local public services, underpinned by local area agreements, including working towards joint commissioning of services and joint appointments.
    
Together the partners in Birmingham have sketched out a series of principles “to get more for less”, which include ‘co-production’ – helping communities to help themselves; personalisation of services, as far as possible; and prevention – anticipating problems and intervening early to prevent much larger problems (and expenditure) later.
    
Project themes include early intervention for children with behavioural difficulties; learning disabilities; mental health; reducing impact of drug and alcohol misuse; and combating gangs. For each theme, the team will visit sites that are known to be innovating by collaborative working across agencies.
    
They will also look at savings, since the project as a whole is unashamedly about saving money, as well as improving services. The key is putting the citizen at the centre. At the moment, a vulnerable young person for example, will have masses of reviews by housing, social services, mental health etc, none of them talking to each other.
    
As part of Total Place, Birmingham had carried out an exercise mapping total public expenditure on the area, he said, and where it was spent, and it had come out as £7.2 billion a year, excluding pensions. Very little of that money is currently spent on prevention – in the health service, less than two per cent is spent on preventing ill-health. And far more is spent on employment benefits than on regeneration and job creation.”
    
There are problems with a mismatch of where savings accrue. Parenting classes are known to work, and for every £1 spent by council, £4 comes back to public sector. But only £1 of this comes back to the council itself, while other partners get £3 back.
    
Another stumbling block is the Treasury’s short-term financial horizons, which make expenditure impossible if savings only accrue several years’ ahead.
    
Conflicting performance management and regulatory or audit expectations on different public sector partners was another barrier at national level. Without a single performance management structure for public services, collaboration between public sector agencies will not work as current targets pull in different directions.
    
As well as these ‘big picture’ sessions, delegates were able to attend sessions on a wide rage of other topics. One of the most popular was the presentation on The Council of the Future, when Socitm Consulting manager Doug Maclean explained how every local authority can use this model to become a more agile (and virtual) organisation, making maximum use of technology and information to respond effectively to customer needs, despite the challenges of the recession and shrinking budgets.
    
For more information
Summaries of presentations, slides and video from the conference are available for all to view at www.socitm09.net