Accredited

Adrian and I met at Intellect’s offices with Vaughan Shayler, Gary McQuade and Leanne Johnson regarding the Accredit UK professional certification programme. “Accredit UK” is now a separate company within the NCC Group, with Vaughan as its Managing Director. Following our previous discussions, Socitm Consulting has designed a Consultancy module for the programme, and is bidding to develop others. Twenty-one of its consultants are training as assessors.

In effect, the Accredit UK programme provides an Operational Process Manual enabling a business to determine which areas of its operations it must focus on and which can be left to others. It was designed with smaller organisations in-mind, but is scalable, with an emphasis on continuous improvement. Existing customers, such as Richard Tubbs, of Netlink, have testified to the effectiveness of the approach.

We agreed Socitm would further work with Accredit UK in promotion through our Regions, arranging to explore, with Socitm Insight & Consulting, the potential for further developing our benchmarking products by building-in appropriate parts of the Accredit UK standard, and would facilitate engagement with the Local CIO Council, and Buying Solutions. We will also explore enrolment in the programme of Socitm member sites and premium partners, with a view to enabling endorsement from “personal” experience.


I met with Richard Paugh and Stuart Roberts of the CEO Board at their offices in Bloomsbury Square, and explained that Adrian is developing an output-based specification of requirements, to be ready in 2-3 weeks, which we will ask the CIO Board and others to respond to. In the meantime, we remain very interested in the CIO Board proposition, and discussed how this may work with the Local CIO Council, for the benefit of the Society generally, and its national events programme, and how it can be funded.


Back at base (Newham Dockside) I joined Geoff and Richard Carde for a meeting with Vince, from TfL and his colleague Matt Wright to discuss our NTC programme, the way we’ve approached office automation in Newham Dockside, PSMP, and opportunities for collaboration, including in procurement.


Becky Furnell and I discussed possible IT links to the Newham – Barnsley partnership, and we agreed to proceed with the suggested workshop to consider what synergies there may be in our IT programmes and infrastructure developments.


It’s great that Newham Dockside visitors, such as Glyn Moody, are impressed by our new offices (and quite a change from the previous position!) There’s no doubt that the accommodation is very nice indeed, but it is also far more efficient to maintain than the 27 premises it replaces, so represents a great deal for Newham’s communities, as well as its staff.

Glyn has rather misinterpreted my comparison of e-mail and instant messaging (or perhaps I didn’t explain it well). Instant messaging is a conversational medium, where as e-mail is “on the record”. Anything that’s on the record is subject to FOI, but that does not, for example, include the process of developing policy. We do not use IM to “sound off” – but for conversational exchanges and much of the power, as I tried to explain is in the availability of tele-presence information that lets you know a colleague’s availability and preferred means of communication. This is a huge boon, especially in remote working by enabling disparate teams to work effectively together.